Patricia Milton's blog

Over on the excellent RethinkHr.org blog [7], Benjamin McCall writes a thoughtful post on meetings (with a bonus dollop of hilarity at the end). 

In "Meetings Can Be Unbearable," Benjamin laments purposeless meetings as time-wasting and dull. No argument here! His examples include meetings with no agenda (disastrous, generally) and meetings to which you’re invited for no apparent reason.

Is business an art? Perhaps not, but certainly business can learn from the arts. In my estimation, one of the biggest lessons business can take away is the value of collaboration.

Andrew Carnegie was on to something when he said, "No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself."

All managers, at times, feel stressed and overloaded. If you work on your own, there’s a limited amount that you can do, however hard you try. After all, there are only so many hours in the day, and only one “you.” If you’re a new manager, you may even be used to working by yourself.

Collaboration is critical to business success. Not surprisingly, it's critical to success in the arts, too — perhaps especially to performing arts like theatre.

My writing collaborator, Andrew Black, and I appeared this month in a feature interview in The Dramatist, the monthly membership magazine of The Dramatists Guild. We were interviewed, of course, on collaboration. I say "of course" because that is the single most-asked question of Andrew and me — "You write plays together? How on earth do you manage that?"

I was intrigued by the recent New York Times article "An Internal Wiki That’s Not Classified [22]." It seems the State Department --- not exactly famous for its openness and lack of bureaucracy --- has adopted the free-wheeling collaborative tool to keep abreast of everything from meeting agendas and biographies to how best to get lunch delivered.

It’s no secret there has been a major shift in Human Resources in the last decade. HR leaders are grappling with deep cultural, functional, and operational changes – commonly referred to as "HR transformation." As transactional HR operations are made more efficient through process streamlining, technology, and outsourcing, HR is linking itself to corporate strategy, and discovering new ways to create business value.

Brandon Hall Research recently announced a research report that confirms this BFO (blinding flash of the obvious): Blended learning is more effective than either e-learning or face-to-face learning alone. Besides citing its own research conducted with 150 different organizations, Brandon Hall examines a variety of other studies, from Net-G’s 2002 research, to a Pew study, to research by the University of South Australia.

I recently read a remarkable story in Businessweek [32] about innovation in the mining industry that speaks to the power of collaboration. The struggling mining company GoldCorp used mass collaboration to catapult itself from $100 million to $9 billion, while "transforming a backwards mining site in Northern Ontario into one of the most innovative and profitable properties in the industry."