Collaboration

How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results

Morten Hansen

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781422137277
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

In Collaboration, author Morten Hansen takes aim at what many leaders inherently know: in today's competitive environment, companywide collaboration is an imperative for successful strategy execution, yet the sought-after synergies are rarely, if ever, realized. In fact, most cross-unit collaborative efforts end up wasting time, money, and resources. How can managers avoid the costly traps of collaboration and instead start getting the results they need?In this book, Hansen shows managers how to get collaboration right through "disciplined collaboration"-- a practical framework and set of tools managers can use to:· Assess when--and when not--to pursue collaboration across units to achieve goals· Identify and overcome the four barriers to collaboration· Get people to buy into the larger picture, even when they own only a small piece of it· Be a "T-Shaped Manager," collaborating across divisions while still working deeply in your own unit· Create networks across the organization that are not large, but nimble and effectiveBased on the author's long-running research, in-depth case studies, and company interviews, Collaboration delivers practical advice and tools to help your organization collaborate--for real results.

CHAPTER ONE

Getting Collaboration Wrong … or Getting It Right

IN EARLY 2003, Howard Stringer, head of U.S. operations for Japanese electronics giant Sony, was plotting to respond to Apple’s amazing success with the iPod, a recently introduced small portable music player. Sony did not want to let Apple take over the market. It was, after all, a market Sony should own. It had invented the idea of carrying music around on people’s heads with the iconoclastic Walkman, which was introduced in 1979 and had sold nearly 200 million units by the time the iPod became the new kid on the block.¹ Stringer was the right man to lead the charge. A jovial, Oxford-educated Englishman in a six-foot-three-inch frame, he had been brought into Sony in 1997 to help forge unity among its headstrong and independent music, film, and electronics divisions in the United States. Stringer had had a long career in media—as a journalist, head of CBS News, and president of CBS—and was an experienced executive who understood media and could cultivate collaboration in Sony.²

By 2003 Sony was a formidable company. With annual sales of $62 billion, it was ten times as large as Apple, which had $6.2 billion in sales.³ And Sony was much better placed than Apple to launch portable music players and an online music store. Sony had the Walkman division (and so could develop its own hard-disk music player), the VAIO personal computer line (and so it knew computers), Sony Music (and so it knew a thing or two about music⁴ ), and Sony Electronics (and so it had a range of devices and batteries). Ironically, it supplied the batteries for the iPod. Sony was also well known for sleek design. From the vantage point of his Manhattan office, Stringer could see that he had all the pieces to mount a counterattack against the iPod. Philip Wiser, chief technology officer of Sony U.S., told him, “We can do this in nine months. We got the product, hardware, software.”⁵ By this time, Apple had offered the iPod device and the iTunes software only for computers, and not the online music store. There was still time to catch up.

Stringer and Wiser set it all in motion. They aptly named the venture Connect, reflecting the vision of linking the various pieces of Sony to connect portable music players with an online music store.

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Sony’s headaches had come to light some eighteen months earlier, on October 23, 2001. That day Steve Jobs, the magnetic leader of Apple, introduced the iPod to the world: “This amazing little device holds a thousand songs, and it goes right in my pocket.”⁶ Wearing his classic business attire of jeans and a black mock turtleneck, Jobs stood on a small stage in an unassuming auditorium at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. The two hundred invited guests, many of them journalists, had no idea that Apple was introducing a portable music player that day. (The coy invitation letter read, “Hint: It’s not a Mac.”)

Jobs, ever the showman, teased his audience, spending about ten minutes going through slides and then coming to the climax: “Let me show you.” First he displayed a skinny side view of the iPod. Then he showed the back. Finally, with, “This is what the front looks like, Boom!” he capped the reveal: “I have one here right in my pocket.” He pulled it out for the world to see, and the audience burst into applause.

It was a great comeback moment for Jobs, who had cofounded Apple in 1976 at age twenty-one, was fired by CEO John Sculley in 1985, and then resurfaced as interim chief executive in 1997 when Apple had sunk close to bankruptcy.⁷ The iPod was not the first portable music player using a hard drive to hit the market (the Rio, a portable music player holding about one hundred songs, appeared in 1998).⁸ But the iPod was easy to use, looked cool, and worked with Apple’s iTunes software to allow users to manage music on their computers.

As people started looking under the hood, they soon realized that the iPod wasn’t a marvelous technological revolution but rather a shrewd combination of many existing pieces. “This was a highly leveraged product from the technologies we already had in place,” explained Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware.⁹ The hard disk holding all those songs was a tiny 1.8-inch drive from Toshiba; the minute battery was from Sony; the hardware blueprint was provided by a small Silicon Valley company called PortalPlayer; the digital-to-analog converter came from Wolfson Microelectronics; the FireWire interface controller was shipped by Texas Instruments; and some of the software came from Pixo.¹⁰

Inside Apple, a hardware team led by Tony Fadell and reporting to Rubinstein had crafted the architecture of the dwelling that housed these technologies. According to The Perfect Thing, Steven Levy’s book on the iPod, the team had had to integrate all the pieces from outside Apple and work across several units inside the company. This included Rubinstein’s hardware division, Jeff Robbin’s iTunes division, and Apple’s vaunted industrial design unit, headed by design wizard Jonathan Ive (dubbed the “Armani of Apple”).¹¹ Resolving complicated issues required many interactions between the hardware and software teams. Robbin described this complexity: “We had to figure out how iTunes was going to sync the content onto the ’pod, how the ’pod was going to access that information, how we could do a database on the device that was just incredibly simple to use.”¹²

