Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration
Robert Hargrove
(McGraw Hill, #17.99)
We had worked all night to prepare the factory for the VIP opening visitor and were awaiting his arrival eagerly, if exhausted. He got out of his car, cut the tape and then stood in a corner quite alone and silent. I was staggered that someone, who had risen so high, had so little awareness of the importance of collaboration as a way to get things done.
This book is about great collaborators and their projects. In times past, collaboration meant sleeping with the enemy, which was obviously how our VIP saw it, but the stories of great successes have often been about exceptional collaborators. Nowadays, it is a given that good management has such skills and will use them, but would a staff survey necessarily reveal them? Or is it still a matter of personality and culture?
The author believes that collaboration is not an optional part of management but an essential ingredient for success. His examples are all from the US, including the Mars Pathfinder project, the story of the Middle East Oslo Accords and Xerox's Palo Alto research centre, but the message from the experiences is the same: collaborate or die.
Chapters five and six are of most value as they describe how to do it. These two are a goldmine of ways not only to spot a collaboration going in the right or wrong direction, but also how to organise and manage collaboration at its best.
Among the themes on offer which struck a chord were: watch out for passionately advocating views without enquiring; watch out for people talking too fast without understanding and watch out for believing there is a shared understanding when undiscussables lurk!
We may think we are sufficiently professional to collaborate easily, this book makes it clear that collaborating is an art that takes learning and practice.
Jargon free ** Topical ***
Need to know **** Overall ****
The Iceberg Agenda
Philip Atkinson
(Batsford, #18.99)
I WEAR a badge on my jersey which reads ''I've sat through Titanic''; hubris followed by nemesis is therefore a topical issue. This book is about icebergs: the hidden dangers and unexploited benefits and they represent to corporate culture and how they can be used to avoid disaster and plan for success.
The author believes, like Dennis Healey, that both individuals and organisations have a hinterland, a country from which individuals draw their motivation and organisations their performance. The Iceberg Agenda is about uncovering this below the waterline agenda and using it to challenge existing practice and create the potential for new ways of behaving and doing.
There is much talk in management at present of values, leadership, and empowerment, but how are these to be identified and harnessed?
The book issues a series of challenges to top management. For example, that one typical iceberg of dangerous ignorance is that managers will be aware of 9% of service failures; supervisors of 74% and rank and file of 100%. By developing processes to uncover the reasons for such failures; creating revised standards of performance, demonstrating commitment to them and letting staff at all levels take responsibility for them is not a negation of management's prerogatives but a core function.
We all have our own examples of organisations in the private and public sectors whose products and services we admire and likewise those we do not. This book will help anyone who manages and who wants to be on our list of favourites.
Jargon free *** Topical ****
Need to know **** Overall: *****
n Michael Fass is a director of Partners in Economic Development Limited
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