For Collaboration to Take Flight: Cultural Intelligence

In a global economy, high flying collaboration is very dependent on cultural intelligence.

There have been a lot of additions to the ‘intelligence family’ over recent years with emotional intelligence (EQ) being the most famous. Cultural intelligence (CQ) has evolved out of previous approaches to cultural competence, e.g., the Do’s and Taboo’s school and the underlying value orientations of national cultures school. Neither approach really enabled people to understand how culture works nor how to adapt across a range of different cultural contexts.

Professor Martha Maznevski at the IMD business school describes CQ as “emotional intelligence across contexts.” Unlike emotional intelligence which deals with forming and maintaining positive relationships with different individuals, CQ is about forming and maintaining positive relationships with different social groups. EQ can be said to be an essential prerequisite for CQ.

As a simple working definition of CQ, let me give you the following: CQ is the ability to form and maintain productive relationships across cultures by making appropriate adaptions to difference.

CQ isn’t just for business travelers. In today’s workplace, most people work and collaborate across cultures without travelling anywhere. New communications technologies enable us to interact with colleagues worldwide, and even those who only work domestically will need to form productive relationships across cultures.

What are the key elements of CQ?

Mindset: A way of looking at the world that is (1) respectful of different values, beliefs and behaviors, and (2) is open to seeing, thinking, and doing things differently. 

Knowledge: Of cultural orientations, in general, e.g., differences in task-relationship focus or individual-group orientation, along with an understanding of how these differences influence assumptions, interpretations and behaviors.

Adaptive Skills: An ability to analyze a cross-cultural interaction, decide on how to adapt, apply the chosen adaptation(s), process what happens, and tune the adaptation(s) as needed.

I’ll outline what I call The ADAPT Cycle in a future post.

Collaboration: The Six Cs Revisited

The Six Cs developed out of my experiences with a number of French-Japanese virtual teams.  There was a lot of dysfunction on the teams, and the client was making the mistake of thinking that all the dysfunctions were caused by cultural differences. Some of them were, but many were not.  Mostly they were caused by a lack of what I came to call a ‘shared collaborative architecture’ – a scaffolding of performance indicators to help start, develop, and run a team.

Once the core indicators were identified, it became relatively simple for the teams to use them for creating shared operating agreements and behaviors.  The performance indicators came to be known as the Six Cs. As well as best practices, I also identified a critical mindset needed for each C (post-book).

The Six Cs and critical mindsets are:   

The Six Cs	Definitions	Mindsets
Cooperation	Developing supportive relationships across geographies, time zones and cultures	We help each other
Convergence	Maintaining a clear purpose, direction, and shared set of priorities across distances	We pull in the same direction
Coordination	Sharing processes, routines, tools, standards, and structure	We work together
Capability	Leveraging the knowledge, skills, and experiences on the team	We share what we have
Communication	Creating shared understandings across the team	We pay attention to one another
Cultural Intelligence	Developing an inclusive virtual workplace	We play well together

Too many teams – either co-located or virtual – lack a shared set of performance indicators for their teamwork.  Performance indicators are often created for desired team outputs, but not for the quality of the teamwork itself – which, of course, is critical to achieving the outputs.

It is the responsibility of the team leader to create the conditions needed for high performance in each of the Six Cs

It is the responsibility of team member to ensure that their participation contributes to high performance in each of the Six Cs.

Enterprise-Wide Learning, Collaboration, and the Power of Alignment

Globalization used to be a race to create company footprints around the world. Today, those early globalizers are seeking greater integration and alignment – organizing and enabling distributed resources, like talent, to fast-track along a common strategic direction. From the title of this posting, you might think that I’m going talk about enterprise-wide learning management systems, but that’s not the case. Learning management systems are excellent vehicles for delivering consistent enterprise-wide learning, but I want to talk here about something much more fundamental.

