Collaborate or Perish!

October 17, 2011
In today’s competitive, global marketplace, the ability to collaborate with colleagues, business partners, other companies, and even other governments is more critical than ever. Former LAPD and NYC police commissioner Bratton and Harvard professor Tumin have joined forces to create this playbook on how to reach across boundaries to share information and get results. Using stories from their own experiences, the authors illustrate how radical collaboration can create new opportunities and enable companies, government agencies, and the military to compete. Among the diverse success stories highlighted are IBM, VISA, President Obama’s campaign, and the Massachusetts Division of Social Services. Additionally, Bratton draws heavily on his law enforcement experience to show examples of “in the trenches” collaboration, including the NYPD’s use of Compstat, a digital collaboration mapping New York’s neighborhoods. These real-life stories bring the concept of collaboration to life and underscore the importance of breaking down barriers in order to survive in an increasingly competitive world.

November 15, 2011
A guide to previously unattainable levels of collaboration and control in a networked global environment. It would be hard to argue that collaboration was ever an entirely alien concept in government, business or private spheres. What former Boston, New York City and Los Angeles police chief Bratton (The Turnaround, 1998) and co-author Tumin assert is that technologically up-to-the-moment collaboration is now virtually a matter of survival. Either learn to create shared-goal cyber platforms linking all the players or, as they exclaim in their title, perish! With Bratton drawing on his front-line policing experiences, the authors present a series of highly informative, wide-ranging and frequently unsettling examples showing the rapidly expanding impact of collaboration-enhancing technology. They also suggest techniques for effective collaboration, ranging from right-sizing problems to coercing participation, if it comes to that. Their purpose, they write, is to share the wisdom they have gathered over their 40-year careers from government leaders, top executives, managers, researchers and others. "It is a book that will help you collaborate better," they write, "and get on with the business of transforming the world as it is into the world that should be"--though they never get around to explaining the exact nature of that world. That it might be repressive, given the immense new powers of top-down control that come with collaboration as the book defines it, never arises as a topic. Mostly enlightening reading for understanding what the world is becoming.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 1, 2011

In this book about problem solving through collaboration, Bratton, former police chief of New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles, along with Tumin (John F. Kennedy Sch. of Government, Harvard), provides many successful examples of his philosophy in action taken from personal experience, international politics (e.g., the rescue of FARC-held hostages in Colombia), U.S. policy, industry, education, and health care. Inserted among these accounts are nuggets of commonsense information on, e.g., how to encourage and facilitate collaboration and ways to achieve buy-in from parties with divergent interests. These include ideas on "right-sizing," or simplifying, problems; assembling teams; getting out of one's "silo" (broadening one's perspective); and building trust. There are lots of good ideas here, but--other than what can be gleaned from the anecdotes that make up the majority of the text--no real suggestions on how to implement them. VERDICT An engaging book filled with real-world examples of successful (and some failed) collaborations around the world but offering little new data or insight. Optional; purchase where there's interest.--Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH

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