But how do you create a curious culture? I struggled with this question until the January 2013 issue of National Geographic landed in my mailbox with this cover theme: “Why We Explore.” Inside was a fascinating article called “Restless Genes” written by David Dobbs. The article (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/restless-genes/dobbs-text ) provided panoply of scientific evidence as to why humans explore.

“The compulsion to see what lies beyond the far ridge or that ocean – or this planet—is a defining part of human identity and success.” – David Dobbs.

The article helped me conceptualize a framework for enabling a curiosity-based culture inside an organization. I learned three things about human behavior that encourages us to explore – why we are curious – and what we as leaders can do to unleash some of it our organizations.

First, I was stunned to understand that about 20 percent of human beings have a mutated gene called DRD4-R7. Those of us with this gene tend to be more curious and restless; we take more risks in exploring new places, food and ideas. Remarkably, Dobbs says people with this “explorer’s gene” who lived a settled lifestyle within the confines of a village tended to “wither” and become malnourished. Dobbs went to great pains to point out that a gene alone does not make someone an explorer. In the right environmental conditions, however, those with the gene flourished and the societies around them benefited from the bounties of their exploration.

Here is what I think this means to us as leaders: We must institutionalize a system to identify and engage the explorers inside our organizations. In Cisco, we have a select group of men and women called Distinguished Engineers – a tiny fraction of Cisco’s engineering team, but these “DE’s” as they are called, are the Internet’s original explorers who invented the standards and products powering the mobile, social, visual and virtual world we all take for granted today. But truthfully Cisco did not always know how to engage these DEs in our day-to-day engineering innovations – I guess you could say that for a while they were “settled” and undeniably restless. To his credit, Cisco’s President and COO Gary Moore recognized this gap and over the past two years has re-engaged the DE community and many are now serving in CTO roles across the engineering organization. The lesson: Formalize a system to recognize your explorers and ensure they are consistently engaged in your team’s innovation paths.

“A restless person may thrive in a changeable environment but wither in a stable one; likewise with any genes that help produce the restlessness.” David Dobbs.

The article identified a second trait about human explorers that I already knew: the extended childhood of a human is unique among our closest genetic neighbors. What I didn’t grasp is the impact of childhood on exploration. What’s uniquely human is the many years we get to play, fail and succeed at games that help us grasp the possibilities and rewards of exploring. (Ok, I can admit it, I was one of those kids who stood in the driveway facing his basketball hoop with this imaginary game going through my head, Ricci has the ball…five seconds to go…he takes Earl “The Pearl” Monroe left… he fakes…he shoots…he scores!!!) These years as a “child” and the games we play as children are vital in learning the value of exploration and its rewards.

It’s completely possible to create “play” inside organizations. At Cisco, one of our leadership development disciplines focuses on experiential learning, where leaders play roles and different personas in solving real-world Cisco problems. Nothing is at stake, other than perhaps a bruised ego of learning an important lesson – we call this “action learning.” Another example of “play” inside an organization is the use of “knowledge markets,” a structured form of crowd-sourcing where ideas to problems compete with each other in a “market.” Cisco has leveraged knowledge markets for a wide range of applications; we once used it to identify the top five questions on the mind of Cisco’s leadership team about the company’s strategy. Dobbs says that as we get older, we tend to play less. The lesson: “playing” may have to be manufactured, encouraged and rewarded to model the lesson of taking risks, failing and learning.

“We do less of this (play) as we get older and become less willing to explore novel alternatives and are more conditioned to stick with familiar ones.” Alison Gopnick, quoted in “Restless Genes” and author of The Scientist in the Crib.