Building consistency and alignment

Let me begin by distinguishing between consistency and alignment. Think about geese swimming on a pond. Their individual behaviors are consistent with being geese (we see the same behaviors repeated by geese everywhere), but they are unaligned behaviors. Now think about the same geese in the air, flying in their ‘V’ formation; their individual behaviors are still consistent with being geese, but those individual behaviors are now collectively aligned to achieving a shared purpose – migration to a common destination. Consistency is related to repetition; alignment adds the power of unity and direction.

Looking at training program portfolios offered in many companies, you will find that individual programs promote a consistent approach (e.g., process) to executing a particular skill, like collaborating. When many managers in the company learn and repeat the same process, the company will have established a consistent approach to applying the skill in the manager population. Alignment takes consistency to another level – it connects a skill like collaborating to shared purpose, direction, and strategy. What I’m saying, therefore, is that while many training program portfolios help develop consistency in skills and knowledge they fail to develop the power of alignment.

Taking a holistic view of your training program portfolio

One of the critical skills needed in today’s highly complex business environment is systemic thinking – the ability to understand not just the parts, but also the linkages and relationships between the parts – the ability to connect the dots. Associated with systemic thinking are abilities to synthesize, identify patterns, and understand interactions within the whole system.

The traditional response to a skill development need is to create a program on Systemic Thinking - which is a great first step - but such a program would most likely be, and remain, an autonomous ‘product’ within a training program portfolio. If such a skill is critical to business success, we need to be asking where else in the portfolio could this skill be explored, linked to, and reinforced. We pay a great deal of attention to individual program development in specific areas of knowledge and know-how, but very little to connective knowledge and know-how between programs.

One of the ways toward greater alignment of people resources would be a comprehensive training portfolio review. Look at your portfolio of programs as a whole, and not just the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

How?

First, start by placing every program in the context of your collective vision, mission, values and business strategy. Is the program helping generate alignment power as well as consistency? Does each program make connections to the greater why, as well as the specific what and how?

Second, look at the portfolio as a whole and look for existing connections and contradictions between programs. Yes, I’ve seen individual programs that seem to work against other programs in the portfolio; eliminate the contradictions. Then examine the existing connections between programs, e.g., reinforcement of vision, mission, values, skills, models, tools, strategies, concepts, key messages, and terminology, and ask:

• Do any of these inter-program connections need to be strengthened to deepen alignment?
• Are some connective knowledge threads missing between programs that could strengthen collective alignment?
• Can we add this connective knowledge and know-how without creating too much redundancy in the portfolio?

Factoring in company values and connective language

Reinforcement of company values in a portfolio is particularly important for creating alignment and integration, and so is the issue of creating shared terminology or connective language. So much energy and time is wasted in individuals using the same language across a business, but meaning different things.

Will an enterprise-wide learning management system guarantee people alignment in the business? Not necessarily. Greater consistency should result, but greater alignment power will depend not just on the quality of individual programs, but the vertical connections to business strategy, etc., and the integrative connections across the portfolio.

The bottom line
And so, bottom line, we need to help people see connections, make linkages, and arrive at shared understandings. New social media being introduced into organizations will help people gain connective knowledge in their individual networks, but we must complement this informal connecting of the dots with a more rigorous and systematic approach to alignment in our training portfolios.

Managing Remote Workers

I was talking with a friend the other day who works full time from her home. She’s employed by a major US bank investigating possible account fraud. I know she enjoys her work, and gets a thrill from the chase and capture! While enjoying what she does – and eliminating the hours and costs spent commuting every week – I could tell she wasn’t thrilled by the remote working arrangement.

What were some of the issues?

·         Isolation – very rare contact from her manager

·         Increased misunderstandings – when the manager is heard from, the communications tend to be vague, imprecise

·         Working longer hours – what was commuting time is now considered to be part of the normal working day, or that the boundaries between work and home disappear altogether

·         No feedback – no expressions of thanks or “Let’s see if we can work together and streamline that process.”

