A great piece was posted recently to the strategy+business site.  It encompasses a lot of the concepts we discuss in class such as collaborating beyond your company’s legal borders to build better ideas with customers/suppliers than can be built acting alone.  Quality initiative often drive these collaborations but many companies have expanded on the concept for other reasons and even to bridge gaps across internal departments.

As companies outside the computer industry adopt the collaborative precepts of open source to improve their research and development efforts, they too undergo some major management shifts. P&G, for example, once known as an obsessively secretive organization, has thrown open its laboratory doors and invited outside collaborators to help develop new technologies and products, and at the same time is sharing some of its own intellectual property freely.

This is a lengthy piece, but really does cover a lot of ground including quality, culture, collaboration, kaizen (coninuous improvment), innovation, alignment of goals/rewards, and fostering trust.  It also covers pitfalls that companies may have learned to avoid given past failures in this area .

But the quality movement of the 1980s also had many failures. Under such names as “statistical process control,” “Six Sigma,” or “total quality management,” the practice of quality-oriented management was frequently misunderstood, misapplied, and eventually abandoned, often at the expense of customers, employees, and shareholders. Today, many companies that once embraced the concept — for example, some manufacturers of cell phones and appliances — are being challenged by Korean companies that have borrowed more successfully from Toyota’s quality playbook.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to a style of open collaboration is that it contradicts what many managers are comfortable with.  And it requires them and their companies to change.  Change is seldom an easy task at organizations because it represents a shifting of powers and may require actually pushing the culture to change, which can make lots of folks unhappy.

Open collaboration is already facing the same formidable barriers that held back the quality movement, especially in traditional companies. The persistence of hierarchical thinking, particularly a reliance on experts rather than the expertise of knowledgeable employees at all levels, can undermine any open collaboration effort. Also, although much of the publicity around the movement has focused on finding outside ideas through joint ventures and partnerships, it can be far more difficult, and more important, to cultivate and tap in-house creativity. Executives in many Western companies have never been comfortable soliciting the opinions of employees — especially rank-and-file workers — in any systematic way.

Companies that recognize this trend and capitalize on it sooner than others will likely have the most success in the marketplace in the next several years.  In fact, companies that fail in this regard may no longer be around when the dust settles.  Check out this great piece when you have a chance.

The Promise (and Perils) of Open Collaboration. Companies like IBM and P&G have prospered by opening their borders, but there are cautionary lessons from the quality movement of the 1980s.Andrea Gabor. strategy+business.  Autumn 2009.