I already knew that human hands with our five fingers, including a thumb, were a competitive advantage for Homo sapiens in the battle for resources. In the final lesson from the article, what I didn’t’ know is that societies tended to develop mythology around those people who excelled at “clever hands,” as author Dobbs refers to innovations created by those hands. Mythology made it “cool” to be “clever”; a little like the adulation the Steve Jobs’ of the world receive today. The marine vocabulary of the Polynesians conferred great status on ship builders; as Dobbs says, “Like today’s astronauts.” This social standing was a motivating force to continue exploring. I recently visited Cisco’s customer briefing center in Tokyo and, as I walked down the hallway past a bank of Cisco equipment, I stopped because I saw a box that was a different color from all the others. It was white with red lettering on it. I knew right away when my eyes focused specifically on this box that I was looking at a Cisco “AGS” router, the product that was used in the first-ever commercial Internet connection. A group of us just stood there for a few minutes and talked about what this AGS box meant to Cisco – and the world. It is not an understatement to say the AGS changed the world. I’ve always believed that culture is built on the backs of important symbols. The mythology around the Cisco AGS router is every bit in our vocabulary as the sail is in the Polynesian marine vocabulary. The lesson: Nostalgia is what keeps an organization from moving forward, but the myths of what symbolizes the great accomplishments of your organization should be celebrated and must be front and center in your team’s culture.

“When you set sail to find new lands, you became mythologized – even if you didn’t come back.” National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis quoted in “Restless Genes.”

Cisco CEO John Chambers frequently says culture is the responsibility of leaders. Curiosity may kill the cat, but it may be the most important attribute of a resilient organization in a constant state of evolution to win in today’s markets. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to set curiosity free inside our organizations, in the same way the great human explorers dared to go places that others feared but few ventured.

“…for the larger powers we gain through culture…it gives our malleable genomes, imaginative minds, and clever hands the power to transform even the strongest forces in our environment — wind, water, current — from threat to opportunity.” David Dobbs.

This article is also posted at Switch and Shift: http://switchandshift.com/how-curious-is-your-organization?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SwitchAndShift+(Switch+and+Shift

Much has been said and written recently about the value of working virtually, and I don’t think you can sub-divide mobility into “at home” and “on the road.” Social technologies, video and mobile platforms make it easy to work from just about anywhere.

But as leaders, we have to resist the temptation to confuse technology with change management – despite our love affair with technology. Any time technology brings a sea-change transformation to the way humans do stuff, especially work stuff, we can’t forget that people work in organizations – and organizations are an amalgam of culture, processes and technology.

All of Cisco’s experience has taught us that technology alone does not create sustainable productivity; it is the way culture supports the behaviors needed to make the technology effective and processes that support and optimize it. Ultimately any organization needs to determine its “system” for collaborating as teams, whether those teams are in the same room all the time or working virtually anywhere in the world. No model is right or wrong; it is what works for the mission of that organization.

For those organizations where work is an outcome, not a place, here are some best practices from The Collaboration Imperative (www.thecollaborationimperative.com) on making virtual work work:

• Culture: Focus on shared goals, not location. Studies show that establishing rapport and trust is a key challenge of working on a virtual team. As leaders, it’s our job to replace uncertainty with trust by articulating your team’s charter and the ground rules of what you can expect from each other. In Cisco, we’ve found that virtual teams exceed expectations when their team charter answers four questions: What is our purpose? What is your role against our purpose? What are our shared goals and how are we measuring success? What is the scope of our work and where are the boundaries? Finally, another simple but profound cultural consideration: be pragmatic about scheduling meetings on a global calendar and rotate start times to accommodate time zones – you will be pleasantly surprised by the reaction of your global peers

• Process: Stop wasting time in meetings. Knowledge workers spend more than half their time in meetings with colleagues or customers, regardless of location. We’ve all been in “meeting hell,” where we’re asking basic questions like, “Who called this meeting?” or “What’s the agenda?” or “What are we trying to accomplish here?” Any meeting – physical or virtual, but most importantly for virtual – needs discipline. Chapter Six of The Collaboration Imperative is devoted to a “Clarity of Purpose” model for meeting management; where one meeting type is devoted to reporting, such as an “inform” meeting. Another is devoted to conceptualizing or brainstorming, such as an “exchange” meeting. A final quick tip: adopt a common vocabulary for making decisions. If “strategy” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone in the meeting, how can any team be effective?

