Is Collaboration Always Good?

Mike Carruthers:
In our workplace culture there is this assumption that collaboration is always good.

 Morten H. Hansen:
The more I collaborate, the more you collaborate, the better off you are - and that's simply wrong; you've got to figure out the difference between good and bad collaboration.

Morten Hansen, author of the book Collaboration, has been researching this subject for years.

What I've found in my research is that collaboration can undermine performance just as it can increase performance. So the key is really to figure out how to do it correctly.

And what makes for good collaboration?

When to collaborate for the result - what is the economic upside here? What is the profit that this is going to generate or the benefit? And what I've found is that often people do not spend enough time articulating that. And if the benefit is not there then you have to have the mission to say, "No, no collaboration."

Morton says one classic example of bad collaboration happened when Sony tried to compete with the Apple IPod.

It had to work across five divisions in Sony so they had the music store, they had the electronics, they had the Sony Walkman, but they didn't have a culture or collaboration. People were not willing to work across these divisions. So as a result the product that eventually came out was called the Sony Connect and it was a dismal market failure. So today they have basically given away the whole market of portable music players to Apple.

 To listen to the complete unedited interview, click here.