Why Managers Don't Collaborate

This book offers an innovative, controversial approach to dispel the baseless myths that are preventing managers from moving forward and reaping the benefits of collaboration. Compared to most publications on the market, this book is packed with the rich results of 20 years of research. It is based on over 200 studies in a wide variety of public, private, and international settings and over 4,000 quotations gathered from interviews with managers. Many have been selected to illustrate the case studies and key points in the book. Collaboration has been presented as a serious business strategy for at least 50 years. Scads of books, papers, and conferences by consultants, academics, institutes, associations, and governments have trumpeted its benefits, and many online discussion channels are extolling the same messages. This book takes on all this gung-ho hype that has, in most alliance cases, patently failed to deliver the full potential returns, such as improved revenues, reduced costs, greater market share, access to specialized know-how, and increased resilience in difficult economic conditions.

The authors have looked at over 200 organizations in many industries and public sectors across the world, and in most cases, they have claimed they are collaborating, but it is not happening. This is the first Big Myth. The second Big Myth is that managers ignore it because they don't have the foresight to realize how collaboration will benefit their operations, and so they find excuses why they don't need to do anything. Many believe that closer working with partners is more trouble than it's worth, it's a black art "where we don't know what to do, we don't know that we don't know what to do, it's someone else's job or we haven't the time, money or inclination to do it". These attitudes are prevalent despite the high value (both bottom-line and strategic) that is usually tied up in the often long-standing formal and informal agreements between organizations. They also ignore the adverse impact on staff workloads, motivation, development, and morale, and seriously undermine their enormous potential contribution to alliance success.

The purpose of this book is to dispel these myths because our research has clearly shown that they are baseless and are stopping managers and organizations from moving forward and gaining the benefits of collaboration that are there for the taking. This is groundbreaking and contentious because, for the first time, the universal misuse and obfuscation of the collaboration concept is being confronted. After many years, collaboration has become a cozy buzzword that is thrown around randomly and not taken seriously.