• Technology: Make video communications ubiquitous on your team. The social science on body language is pretty clear – 80 or 90% of what we communicate comes from body language. If you can’t see your team, it is hard to know how engaged they are. My strategy brainstorm discussion was hosted in WebEx and we all had our video cameras on. The point isn’t the video, it’s what video lets you do as a leader – engage your team.

In and of themselves, any of these approaches would add value to how teams perform. In combination, they can produce both discretionary effort through more effective engagement, but also measurably superior results.

One of Cisco’s customers doesn’t call their virtual meetings “video meetings”; they call them “flawless meetings.” It’s what we get done virtually that matters most. While Cisco has achieved considerable real estate savings with teleworking, perhaps the most important measure is the performance of the people themselves who are working virtually. The numbers are pretty clear: As a percentage of the company’s population, teleworkers receive a higher share of the top grades in Cisco’s performance management system.

When process-culture-technology are managed like an integrated, coordinated system driving a deliberate change management strategy, it’s possible for leaders to get more done while creating passion and discretionary effort — no matter where people work. If you are considering a virtual worker program, do you have a change management strategy? Do you know what cultural norms need to evolve or adapt? Do you have rigor to your virtual team processes? How you answer these questions will predict success or failure as much as any technology that enables the virtual work.

Follow me on Twitter: @RonRicciCisco

by Kare Anderson, Forbes.com

“I’ve yet to meet a CEO who didn’t want his or her company to move faster,” wrote Ron Ricci, a Cisco executive. In this disruptive era, the companies that will survive are those that can adapt most swiftly. Rapidly exiting the Home Networking business, as Cisco did recently, couldn’t have happened if the firm had not developed a clear, transparent and collaborative decision making process according to Ricci and his Cisco colleague and co-author of The Collaboration Imperative, Carl Wiese.

Read the rest of the article on Forbes.com.

CEOs around the world are looking to collaboration as their top strategy to increase the speed of their organizations. Why?  Because collaboration eliminates the friction that slows organizations down – whether that friction comes from people or processes. 

The amount of friction in your organization is directly proportional to your ability to speed up your team.  Friction is sometimes purposeful, such as passive-aggressive behavior.  Other times friction comes from processes that create decisions without any clarity or a clear definition of success.

Here are four New Year’s resolutions for all leaders to curb their organizational friction and speed up their team’s execution with collaboration:

1.) Take a holistic view of collaboration. Collaboration does indeed deliver transactional value, such as Telepresence, which eliminates the need to travel.  But the transformative value of collaboration comes from looking at your organization holistically – by leveraging culture, process and technology in combination. My Cisco colleague Carl Wiese and I wrote The Collaboration Imperative with this end-to-end perspective in mind.  You can read a sample chapter of our book that here outlines this holistic approach to collaboration.

2.) Embrace the behaviors of a collaborative leader. Of all the strategies available to leaders to create speed in their organizations, none is more important than the behaviors of the leaders themselves. This is because nothing slows an organization down more than a culture of internal competition and the executive behaviors that encourage it. Collaboration encourages a culture of shared goals as it minimizes hoarding and competition by creating an environment that shares information, diagnoses problems, raises concerns, coordinates efforts and identifies possible initiatives and transition points – all which ratchet up the pace of an organization’s ability to execute. Read more about the four behaviors of collaborative leaders here.

3.) Invest in your collaboration persona. Leadership is how we “show up” every day in front of our teams.  But how do we show up as leaders in a world where work is increasingly done on a mobile phone or tablet, or using a video chat, web conference or Telepresence? This is one of the greatest leadership challenges of this hyper-connected world. As a leader you will need to know what I like to call your “collaboration persona” – that way in which your leadership style shows up when you’re not in the physical world. We all have to learn to be virtual stars in our own, authentic way.  You can learn more about how to understand and embrace your collaboration persona in this blog.

