Reimagining Collaboration

Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and the Post-COVID World of Work

Phil Simon

• Publisher: Motion Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780982930274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Winner: International Book Award, Business: Communications/Public Relations

Microsoft Teams. Slack. Zoom. Google Workspace.

Every day, hundreds of millions of people use these über-popular collaboration tools, but only in decidedly limited ways: as email and Skype replacements. Because these folks are merely scratching the surface of what these robust collaboration hubs can do, they fail to realize their massive benefits.

Blame ignorance, not malice. With rare exception, organizations, executives, and rank-and-file employees have historically worked in piecemeal fashions. They have lacked a holistic framework to fully understand the remarkable power of these applications, much less unleash them.

At least until now.

Reimagining Collaboration -the eleventh book from award-winning author and world-renowned collaboration expert Phil Simon-provides this essential gestalt. Simon introduces a bold new model of work. Ideal for HR professionals, knowledge workers, executives, remote workers, and small business owners, this timely, ambitious, and provocative book offers concrete tips for companies and groups on how to transform the way they work by embracing hubs and spokes.

Part

The Collaboration Imperative

Chapter

1

The Evolution of Collaboration

“The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”

—WILLIAM GIBSON

Long before we stood upright, collaboration was essential to our species’ survival. Since the dawn of our existence, we have worked together in some capacity.

How do I know?

Simple. Because I wouldn’t be here without collaboration. Neither would you or anyone else for that matter. But don’t take my word for it.

Cavemen and Collaboration

Archaeologists know that, two million years ago, members of Homo erectus needed to work together in order to survive. Put differently, collaboration wasn’t optional. Hunter-gatherers’ challenges included foraging for food and water, finding shelter, keeping warm, and staving off wild animals. Hunters gotta hunt, right?

Around 10,000 years ago, our ancestors developed a new and better means of providing subsistence: farming. At a high level, the Agricultural Revolution required Homo sapiens to work together. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in his bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:

Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water, and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun.

Of course, today relatively few of us call ourselves farmers. As of this writing, they represent a mere 1.3 percent of the U.S. workforce.¹ No matter. As Harari describes, collaboration wasn’t easy millions of years ago, but we did it because it was essential. Notably, we also worked together in person because, again, what other option was there? Cavemen didn’t whip out their smartphones, fire up Google Docs, or text each other.

Early Office-Based Collaboration

Fast-forward 10 millennia or so to about 1950. People were much more likely to work in offices than in the fields. Picture Mad Men. Like agrarians, though, most professionals worked in close physical proximity to their colleagues.

During this quaint era, people could certainly exchange information and ideas. That is, they could collaborate synchronously. Doing so, however, meant that they needed to meet in an office, board trains or planes, or pick up the phone.

As for asynchronous work, typewriters and intra- and inter-office memos ruled the day. Friction abounded. Executives typically employed secretaries to make appointments, coordinate schedules, and handle other administrative work. Mainframe computers existed, but they were enormously expensive, rare, bulky, and limited by 1990s standards, let alone those of today.

New Technologies and Tools Change the Game

This model of decidedly low-tech collaboration began to shift around 1995. Although early incarnations of the Internet had existed since the mid-1960s, it was largely the purview of academics and government types.

A few things happened that brought the Internet and high-speed communications to the consumer and business worlds. Most notably Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina launched Mosaic, the insanely popular and user-friendly web browser, in February of 1993.

To be sure, the Internet and the Web changed many things.^a Photo-development services, travel agents, fax machines, most bank tellers, executive secretaries, and Blockbuster Videos largely went the way of the Dodo. Within a relatively short period of time, laptops, e-commerce sites, sophisticated productivity software, nascent videoconferencing tools, search engines, social networks, blogs, smartphones, tablets, email, websites, and file-sharing services arrived.

For the purposes of this book, these powerful new tools meant that synchronous workplace collaboration no longer needed to occur in person. For its part, asynchronous collaboration became quicker and easier. In a word, collaboration was becoming more virtual.

The Turn of the Century Births Purely Distributed Companies

Plenty of companies and individuals resisted these fundamental changes in how they worked—by themselves and with others. No shocker here.

For example, in 1998, I worked at Merck & Co., one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. I vividly remember Jonas (a pseudonym), a less-than-tech-savvy vice president of human resources. He effectively used his laptop as a paperweight. Jonas told his secretary to print out his emails. He handwrote his responses for her to type.

Back then, such behavior was not exactly the paragon of efficiency. Still, it was understandable and not uncommon.

At the other end of the technology-adoption spectrum, some prescient individuals immediately recognized the vast possibilities that these new tools presented. As a result, they went all-in on tech. These distributed companies built collaboration and tech-savviness into their DNA from day one. Here are two of them.

Basecamp

In 1999, Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim started 37signals—a web-design firm. Over the years, the company has released a number of different software applications. In February of 2014, it shifted its focus to its project-management tool, Basecamp, and rebranded under that name.

Today, Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (aka, DHH) run the company. DHH currently lives in Benahavís, Spain, while Fried calls Chicago, Illinois, his home. Its other fifty-some employees live wherever they want and rely extensively on collaboration tools.

DHH and Fried have codified their philosophy into a number of bestselling manifestos, most notably Rework and Remote: Office Not Required. In short, they find the notion that all work needs to take place in the same physical space at the same time absurd.

Automattic

You may not have heard of Matt Mullenweg, but you’ve doubtless used his company’s software. Automattic maintains WordPress—the open-source content-management system that runs a full 39 percent of the world’s websites, more than 60 million in total.² WordPress provides the plumbing behind The New York Times, BBC America, the Rolling Stones, and oodles more household names. On a personal level, I’ve been using WordPress for a decade. It’s awesome.

If you think that Automattic is no five-person startup, trust your instincts. As of May 2020, it employed 1,184 people. One thing, however, hasn’t changed: Since its founding in August 2005, Mullenweg has proselytized remote work. Automattic has operated as a purely distributed company from day one.

So, employees never meet each other, right?

Nope.

Each year, everyone descends upon an exotic locale for the company’s annual gala. My friend Scott Berkun spent a year working at Automattic on a participative-journalism project. As he writes in his 2013 book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work:

The rest of the year we work online from wherever in the world each of us happened to be.^b

By definition, Automattic employees must colla...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Also by Phil Simon
• Praise for Reimagining Collaboration
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• Part I: The Collaboration Imperative
• Part II: Better Collaboration Through Technology
• Part III: Moving From Theory to Practice
• Part IV: What Now?
• Conclusion and Parting Words
• Thank-You
• Suggested Reading
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Endnotes
• Back Covert