·         Perceived unfairness – those in HQ doing very similar work are on higher pay grades

·         Out of the loop regarding opportunities – “No, I didn’t hear about that new position!”

Simply put, my neighbor’s major problem was that she was caught in the ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’ trap – a not uncommon feeling for remote workers.

The problem is not with remote working per se, but with the management of remote working. If anything is going to reveal deficiencies in management skills, it is management of remote workers.

Ten Tips

Switch perspectives – put yourself in the remote worker’s shoes for a while. What kind of positive and negative feelings and thoughts would you most likely experience? Show empathy for the tough sides of remote working.

Make contact frequently – you might think you give each of your remote workers a lot of your time, but they will perceive the time you spend as far less. And don’t make every contact about work; build a relationship and develop trust.

Make expectations clear – don’t leave remote workers trying to read your mind. Distance amplifies uncertainty, and it is the role of the remote manager to provide a sense of structure through clear roles and responsibilities, precise objectives, and performance measures. Create ways by which remote workers can monitor their own performance and not always have to wait for your feedback.

Be accessible – don’t disappear into the virtual black hole, never to be seen again. Let remote workers know how they can best contact you, and when. Share your calendar.

Promote network building – remote workers may not work as a team, but they can still support each other, share knowledge and best practices, and establish a ‘virtual water cooler’ – through social media, for example.

Standardize – create standard tools, templates and processes where you can. The research points to higher productivity levels among remote workers, but they can’t be if they often have to invent and reinvent their own ways of working.

Stay alert – look for warning signs that all is not well, e.g., being unresponsive, changes in the tone of communicating. Act quickly to resolve any issues because distance tends to make small problems big problems very quickly.

Close the feedback loop – feedback and coaching can be wonderful gifts, but sometimes distance causes them to be left open-ended. It is easy to lose track and miss following through effectively, and that can feel like neglect leading to resentment.

Inspire - it’s so easy to lose sight of people’s emotional needs when they’re at a distance. In my view, remote management should be made up of about 40 percent management and 60 percent leadership. The management side can facilitate work getting done efficiently and effectively, but that by itself doesn’t engage people. Let remote workers know how their work is important to the bigger picture - how it contributes to the success of the unit, the division, the organization, to the wider community. We all need to feel we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, and for remote workers to feel that way requires the inspirational touch as well as the transactional instruction.

Focus on what matters – results are what matter, not whether someone has sat handcuffed to a computer for 8 hours or more (the ‘presenteeism’ school of management thought). For some managers this requires a mindset shift, and a letting go of fears about ‘What are they doing out there?’

With clear accountabilities, objectives and measures – and with treating people with respect and consideration no matter where they are located – our remote colleagues can be extraordinarily productive and successful.

Fast Track Your Collaboration Through Patterning

Good collaboration requires the formation of collaboration patterns.  What are these?

Any collaboration contains problems that recur repeatedly, and a collaboration pattern is a reusable methodology - or repeatable set of behaviors or activities - used by people when working together to solve these problems.  According to Ellen Gottesdiener, “A pattern is a description of a known solution to a specific type of problem. It documents a core insight or instructive information, so people can solve problems quickly and effectively.” (1)  Context is a critical factor; specific patterns are right for some contexts, but not others.

Over time, collaboration patterns will emerge in a group, but productivity can be established quickly if primary patterns can be identified and agreed upon early.  Patterns save time; reduce uncertainty, learning, fragmentation, and redundancy; and develop cohesion.

In Where in the World is my Team? I presented what I call a collaborative architecture - The Six Cs. (2) One way to think about this architecture is as a form/container for collaboration patterns. In the chart below are the Six Cs along with associated ‘problems’ and some potential collaborative activities that could benefit from patterning early in the game.