4.) Make clarity and decision making synonymous.  At each stage in the chain of decision-making in your organization, ambiguity looms as the enemy of clarity. In worst cases, ambiguity leads to conspiracy theories and people actually work against each other. In most cases, work simply slows down while people seek out answers. I’m convinced that most people don’t wake up in the morning trying to second-guess decisions. Ambiguity is your enemy as the leader of a team. You can transform your team’s natural curiosity into a powerful source of discretionary effort – all it takes is a little clarity.  Read here for ways to increase decision clarity on your team.

Good luck with your own new year’s resolutions.
Ron

Follow me on Twitter at @RonRicciCisco

For more than a decade, Ron has worked at Cisco as the vice president of executive and customer engagement to develop and nurture a culture of sharing collaborative processes. Ron’s work lays out in 21st century terms the increasing need to have global reach and connect with teams around the world. He is co-author of The Collaboration Imperative, a beautifully designed book that is very accessible, fun and engaging. In it, he weaves both his experience at Cisco as well as other organizations to understand and encourage new approaches to teamwork. In this interview Ron and I discuss his perspective on collaboration, including:

• How to take a holistic approach to collaboration
• The shiny object syndrome
• Three meeting formats to help you stop wasting so much time
• Understanding different decision-making styles

Listen to the audio interview here: http://www.boxofcrayons.biz/2012/12/ron-ricci-the-collaboration-imperative/

But this isn’t a time for fear or anxiety. Peter Drucker said it best:  “Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business—in demographics, in values, in technology or science—and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.”

In 1971, when FedEx founder Fred Smith said he was going to deliver mail by jets, most thought he was crazy. In 1980, the creators of Whole Foods broke the mold when they entered a mature industry—with razor thin margins and driven by sales and coupons—and introduced the idea of charging premium prices for fresh, organic groceries.  And when Apple announced opened its first retail store in 2001, Newsweek ran an article titled “Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work.” 

Times of change are when the big winners are created. And this is a perfect moment to leverage Collaboration to reinvent your industry, to reinvent how your teams work, to reinvent yourself. The last time we saw this kind of market transformation was with the Internet. Only this time, we aren’t connecting networks, we are connecting people and applications.

Ask yourself:

• How is Collaboration uniquely advancing your industry—and what more is possible?
• What factors constrain the pace of innovation in your industry, and what kind of advantage would we gain by innovating faster?
• What new business models can your industry enable with virtual teams, mobile productivity and stronger customer interactions?
• What is holding your industry back and how could improved Collaboration overcome these barriers?
• How are competitors reinventing your industry today—and where are the opportunities to leap ahead?

Will you lead that change? Will you step up and assume the role of Chief Collaboration Officer in your organization? Big winners are created in times like these. These big winners get comfortable with the fluid business world we live in. They find excitement in navigating the unknown. They see opportunity in chaos. They challenge conventional thinking. Now it’s your turn.

I’ve yet to meet a CEO who didn’t want his or her company to move faster.  But how many times have you ever heard a CEO say – “My organization moves as fast as our markets do” or “I’m confident my company can adapt to any unforeseen market shift”?  Moore’s Law states the speed of a semiconductor chip doubles every 18-24 months; what if your people’s ability to change moved as fast?

Of all the strategies available to leaders to create speed in their organizations, none is more important than the behaviors of the leaders themselves. Ultimately executive behavior creates the culture of your organization; your organization’s culture is almost certainly a reflection of your CEO’s personality.

Nothing slows an organization down more than a culture of internal competition and the executive behaviors that encourage it.  We all know the challenges of organizational silos and the incentives that encourage myopic thinking. As leaders, we’ve experienced some form of passive-aggressive behavior from our peers. We all know the symptoms:  Teams protect information and assets to compete with other teams for budget resources; knowledge gets trapped in pockets that others in the company could benefit from but cannot reach. Budget gets wasted. All the while, markets move and new opportunities emerge.

