It's out. David Coleman and Stewart Levine's new book, Collaboration 2.0. We were delighted to write the Foreword to this book. Here it is in its entirety (for those who fail to buy the book - oh, no!):
Collaboration 2.0
Foreword by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps
At the Seventh International Conference on Complex Systems in 2007, Barbara Jasny, Senior Editor at Science, cited a statistic that provoked a collective “wow” from the audience of complexity scientists. The current record for the largest number of collaborators submitting a paper to her prestigious journal? 350 [corrected update, 445].
Jasny pointed to the truth that reigns in all domains these days: once the province of isolated geniuses, good work and breakthrough ideas congregate on the playground of those who can play well together. In our highly interconnected world, everything interacts with everything else and in order to understand—or accomplish—anything, we need to work together better. And, typically today, that means making use of innovative technologies and becoming adept at the human side of collaboration.
Not long ago, the word collaborator had a bad connotation in Europe, implying working with the forces of evil during World War II. But in a relatively short amount of time, collaboration has reclaimed its original meaning—“co-labor,” to work together—and has become a popular term even in countries where it was anathema as recently as a few decades ago.
Now in North America and South, in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the exquisite nations of Australia and New Zealand, to collaborate means that you know what you’re doing. The trick is to do that supremely well.
When we were interviewing executives for our book Virtual Teams, nearly every conversation ended with a variation on the same idea: “You know, it’s 90% people and 10% technology.” This phrase has become something of a slogan for us and when a technologist has the capacity to speak from the people side, we always take notice.
We first met David Coleman a number of years ago at a conference on—take a guess—collaboration. He impressed us with his knowledge and his sense of humor, both vital to collaboration, and we’ve followed his work since, depending on him to be up on whatever was happening in that world. Invariably, he stresses that people are the ones using technology and that how and for what purposes they use it are far more important than the technology itself.
When we learned that David had teamed up with Stewart Levine to write the “next rev” of collaboration, we were intrigued and it took us approximately one second to agree to write this Foreword.
Stewart’s grasp of the people side of the equation is comprehensive and practical. Good psychology, good people skills, and good common sense combine in his many ideas for how to make collaboration work.
The offerings in collaboration technology can appear like items in a supermarket, all the little cans bearing only tiny variations in ingredients to distinguish them. What David helps us see are the signs marking the aisles, pointing out the categories that we need to consider before making our choices, then applying expert stars to the ones he regards as best picks.
On the people side, Stewart enables us to zero in on the essence of collaboraton. At the beginning, during the middle, and in the final analysis, collaboration is about communication. Prone to wanting to make our views known, we fail to listen. And listening across boundaries is the most difficult behavior of all. The borders that separate us stand in the way of our humanity and we need to dissolve them. The ability to truly hear what others have to say is the most powerful form of communication, Stewart writes. We agree.
And though the word business appears in this book some 117 times, it is far more than a manual for business. As our scientist friends indicate, our world and indeed our future depend upon collaboration, which the authors make clear in their final pages. From global warming to alleviation of poverty to stemming the population explosion to reducing the threat of “weapons of mass effects,” the human family needs to learn how to work together better very quickly and to become adept at using the best tools for doing so.
This book is your GPS for collaboration now and in the years to come. Open it anywhere and you’ll learn something. Apply what you’ve learned and your work will become easier—and our hopes for the generations to come will soar.
—Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, CEO and Chief Scientist respectively of NetAge, a consultancy that helps organizations work together better, and co-authors of many books, including The Age of the Network and Virtual Teams.