The Six Cs	Problems	Some Candidates for Patterning
Cooperation	Developing supportive relationships across geographies, time zones and cultures	Partnering Managing conflict Negotiating Sharing
Convergence	Maintaining a clear purpose, direction, and shared set of priorities across distances	Goal setting Strategizing Planning Prioritizing
Coordination	Sharing processes, routines, tools, standards, and structure	Designing Decision-making Resourcing Monitoring
Capability	Leveraging the knowledge, skills, and experiences on the team	Eliciting Capturing Transferring Problem solving
Communication	Creating shared understandings across the team	Dialoging Running Meeting Sensemaking Using technologies
Cultural Intelligence	Developing an inclusive virtual workplace	Learning Adapting Leveraging Co-creating

By forming and integrating collaboration patterns early, a group can accelerate its drive to high performance.  

(1)    Ellen Gottesdiener, Decide How to Decide, Software Development Magazine, vol. 9, no. 1

(2)    Terence Brake, Where in the World is My Team: Making a Success of Your Virtual Global Workplace, Jossey-Bass, 2008

Do You Speak VUCA?

Never the same wave twice

VUCA is an acronym describing many of the conditions and situations we face today – from battlefields to business environments. It stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.  It derives from military vocabulary used in relation to strategic leadership at the U.S. Army War College, and has been in use since the late 1990s.  Let’s dig a little deeper.

Volatility: The rapid rates of change in information and situations. Rapid changes in an environment require adaptive and innovative decision making. Also required are better ways to anticipate the future (foresight).

Uncertainty: The inability to know everything about the current situation and the difficulty of predicting what the effects of a change now will be on the future. Leaders must be willing to take measured and prudent risks, assess risk accurately, and develop risk management strategies.

Complexity: The web of cause and effect relationships have become much more complex in a global and technologically connected world.  Leaders must avoid the temptation to address symptoms quickly and apply short-term solutions. 

Ambiguity:  The difficulty of understanding what is happening in many situations or of identifying what is significant. There is an increased chance for misreading situations because the reality might be interpreted in more than one way, or observers might have insufficient mental models to make sense of what is happening.  Leaders need to create a climate of openness and questioning to uncover different perspectives.

In his book, “Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present,” Bob Johansen of the Institute of the Future says:

·         Volatility yields to Vision

·         Uncertainty yields to Understanding

·         Complexity yields to Clarity, and

·         Ambiguity yields to Agility

Speaking VUCA doesn’t grant us a greater degree of control, but it does enable us to look at challenges in a more sophisticated way, as well as help us calibrate our expectations appropriately.  It also provides a compelling rationale for why it is so important to bring diverse perspectives, experiences, and skills together in collaboration.  

Collaboration Defined: Back to Basics

Let’s get down to basics.

What do we mean when we talk about ‘collaboration’?  And how does it differ from words with a family resemblance like ‘cooperation’, ‘coordination’, and even ‘teamwork’.  Let me start with a broad definition of collaboration:

People with different skills and perspectives co-creating ‘something’ that none of the individual members could have created alone.

The ‘something’ could be anything from new understandings about a problem or solution, a new process or product or event. As Michael Schrage says in his book Shared Minds: “. . . there is nothing routine about it. Something is there that wasn’t there before.”

So how does this differ from related terms?

Cooperation: Is about saying and doing things that make making working with others an agreeable and constructive experience.  A group can be cooperative, however, while only producing a routine outcome.  Cooperation can simply be compliance.

Coordination:  Is about all the parts of a system working together efficiently – each part knows what to do, when to do it, in what order, and where the output needs to go next. It’s about efficient and effective relationships between the parts, but like cooperation it may not produce anything that wasn’t there before.

Teamwork: Is about working together to achieve a shared purpose, but teamwork itself doesn’t necessarily reach the level of ‘collaboration’.  Some teams might be geared toward achieving relatively routine, non-surprising outcomes.  You want the team to comply with policies, procedures and processes rather than collaborate and create.

That said, in today’s complex environment in which new and unexpected challenges occur frequently, a good degree of collaborative effort is likely to be necessary in most teams.