I’ve been fortunate to meet and work with hundreds of CEOs, and here is what they want:  a culture of shared goals. A culture of shared goals minimizes hoarding and competition by creating an environment that shares information, diagnoses problems, raises concerns, coordinates efforts and identifies possible initiatives and transition points – all of which ratchets up the pace of an organization’s ability to execute.

In The Collaboration Imperative, my co-author and Cisco colleague Carl Wiese and I identify four executive behaviors of the collaborative leader.  These behaviors are the necessary ingredients to create a culture of shared goals, and eliminate or mitigate the types of human behaviors that slow organizations down.  The four behaviors are:

1. Focus on authentic leadership and eschew passive-aggressiveness. For collaboration to succeed, leaders need to be authentic. Cisco studied which characteristics of leaders on collaborative teams are most important, and we found that the most critical attribute was a leader’s willingness to follow through on commitments. Being authentic involves two elements. First, as a leader of a team, department or business unit with people, budgets and resources under your control, you must follow through on organizational commitments.  Second, when there is disagreement about a decision, fight the instinct to make it personal.
2. Relentlessly pursue transparent decision making.  In our experience, there’s a direct relationship between the agility and resilience of a team and the transparency of its decision-making processes. When you’re open and transparent about the answers to three questions — who made the decision, who is accountable for the outcomes of the decision, and is that accountability real—people in organizations spend far less time questioning how or why a decision was made. Think of how much time is wasted ferreting out details when a decision is made and communicated because the people who are affected don’t know who made the decision or who is accountable for its consequences.
3. View resources as instruments of action, not as possessions. It’s hardly a new observation that people sometimes stockpile resources around their business unit or department, or are slow—perhaps even hesitant—to share those resources with other departments. There may even be incentives in place that discourage sharing. It’s easier, although never truly easy, to move resources around an organization when leaders tell their teams the process they used to make a decision about resources, the data and facts used to support the decision, and the tradeoffs they considered.  Fact-based decision making is your goal; it’s hard to keep resources squirreled away when the facts suggest otherwise.
4. Codify the relationship between decision rights, accountability and rewards. Modeling the desired collaborative behaviors—showing your employees that you walk the talk—is the goal. But what happens when you’re not around? The more these behaviors are codified into an end-to-end system across your organization, the greater the odds of collaboration succeeding when you’re not there to reinforce cultural norms. The most important enabler of an accountability system?  Decision rights.  Who gets to make decisions in your organization is the center of gravity for accountability.  If you don’t have published decision rights, then accountability is problematic – everyone can point fingers at someone else.

The ability to create speed, flexibility and adaptability is the foundation of the modern competitive organization.  The enemy is internal competition and the denial and nostalgia that perpetuate it.  A culture of shared goals should be the mission.  There’s only one answer:  how you and your team of leaders behave.

Q2:  Does your organization use a common vocabulary for decision-making?  If so, what is it?

Q3: Does your organization have a definition of a transparent decision?  If so, what is it?

Q4: What effective ways have you found to thwart passive-aggressive behavior?

Leaders have a lot on their plates, but nothing is more important than clarity. What’s important to your organization? Why? How are we getting the work done? When do we start? At each stage in the chain of decision making, ambiguity looms as the enemy of clarity; as leaders we’ve all experienced dis-engagement when things simply aren’t clear to our team. What can a leader do – especially in a world where hyper-connected employees can question and second-guess decisions instantly?

Leaders have to understand that decisions are like best-selling novels; the greater the ambiguity around a decision, the faster it moves up the New York Times best-seller list. People’s natural curiosities and ambiguity seem to feed on each other. In worst cases, ambiguity leads to conspiracy theories and people actually work against each other. In most cases, work simply slows down while people seek out answers.

What if you could eliminate ambiguity? A lot is at stake. There’s more than enough evidence to demonstrate that teams produce higher results when they can align their individual work to the greater mission and strategy of the organization. When all goes right, organizations can produce discretionary effort – that amazing, hard-to-bottle effort people give when ambiguity is replaced by a sense of shared purpose.

