Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

"The Collaborative Enterprise is a thoughtful, thorough approach to an opportunity that has long eluded many corporations. The authors use their considerable experience to create practical tools for managers at both corporate centers and business units, showing how the whole can truly become more valuable than the sum of the parts."
-Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School

In today's diversified companies, or those resulting from the boom in mergers, acquisitions, and alliances, synergy is touted as a great strategic advantage. But more often than not, it turns out to be a mirage, as managers haggle over turf and senior management lacks the skills or commitment to recognize, support, and sustain collaboration. In The Collaborative Enterprise, Andrew Campbell and Michael Goold offer an incisive and highly practical approach to overcoming barriers to synergy, evaluating opportunities within and outside the company, establishing appropriate roles for corporate headquarters and business units, and fostering a commitment to collaboration at all levels of the organization.

Average Customer Rating:

Worth Mulling Over

Customer Rating:

This is not a book that calls for underlining and highlighting, but it definitely has value as a basis for reflecting on various aspects of collaboration, and the failure of collaboration, within enterprises. The book is written strictly from the perspective of people and perceptions. It does not have a technical or a financial side and this was disappointing. It would have been more useful to have a book that fully integrated human, technical, and financial success stories and failure stories to present an integrated picture of collaborative work principles in a global economy using the Internet as the backbone for collaborative work. The book is well-written, the figures are useful, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to sit quietly on an airplane and think about the authors' subtitle: why links between business units often fail, and how to make them work.