Defining a Global Mindset

Global Mindset: Beyond Diversity

The term ‘global mindset’ is used here, there and everywhere, but what does it mean in the context of business leadership?


Recently, a client sent me an article that they had been using to educate their global leaders. It was called, ‘Cultivating a Global Mindset’ by Professors Anil K. Gupta and Vijay Govindarajan, Academy of Management Executive, 2002. Vol. 16. No. 1.  It was a very good article in many ways, but I felt its view of a global mindset was far too narrow:

“We would define a global mindset as one that combines an openness to and awareness of diversity across cultures and markets with a propensity and ability to synthesize across this diversity.”

Taking account of cultural and market diversity is an important element in a global mindset, but it is only one element.  It doesn’t take into account the range of issues and decisions that a global leader is faced with, many of which lie outside the diversity space per se.

In my view, a global mindset is:

An expansive way of seeing and thinking that grasps the individual, team, and organizational challenges and opportunities triggered by operating in a complex global business environment.

For the advantages of this expansive mindset to be realized, we need to connect it to leadership decision making via four global operating principles (principles I had first outlined in The Global Leader, McGraw-Hill, 1996).  

Integration: Making decisions that promote the ability of the organization to capture the economic benefits of global standardization while learning from, adapting to, and leveraging value-generating market, psychological, cultural, and operational diversity.

Flow: Making decisions that speed the flow of resources around the company to where they can add most value at any point in time. Resources include: people, information, knowledge, skills, and capital.

Leverage: Making decisions that use ‘global leverage points’ to best advantage (leverage points being points in a system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything).

Optimization: Making decisions that produce best possible results for the business as a whole, not just the parts for which we have primary responsibility.

Going global is as much about mindset as capital investment, but let’s make sure what we call a global mindset takes much more than diversity into account.

Virtual Velocity: The Speed to Human Connectivity

One of the reasons that people like me exist is to help increase virtual velocity. I’m not talking about the speed of technological connections (instantaneous takes some beating unless we can create technologies that connect us even before we have thought about connecting – would that be pretaneous?)

No, I’m talking about the speed to human connectivity – in other words the speed at which we can create a shared experience of mutual understanding about how we each feel, think, and do. I’m not saying we would agree with each other’s feelings, thinking and doing, but we would each have a clear understanding of one another.

Even working face-to-face we might not come to know and understand each other very well; the virtual dimension just adds another layer of complexity to building relationships.

Working in a virtual network – as many of us do – requires partnering, and partnering requires what Gervase Bushe in his book Clear Leadership calls ‘collaborative organizing’.  His intent in the book is to address two problems detrimental to collaborative organizing:

1.       We each create our own experience although we think others create it. We each have a unique experience, so who is having the right experience?

2.       We are sense-making beings and make up stories about others so that we can fill in the gaps of what we know about their experience.

The result is ‘interpersonal mush’ - interactions based on stories people have made up about each other, but have not checked out.  The antidote is interpersonal clarity generated from learning conversations in which we get to know each other’s experience. With interpersonal clarity we are able to change and improve our communication, problem solving, and conflict resolution.  

Virtual space is one big petri dish for forming and developing stories about those we may never meet in person. Typically, virtual communications give fewer clues about what we are experiencing.  Given differences in cultures and communication styles our stories can be extremely distorted and damaging.

 And so, virtual velocity is our speed in achieving interpersonal clarity (human connectivity) in our virtual space.  A space in which we have mutual understanding about how we each feel, think, and do.   

Designing a Collaboration Strategy

Many organizations want to develop greater collaboration across their geographic, business, and functional borders.  What do they hope to accomplish?

We have to understand that collaboration can mean different things to different people in different contexts, but, in my view, organizations are usually seeking benefits in one, or more, of the following:

Productivity: As more jobs become increasingly interdependent, greater cooperation and collaboration is required between individual knowledge workers across borders.