Here are three things you can do bring clarity to your organization – and increase the odds of producing discretionary effort on your team:

1. Define what success looks like with one single-source of truth – an organization-wide taxonomy

People laughed when I first said “taxonomy” inside Cisco, but taxonomy is the fundamental building block to any organization looking to speak a common operating language. Taxonomy classifies and defines things; in this case, what success looks like. Focus on defining your operating model metrics like profitability, revenue growth, share gains and productivity; emphasize the specific, written definition of success; and show the outcomes and sources of data used in your organization to gauge success.

Try as hard as you can to tie these metrics to the performance management and accountability system of your organization. Publish this taxonomy on your intranet and push it to your internal communities.

2. Scale how you communicate decisions with a common vocabulary

Here’s a simple question: does strategy mean the same thing to everyone in your organization? What if the answer is no? That’s highly likely, because we’ve all gone to different colleges and had diverse work experiences. A common vocabulary provides a single context for decision-making. In Cisco, our common vocabulary is called Vision-Strategy-Execution-Metrics. Each decision element is defined and includes guiding principles to give people guardrails. It’s mandatory for leaders to communicate their priorities – that is, the decisions they have made – to their teams using this vocabulary. You can achieve transparency when you tell people three things about a decision: who made it? Who’s accountable for it? What does the accountability system look like? It’s hard to sacrifice around one vocabulary; imagine, though, the power of a single decision language across a global organization.

3. Engage your team on the “story behind the decision”

Taxonomy and common vocabulary tell your team what’s important; engagement is more driven by the human need to understand why decisions matter and how it is expected to be executed – what I call the “story behind the decision”. When you engage your team on decisions you’ve made (hopefully using a taxonomy and common vocabulary!), you have to answer three questions to satisfy “why” something is important: First, what process was used to make the decision? Second, what facts or data were used to support the decision? Third, what trade-offs were considered? The more your team knows this “story,” the faster teams move to execution.

I’m convinced that most people don’t wake up in the morning trying to second-guess decisions. Ambiguity is your enemy as the leader of a team. You can transform your team’s natural curiosity into a powerful source of discretionary effort – all it takes is a little clarity.

P.S. There is one final thing you can do as a leader to increase clarity on your team – tell your team how you make decisions. We all naturally make decisions differently. By sharing our authentic style of communicating and making decisions, you can diffuse a lot of unnecessary friction and built trust faster.

I was lucky enough to meet GE CEO Jeff Immelt at a Cisco event some years ago and interview him on the topic of leadership.  My biggest takeaway from listening to him:  leadership is about how you “show up.”  In other words, it’s how we act and behave in everyday situations that define our leadership persona.  I’m pretty sure he meant it literally, as in how we “show up” in the physical world.

But how do we “show up” as leaders in a world where work is increasingly done on a mobile phone or tablet, or using a video chat, web conference or Telepresence?  This is one of the great leadership challenges of this hyper-connected world: as a leader you will need to know what I like to call your “Collaboration Persona” – that way in which your leadership style shows up when you’re not in the physical world.

How should you approach building your Collaboration Persona?  Here are three steps:

1)      Know yourself:  Whether it is in the physical world or virtual, how we show up should authentically represent who we are.  Click here to take a quick online assessment to discover your authentic communication style (Click on the green “Take Survey” button). This confidential assessment is a bit like the Myers-Briggs test and provides you with a customized profile of your unique communication style; it reveals how you naturally process information, and how you prefer to deliver that information to others. Most importantly, the assessment provides a simple vocabulary to communicate your style to others. Are you conceptual or analytical?  An introvert or an extrovert?

My co-author Carl and I cover this extensively in Chapter 3 of The Collaboration Imperative, entitled “Get Real about Communications.”

