When Internal Collaboration is Bad for your Company

Collaboration can be a powerful tool in today's crisis. By leveraging resources across a company, managers can cut costs, cross-sell, and cross-pollinate to launch more new products. Collaboration enables managers to practice lean management--to do more with less. Yet, collaboration can just as easily undermine performance as it can increase it. Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration. People spend time haggling over resources and fighting over objectives, wasting time and resources. To get collaboration right, managers need a rule for when to launch collaboration projects and when not to. This article outlines such a tool, called the Collaboration Premium. It's a simple way of figuring out when collaboration makes sense, and equally important, when it may be just a waste of resources.