Don Sull's blog

Much has been written about enhancing co-ordination across organisational silos, a topic that sits near the top of most executives’ to-do list. A search of business and investing books on amazon.com for the keyword “collaboration” turns up nearly 37,000 books. Do we really need another one?

Yes – if it is the right book. Morten Hansen, a professor at Insead and Berkeley has not written “a” book about collaboration, he has written “the” book on the topic. I have been a big fan of Hansen’s work for years, particularly his thorough work unpicking the intricacies of co-ordination within organisations. (In the interest of full disclosure we have also been co-authors on previous research completely unrelated to this book). Hansen’s new book, Collaboration (Boston: Harvard Business School Press) makes a bold promise – to provide the definitive treatment of the topic. It delivers on that promise.

Hansen starts with fundamentals. Companies exist to create economic value (as well as to capture and sustain value into the future). In most business books, collaboration is unmoored from rigorous analysis of economic value creation. Instead it is treated as an inherent good.

Hansen, in contrast, anchors his analysis in a hard-nosed economic analysis of when collaboration creates value, that includes not only a project’s benefits, but also the costs of collaboration and the opportunity cost of foregoing alternatives. The author’s analysis leads to counter-intuitive findings – not all collaboration is good and more is not better. His analysis slices through the fluff of so many books on collaboration and brings readers to the hard edges of value creation.

The book follows a clear structure. After framing collaboration in terms of its benefits, Hansen provides a systematic list of obstacles that inhibit cooperation in many companies. His list is the closest to a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive taxonomy of barriers that I have seen. Hansen also includes a diagnostic to help managers assess the specific barriers to cooperation that they face. The book then provides extremely practical steps to enhance coordination within an organisation. It closes with reflections on the leadership traits required to foster collaboration. The writing is clear, and the examples – a mix of familiar and novel – illustrate Hansen’s points to a tee.

Many business books fall short in the solutions they offer, veering at one extreme into a long laundry list of superficial or obvious actions or at the other into a “one size fits all” solution ill-suited to the complexity of real world organisations. Hansen strikes just the right balance. He introduces three actions, that are not obvious and eminently practical. Among his many useful suggestions, I found T-shaped management and the simple rules for nimble networks to be particularly powerful. Hansen clearly spends a great deal of time with managers in the trenches, and his deep knowledge of the real world shines through in the recommendations.

This book is “academic” in the best sense of the word. Hansen does not conjure up his conclusions based on superficial observation or war stories. Rather, he draws on a rich body of scholarly research on collaboration that stretches back over decades. This firm grounding in research gives the book a solidity and credibility that many business books lack. Although the author is too humble to trumpet his own achievements, much of the best research is his own. The book achieves both academic rigour and practical relevance.