Executive Thought Leadership

The Promise of Collaboration

By working together toward common goals, we have the power to overcome great challenges and take advantage of unprecedented opportunity.

By John Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco

We encourage our young people to be strong individual leaders, which is clearly important. But what if, with equal enthusiasm, we encouraged them to be collaborators?

Societies and economies are rapidly changing; the power of us has become far more important than the power of you. If technology has the ability to help an individual doctor treat cancer more effectively, imagine the impact thousands of doctors working together globally could make on curing it. I believe the second wave of the Internet will be focused on empowering collaboration—groups of individuals working together toward a common goal. The countries, organizations, and individuals that grasp the power of collaboration will, in turn, emerge as tomorrow’s leaders.

The Next Wave of the Internet

Our ability to harness technical and human networks to help us collaborate—across geographical regions, cultures, and job roles—will unleash this next wave of productivity, and I believe it will rival what we experienced in the first phase of the Internet.

This new phase of Internet productivity is often referred to as “Web 2.0,” simply meaning a set of technologies that enable collaboration. It is no longer about one-to-one interactions, but rather about many-to-many. This phase was first developed and embraced by consumers, as they harnessed the Internet for things like social networking, blogging, and building Wikipedia. This wave of collaborative technologies and behaviors are just now moving into business and government, beginning to transform not only our social interactions but also our business and political ones.

Here is just one example in the medical community. A Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Dr. Alfred Gilman, is leading a radical effort to build a “virtual cell” that would allow drug tests and experiments to be conducted online—virtually—from anywhere in the world. Instead of working within a small, closed group of researchers, he’s embraced “open source” medical research, opening up his work to hundreds of colleagues from around the world. Dr. Gilman’s work has the potential to shorten the pre-clinical trial review process from years to months to even days with the goal of bringing new life-saving drugs to market much faster than before. This is the power of collaboration—the power of us.

The network, coupled with widespread broadband Internet access, has created a platform that eliminates time and distance as obstacles to working together toward common goals. This ability to collaborate on a global scale has the power to transform companies. For example, while Cisco’s Scientific-Atlanta acquisition took Cisco nearly 48 days to complete two years ago, our recent WebEx acquisition took only 8 days, due to collaborative technologies. These technologies enabled a virtual acquisition team to share information and work collaboratively in realtime, across geographies and time zones. That kind of power will transform the pace, the structure and the very nature of business processes and business models.

Changing Human Behaviors

This shift will require much more than technology changes. More than in the first phase of the Internet, this more collaborative phase will require significant changes in human behavior. Business and government leaders will need to lead from a “collaboration and teamwork” mentality, as opposed to the traditional “command and control” perspective. And as we adopt this collaboration mentality in our personal lives, we are beginning to carry similar expectations into our work lives, fueling demand for collaborative technologies and behaviors at work.

Encouraging this collaborative behavior will require that we teach students and employees how to work well together and to make good collective decisions—and then reward them for collaborative as well as individual accomplishments. This is a critical test, in particular, for our education system. Many, at this point, don’t grasp how important this is. Only 31% of respondents believed group skills should be more greatly emphasized in classrooms, according to a recent poll by Zogby International/Cisco. I think we will see that percentage rise as more collaborative tools drive new social and business behaviors.

We are at one of the great inflection points of our time. Our opportunity is to build a connected, global, human network capable of working collectively to address the significant social, economic and political issues of our time. As leaders, it is our responsibility to lead by collaborative example, encourage and reward these behaviors, and welcome the innovations that will enable a world that is more connected than ever before. We are not limited by technology, but only by our own imaginations and willingness to adapt and embrace this exciting new era.