Best Practices in Multi-Enterprise Multi-Collaboration

A New Collaboration Best Practices Model

Many leading companies now employ 10,000 or more professionals, who have some 50 million potential bilateral relationships. The same holds true for knowledge: searching for knowledge means trying to determine who’s head (which person) it resides in, whether at the employee, customer, operations, supply chain, or stakeholder levels. In today’s globalized business environment, the immediate need is to compete and to raise the productivity of professionals. Big corporations must change their organizational structures dramatically to do this, retaining the best of the traditional hierarchy while acknowledging the heightened value of the people who hatch ideas, innovate, and collaborate with peers to generate revenues and create value through intangible assets such as brands and networks. With best practices in this area, companies can achieve these goals by modifying their vertical structures and empower managers to let different groups of professionals focus on clearly defined tasks; line managers on earnings, for instance, and off-line teams on longer-term growth initiatives - with clear accountability. Then these companies should create new, overlaid networks and marketplaces that make it easier for professionals to interact collaboratively and to find the knowledge they need.

PWR can help your company to not only build this new kind of organization but incorporate successful best practices and to also reduce the complexity of their interactions and improve the quality of internal collaboration by implementing four interrelated organizational-design principles:

1. Streamlining and simplifying vertical and line-management structures by discarding failed matrix and ad hoc approaches and narrowing the scope of the line manager's role to the creation of current earnings.

2. Deploying off-line teams to discover new wealth-creating opportunities while using a dynamic management process to resolve short- and long-term trade-offs.

3. Developing knowledge marketplaces, talent marketplaces, and formal networks to stimulate the creation and exchange of intangibles.

4. Relying on measurements of performance rather than supervision to get the most from self-directed professionals.

Call us at 978-663-9212 to discuss your needs and opportunities for improved profits and growth by improving collaboration at all levels of the enterprise through 21st century best practices.