Business in books, the good and not-so

THE CULTURE OF COLLABORATION By Evan Rosen Red Ape Publishing, $29.95, 320 pages FIVE FUTURE STRATEGIES YOU NEED RIGHT NOW By George Stalk Harvard Business Press, $18, 120 pages GOD IS A SALESMAN By Mark Stevens Hachette Book Group USA, $18.99, 144 pages

REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES

With the economic climate as bad as it is, it should be a good time for good business books. Good business books, I said.

The mark of a good business book is that it states the valuable truths so that the point suddenly becomes a revelation to the readers. An “ah-hah!” moment if you will.

Evan Rosen, a San Francisco-based corporate strategist, has produced the best of the current crop. “The Culture of Collaboration” already can be called a prize-winner. It received the gold medal at the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards sponsored by Inc. magazine and other industry consultant groups. A week ago Mr. Rosen was here in Washington to make his book”s point to a representative group of government agency management leaders from department from the Pentagon to energy, from welfare to the CIA

The point? The modern (read successful) American corporation of today bears very little resemblance to the cultural structure of those same corporations 25, even 10, years ago. Where once there were chains of command, flows of information (and power), central locations and memo buck slips of Talmudic complexity and obtuseness, technology has made it possible for diverse creative and managerial teams operating in locations around the globe to work simultaneously on projects that bring better, cheaper, more effective products on line at an accelerated pace.

Truly when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton bemoan the outsourcing of American factory jobs to cheap foreign producers they do not have any idea what they are talking about. Where American corporations are succeeding in the global arena, Mr. Rosen argues, you will find a culture of collaboration already in place where projects that once moved in sequence now move in parallel, and where management now operates without either doors or geographical borders.

What Mr. Rosen describes is not a political controversy but production inevitability. I am old enough to remember when the old corporate CEO of the Sixties and Seventies had actually started out on the shop floor of his firm. Men like Thornton Wilson of Boeing, Charles Pilliod of Goodyear and John Swearingen of Amoco could still walk the walk on the production line. Then came the corporate accountant who swore that financial management could take the place of production success. The new business manager can be and often is the one who best directs the current round of changes.

Technology makes much of this evolution inevitable, Mr. Rosen argues. He visited Boeing’s current design center which is not at all near the main plant campus in Everett, Washington but “tucked away in a McDonald’s building two blocks from the Kremlin” in Moscow. Faced with designing its new 787 Dreamliner, Boeing management tapped into the engineering talent pool that had made the old Soviet Union a global aerospace competitor.

By using a perpetual videoconference set of plasma screens design work could shift between the two design bases as the clock changed each day. The result was a plane that rolled out a year earlier than the previous 777 version and a better product in that the 787 uses 20 percent less fuel than its competition models.

There were other participants in the 787’s creation than the bi-cultural, twin campus design team. The cultural shift at Boeing also shifted from italic linear design of the more than 12 million procurement items it needed to parallel design tactics that brought in engineers from traditional suppliers before the design started. Boeing also teamed with four of its major competitors, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Rolls Royce, plus suppliers to create the Exostar consortium to improve design, cut costs and bring commonality to non-competitive component supplies.

This last may be among the most exciting innovations in the American corporate story. Again, intelligent use of the newest communications technology and internet paths makes all this possible and we are just on the frontier.

So whether it’s the Mayo Clinic setting a design team from all departments to create a patient check-in kiosk similar to those at airports or Industrial Light and Magic’s melding of film animators and compositors to create special movie effects for such hits as the Harry Potter series, the culture of collaboration is already what is happening in what may be the most exciting business development since the assembly line.

If you are more curious about the reality of globalization than afraid, this is the read for you.

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