Workplace, Teams, & Culture

INTELLIGENCE: RESEARCH BRIEF: Vigilance is the key to avoiding potential organizational nightmares.

Forming close relationships with suppliers or customers is a popular business strategy, but such partnerships can develop problems. The authors observe that many close business relationships -- whether joint ventures or loose alliances -- fail. They describe a phenomenon they call the "dark side" of close relationships and maintain that close relationships that seem quite stable can, in fact, be vulnerable to decline and destruction. The authors draw both on their own surveys of business relationships and on other examples. The authors point out that the same factors that strengthen a partnership can also open the door to relationship problems. For example, when an automaker and a supplier built up personal relationships between employees at the two firms to facilitate their alliance and just-in-time manufacturing process, the trust and personal relationships also enabled the supplier more easily to cut corners in the production process. While observing that business relationships with problems can linger on for a surprisingly long time, the authors recommend strategies to prevent the "dark side" from taking over a business relationship. One such strategy is to ensure that both parties in the relationship make investments in it, in effect swapping "mutual hostages." If, however, damage to the relationship has already occurred, possible strategies include turning the crisis into an opportunity to improve the partnership, rotating in new personnel, reconfiguring the relationship or terminating it.

Throughout history, all business, innovation and even cognition have been based on localized cultural context. Pointing to the literature on the cultural antecedents of information and knowledge management (IKM), the authors make the argument that such cultural biases are the very spark of global innovation. They find it curious then that Western analytical assumptions currently dominate IKM research and development. Information and knowledge management models and frameworks that exclude the influence of national and regional culture have seriously undercut their potential effectiveness, particularly in global applications. If history is any guide, say the authors, these cultural influences must be encouraged if powerful new ideas for practical and theoretical IKM are to emerge.

Just as the Internet and the World Wide Web led to a huge change in how people interact with distant applications, so the Internet and Web services hold out the promise of drastically changing how distant applications interact with each other. But how real is this promise? If information systems could look for and find each other, share data and execute business processes, all with no (or very little) human involvement, the business world would likely be quite transformed. The author concludes, however, that Web services will not create this world, nor will any technology on the horizon. Web services, he argues, will be highly useful, but not quickly or obviously disruptive; in fact, they will reinforce existing relationships rather than catalyze new ones. What's more, the application-integration challenges that remain unaddressed by Web services are the really difficult ones that can only be overcome by the work of managers and leaders, not technologists or consortia. The author's themes are illustrated by an extended example drawn from his case study of IBM's EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) organization, which has been working with independent distributors in several countries to automate the ordering of midrange computing systems. The case provides a close look at an effort to go beyond the capabilities of previous B2B technologies to build agreements and standards for application-application interactions where none previously had existed.

Lack of communication among colleagues in the workplace is a widespread problem. Many companies struggle with the "silo syndrome" -- employees from different departments tend to keep to themselves, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities, particularly those that would arise from chance encounters among people who don't, but should, know each other. The author asserts that two parallel paradigm shifts are helping to change that. The first is a movement from desktop to mobile computing. The second is the move from individual to "social" software, here defined as programs that enable a group of people to accomplish common goals. Together, they say, the two trends have the potential to dramatically transform the ways in which companies conduct business. Toward that end, the author and his colleagues have developed a new technology that could help facilitate greater workplace collaboration. The technology, known as "Serendipity," is a yet to be commercialized mobile-phone application, intended to extend (rather than supplant) existing enterprise-communication and knowledge-management systems by untethering them from the desktop so that they can be used in social situations where they might be most beneficial: near the water cooler, in the hallway, around the coffee machine. Serendipity relies on Bluetooth, a low-power radiofrequency protocol designed primarily to enable wireless headsets or laptops to connect to mobile phones. A byproduct of that functionality, however, is that Bluetooth devices are aware of one another, which essentially turns them into short-range beacons, each with its own unique ID. In this article, the author explains how Serendipity works and discusses a number of the potential business applications that could arise from its ability to study, track and, perhaps most importantly, predict the dynamics of a social network. He also discusses some of the privacy issues and necessary safeguards -- such as opt-in methodologies -- that would have to be associated with such applications.

For many years, multinational corporations could compete successfully by exploiting scale and scope economies or by taking advantage of imperfections in the world's goods, labor and capital markets. But these ways of competing are no longer as profitable as they once were. In most industries, multinationals no longer compete primarily with companies whose boundaries are confined to a single nation. Rather, they go head-to- head with a handful of other giants. Against such global competitors, it is hard to sustain an advantage based on traditional economies of scale and scope. MNCs must seek new sources of competitive advantage. While multinationals in the past realized economies of scope principally by utilizing physical assets and exploiting a companywide brand, the new economies of scope are based on the ability of business units, subsidiaries and functional departments within the company to collaborate successfully by sharing knowledge and jointly developing new products and services. Collaboration can be an MNC's source of competitive advantage because it does not occur automatically -- far from it. Indeed, several barriers impede collaboration within complex multiunit organizations. And in order to overcome those barriers, companies will have to develop distinct organizing capabilities that cannot be easily imitated. The authors develop a framework that links managerial action, barriers to interunit collaboration and value creation in MNCs to help managers understand how collaborative advantage can work. The framework conceptualizes collaboration as a set of management levers that reduce four specific barriers to collaboration, leading in turn to several types of value creation. They draw on BP's experience to illustrate the effectiveness of a collaborative approach.

Many companies organize employees into self-managing teams that are basically left to run themselves with some guidance from an external leader. In fact, comprehensive surveys report that 79% of companies in the Fortune 1,000 currently deploy such “empowered,” “self-directed” or “autonomous” teams. Because of their widespread use, much research has been devoted to understanding how best to set up self-managing teams to maximize their effectiveness. Interestingly, though, relatively little attention has been paid to the leaders who must oversee such working groups. At first, it seems contradictory: Why should a self-managing team require any leadership at all? But the authors’ research has shown that self-managing teams require a particular kind of leadership. Specifically, the external leaders who contribute most to their team’s success tend to excel at one skill: managing the boundary between the team and the larger organization. That process requires specific behaviors that can be grouped into four basic functions: (1) moving back and forth between the team and the broader organization to build relationships, (2) scouting necessary information, (3) persuading the team and outside constituents to support one another, and (4) empowering team members.

A corporate sphere of influence is not just a platform for a company’s offensive or defensive initiatives. It is the basis upon which the company builds market power over rivals so it can maneuver freely without fear of retaliation.

Tapping traditional Asian values can instill cross-cultural managerial capabilities.