From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Read this: 'Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results'
Learning from Sony’s mistake
At the onset of this decade, Sony was much better placed to launch portable music players and an online music store than Apple was, yet Apple went on to dominate that market. Morten T. Hansen, a Boston Consulting Group consultant and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, uses the competition between the Apple iPod and the Sony Connect as a starting point for this enlightening examination of the importance of companywide collaboration. Hansen says the iPod resulted from the disciplined collaboration of units within Apple. Sony’s highly competitive divisions proved incapable of such collaboration, and its Connect was ultimately scuttled in 2007. Hansen concedes that the battle between Apple and Sony hinged on more than just collaboration, but he insists that the outcome would have been more uncertain had Sony’s collaboration been better. Hansen offers a minicourse in the dos and don’ts of getting collaboration right and wrong, when to do it and when not to, and how to develop the T-shaped, flexible management needed for effective collaboration.