It was no small task. Apple had had a troubling past as a company with lots of infighting between managers. Jobs himself was no exception: in the early 1980s, when he led the team that developed the first Macintosh computer, he put the team in a separate building and launched the theme “Let’s be pirates.” Soon a pirate flag flew from the roof of the building: for the renegades, the “other side” was the rest of Apple.¹³

But the Jobs who had returned to Apple was not the pirate of earlier years. Instead, people were racing to get the iPod out the door. “We were all working together late at night, and it was highly energized,” recalled Robbin. “It was just an incredible team project. There were no boundaries. The software guys, the hardware guys, the firmware guys, everybody worked together. It was a pretty amazing experience.”¹⁴ And all the collaborations paid off. Tony Fadell had started the project in February 2001, and the product was ready by October 2001, just before the Christmas season. The spectacular eight-month sprint was worthy of an Olympic gold medal.

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Meanwhile, at Sony, Stringer and Wiser were busy connecting the parts of the company. Or at least trying to. The problem was that a critical piece was missing from Stringer’s plan: a culture of collaboration among Sony’s various divisions. “Sony has long thrived on a hyper-competitive culture, where engineers were encouraged to outdo each other, not work together,” observed Wall Street Journal reporter Phred Dvorak.¹⁵ In the past, Sony’s competitive culture had worked wonderfully, allowing entrepreneurial groups to work largely by themselves to develop hit products like the Walkman and the PlayStation video game player. But Connect was not a stand-alone product. It required collaboration among five Sony divisions: the personal computer group based in Tokyo; the portable audio team responsible for the Walkman; another team responsible for flash memory players; Sony Music in the United States; and Sony Music in Japan. It was a new ball game, and Sony’s organization was not up to it.

For starters, each division had its own idea about what to do. The PC and the Walkman groups introduced their own competing music players, and three other groups—Sony Music in Japan, Sony Music in the United States, and Sony Electronics in the United States—had their own music portals or download services. Stringer, who had no authority over Japanese operations, complained, to no avail, that the Connect software being developed in Japan was hard to use. Whereas the U.S. team wanted a hard disk for the music player (as in the iPod), the Japanese team went with the arcane MiniDisc. And whereas the U.S. group pushed for using the MP3 format—the de facto U.S. standard—the Japanese PC division chose a proprietary standard called ATRAC. Complained Stringer, “It’s impossible to communicate with everybody when you have that many silos.”¹⁶

It was a mess.

When Connect finally debuted in May 2004, the mess turned into a market disaster. The influential Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal panned the product in a review: “The Walkman’s biggest weakness is its lousy user interface, which is dense and confusing. The SonicStage 2 software and the Connect music store are also badly designed. This is because, for all its historic brilliance in designing hardware, Sony stinks at software… Until Sony fixes the multitude of sins in this product, steer clear of it.”¹⁷

After sending this review to Tokyo, Stringer finally got Sony’s chief executive, Nobuyuki Idei, to take action. In November 2004, Idei moved all the pieces required into one group, also called Connect, and as copresidents of the group appointed Philip Wiser and Koichiro Tsujino, a Sony veteran and skilled collaborator.

But the problems didn’t go away. A team that made flash memory players was not transferred to the new group, as promised, because of internal politics.¹⁸ And when Wiser and Tsujino moved software development to a digital media start-up called Kinoma in Silicon Valley, the Sony people could not collaborate with the Kinoma engineers. CNET reported that “relations between the core Sony programmers and Kinoma declined so far that a team in Japan was asked to serve as a buffer between the two camps.”¹⁹ The improved Connect software that came out at the end of 2005 hadn’t improved much at all. Executives in Sony U.S. refused to release it—it was that bad. By January 2006, Sony had to issue an apology to customers in Europe and Japan.²⁰ Connect limped on for a while, but in August 2007 Stringer killed it.

With this kind of blow—the proud Sony had been trounced by Apple in a way that recalled a great Muhammad Ali knockout—someone had to pay. Would Stringer be fired? Far from it. As Connect went down, Stringer went up. On March 7, 2005, Sony announced that Nobuyuki Idei would step down as chief executive officer and be succeeded by none other than Howard Stringer. Even though he had failed to compete against Jobs and the iPod, Stringer climbed to the top job. It wasn’t Stringer’s fault after all: he had tried to cultivate collaboration across Sony but had controlled only the U.S. part of the venture. He had been a helpless line executive struggling to collaborate in a culture celebrating internal rivalry. The responsibility rested with Idei, who as Sony’s top boss was the leader who could have stitched together the company’s many pieces.

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Without serious competition from players like Sony Connect, and with a red-hot iPod—iTunes combo, Apple’s sales exploded. The iPod juggernaut went from sales of 125,000 units in first quarter of 2002 to the sale of the 100 millionth iPod on April 9, 2007.²¹ Apple’s annual sales of the iTunes and iPod went from zero in October 2001 to $10.8 billion in 2007. Meanwhile, Sony’s portable music players took a dive in the United States, leading to declining sales in its audio division (Sony does not provide separate financials for Connect and the Walkman line). In part because of this, Sony’s stock price declined 20 percent from 2002 to 2006 (see figure 1-1).²² In contrast, Apple’s share price exploded from a miserable $11 at the beginning of 2002 to $84 at the end of 2006—a sevenfold increase....