2)      Know where you excel as a “Virtual Star”: Just as you play to your strengths in the real world, play to your strengths in the virtual world.  Here are some examples:

• If you are a conceptual thinker, you will excel when the team needs someone to explain the aspirations of a decision, such as a vision. These thinkers will be good on video presentations during virtual meetings. It’s not that conceptual people aren’t good in online discussion forums where the medium calls for more precise language; it’s more about playing to the strength of conceptual thinkers – they love talking about ideas and tapping into that passion on video is a great way to play to one’s strengths.

• If you are an analytical thinker, you will excel at “making it real” when communicating a decision to your team.  These thinkers are outstanding in virtual mediums where precision communicates best – such as online question and answer sessions and discussion forums.  Again, it’s not that analytical thinkers aren’t outstanding on video, where the communication is sometimes more free-flow; it’s that online Q&A and discussions forums play to the strong logical nature of analytical thinkers – they love communicating the steps taken, the process used, and the supporting facts of a decision.

3)      Get out there and practice on your medium:  When you align your communication style to these new forms of communication, you’ll find it easy to participate in the increasingly virtual, mobile, social and visual work environment that your teams leverage to get better, more productive results every day. You can’t underestimate how your team will appreciate your unique efforts at participation in the world they live in.

Follow me on Twitter: @RonRicciCisco

• Operational ROI allows you to assess how collaboration eliminates or avoid costs associated with running your business. You might cut travel, reduce infrastructure needs, lower bandwidth or energy costs, save on office space and so on. Collaboration can replace or reduce the need for many of these costs.
• Productivity ROI refers to savings generated from more efficient processes, accelerated decision-making and reduced cycle times. Collaboration can lead to significant productivity gains in a number of ways, such as optimizing lines of business or matching expertise to opportunities early on.
• Strategic ROI can be the hardest to measure, but perhaps the most transformative. This kind of ROI occurs when collaboration enables your business to take a giant leap forward in areas like enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, speeding up innovation, introducing new business models or entering new markets. These types of changes can also reshape an industry in fundamental ways.

These three types of ROI sometime manifest themselves differently across industries. Here are a few examples:

• Financial services. With collaboration, banking customers today can use a virtual mortgage lender, make a deposit on their smart phone, and speak to video service representatives who have access to their banking history and can suggest new products based on your personal needs and history. Collaboration streamlines banking operations, offers customers a multichannel experience and provides on-demand expertise.
• Health care. In health care, telemedicine brings experts together with patients to enhance the diagnosis and treatment processes. Nurses and doctors are mobile and have fast access to the information they need. Collaboration can help decrease patient wait times, increase clinical safety and provide better visibility into staffing requirements. All of these improvements, made possible by collaboration solutions, lower the cost of providing care.
• Manufacturing. Manufacturing companies leverage collaboration to develop products in one country, manufacture them in another and market them in yet another—without skipping a beat. Everyone has complete visibility into the process, and the work never stops. It’s a transparent, seamless supply chain.
• Retail. In retail, collaboration changes the way goods are made and sold. Virtual fitting rooms take time and space out of the equation, as designers review designs and choose fabrics without traveling to Europe and Asia. A process that once took a month can be done in a matter of hours. Meanwhile, at the other end of the retail cycle, new contact center capabilities offer real-time sensing of Twitter feeds from within a store, so retailers can send highly targeted offers to the mobile devices of consumers inside the store. For consumers, the result is a personalized shopping experience from start to finish.
• Government. Federal and local governments use collaboration to enhance public safety, drive efficiency in times of budget constraint and improve the citizen experience with 24-hour access to many services. Police are using mobility and presence solutions to improve public safety. Courts are using virtual trials that include video conferencing technology to save on transportation costs and accelerate the trial process. And prisons are taking advantage of telepresence to bring human services to inmates on premise.

Sit down with cross-functional leaders and challenge yourselves to think about how Operational ROI, Productivity ROI and Strategic ROI might look in your industry and in your organization.

WOULD YOU LIKE A FREE COPY OF THE COLLABORATION IMPERATIVE? The first 25 people to email us a book request to info@thecollaborationimperative.com will receive a complimentary copy. Be sure to include your mailing address!