SMART COLLABORATION

With her book Smart Collaboration, Heidi Gardner has written a book aimed squarely at a niche audience: professionals who work in knowledge-based consultancies such as finance, medicine, or even the legal profession.

The book poses a straightforward question: why should consultants make an effort to cross silos and work with their peers on accounts that aren't theirs? The answer: because it's good for business, and good for one's professional growth.

It might seem obvious from the outside looking in, but it's not so in practice. To start, most work of this nature is account-based where partners or principals with domain expertise in a field of specialization are geared towards focusing almost exclusively on accounts they develop. So there is a huge disincentive, both in terms of time and money, to "help out" or invite others to do so. More, even where collaboration is desired, doing so across broad technical fields also requires significant efforts of coordination, something that not everyone is adept at performing.

Nonetheless, it makes good business sense. From a market standpoint, clients always like one-stop-shop solutions, and therefore are likely to do more business with, say, financial analysts who are not only specialists in a particular industry but who can also bring in other legal and technical experts to consult as the need arises in the process either unlocking more value for a given transaction or generating significant savings that justify the added expense. More importantly, Gardner argues in Smart Collaboration that there is an abundance of empirical evidence to bear out that it is in the interest of consultants and the firms they work for to collaborate, whether in terms of their reputation or the development of a network that may be of help in the future, or in terms of the revenue that can be brought in, or very simply in terms of the rates that firms and consultants inclined to collaborate can charge.

Thus, having argued the case that knowledge-based consultancies should do more to encourage collaboration Smart Collaboration is really a book about the psychology of managing cross-silo collaboration. Even if the figures Gardner presents make a compelling case of it, in practice encouraging such collaboration becomes a matter of ego management (as it is with all talented teams). A brief case study about the Dana Farber Cancer Institute makes this point exceedingly well and is certainly one of the book's highlights.

That said, Smart Collaboration makes a strong case when Gardner draws from her accumulated wisdom, having herself worked among the world's elite management consultants (in her case, with McKinsey & Co.). In contrast, the book's final chapter about seeing collaboration from the client's perspective falls relatively flat. It's not just that Gardner has seldom "been the client" herself; after spending the length of the book making the point that collaboration can be lucrative for consultants, it comes across as a little tone deaf to switch gears and suddenly take on the cudgels for the client. Instead, a testimonial would have been more appropriate and effective.

There's some inevitable tedium to Smart Collaboration, owing largely to the fact that Gardner argues a very simple point that she must therefore belabor repeatedly across several chapters. Yet it's an important point in service of finding solutions to client's problems. "For many clients," Gardner writes, "innovation doesn't necessarily mean a cutting-edge, never before seen solution. Instead, they expect their professional advisers to innovate by taking the standard technical approach and meticulously tailoring it to the very specific needs of the client's business."

At the end of the day, smart collaboration is all about specialists working together to solve complex problems. This is something that consultants of all stripes would always do well to keep in mind.

Reading this book taught me about a lot of business terms and strategies one can implement as either a business owner or a partner/associate in a professional service firm.

One particular term I had never heard of was VUCA - Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

Heidi provides in depth research to prove that collaborating smartly greatly increases profits and outputs when existing solutions are adapted to the specific situation of clients.

She also provides examples of where collaboration will simply not work and how to weed out individuals who do not have the requisite collaborative capabilities.

Recommendation: It is a research heavy book that one needs to read again but the principles are clearly stated with action points. I particularly enjoyed how she provided strategies for attracting and retaining millennials.

I am really sorry since I was not sble to downloa the title. Things are getting overwhelming these days since it is the start of the year.