Coordination: More and more work is being carried out by project teams of distributed knowledge workers, and greater collaborative efforts are needed to ensure the efficient and effective functioning of these teams.

Solutions: Many business problems today cannot be solved with limited individual expertise or one- dimensional thinking. Expertise collaborating across the organization – and even with those ‘outside’ of the organization, e.g., customers, suppliers, partners, distributors – is often required to solve the ‘wicked’ problems and dilemmas resulting from today’s complex business environment.  

Game Change: Innovation is high on the list of many businesses because today’s competitive advantage can easily be tomorrow’s old news. Diverse thinking and perspectives working together help generate game-changing ideas and create new competitive spaces and sources of revenue.  

Different metrics are required for each of these areas of performance. For example:

Productivity: Speed, cost, quantity and quality of knowledge outputs, e.g., data gathering and analysis, reports, technical or customer support.

Coordination: Speed and cost from project initiation to project completion; quality of project outputs; knowledge sharing, learning, and application rates; process improvements identified and implemented.

Solutions: Speed and cost from problem identification to quality solution creation and implementation.

Game Change: Speed, cost, and quality of new innovations generating new competitive advantages.

One way of looking at these different areas of performance is to think of them as being on a spectrum between Surface and Deep Collaboration:

Surface                                                                                                                                                 Deep

Productivity                        Coordination                     Solutions                             Game Change

In developing collaboration strategies, we need to be thinking about what is most important for us to accomplish along this spectrum – now, short-term, and long term. Do you know which benefits of greater collaboration are most important to your organization, in what timeframe, and when and how they can best be realized?

Before going further, let’s think about some of the potential elements of a collaboration strategy (1):

Culture: How to develop shared values, assumptions, norms, and behaviors that support collaborative mindsets. 

Structure: How to organize to achieve our goals more efficiently and effectively through greater collaboration, e.g., power/authority distribution, roles and responsibilities.

Processes: How to manage flows of activities and communications between knowledge workers and groups to generate collaborative advantage.

Incentives: How to create rewards and recognition systems to support the difficult balancing of competitive and collaborative behaviors.

Talent: How to identify, develop, and sustain competencies needed for working and leading in a collaborative environment.

Technology: How to utilize new technologies/platforms to enable quality cross-border collaboration.

Now, all of these elements can be important contributors to a collaboration strategy, but given the benefits you are seeking – and over what timeframe – which elements might it be best to focus on. For example, changes in the organizational culture are likely to be needed over time, but culture change is very difficult to accomplish. If quicker results are needed, in productivity say, it is probably best to focus your immediate collaboration strategy on technologies, talent development, and most importantly, incentives.  By incentives, I don’t just mean financial rewards, but those that support intrinsic motivational factors like “engagement, communication, and a sense of common purpose and identity.” (2)

There is no easy formula for deriving the benefits of greater collaboration, but be sure to think carefully about what benefits you are looking for, whether they require surface or deeper collaboration, what elements of a collaboration strategy will help you achieve those benefits now and in the short/long term, and if you have appropriate measures to support your efforts.

(1)    Elements inspired by Jay Galbraith’s Star model of organizational development.

(2)    Quote from “The Unselfish Gene” by Yochai Benkler in the Harvard Business Review, July-August, 2011.

Economies of Expertise

Access to talent worldwide, broadband connectivity, powerful collaboration tools, and fierce global competition are causing a recalibration of thinking about sources of economic advantage.  Traditionally, the key sources are associated with economies of scale and scope, so let me start by defining those:

Economies of scale: cost advantages gained from efficiencies when a firm produces a lot of the same product – when production increases the average cost per unit falls due to fixed costs being distributed across a larger number of units.

Economies of scope: cost advantages gained from efficiencies resulting when a firm produces a variety of products that draw on the same resources. For example, research & development, design or marketing costs being used across product lines, and not just one.

Are these still important?  Yes, absolutely!  But as the world around us changes, so must our thinking.

A prime candidate for being factored into the economic equation is economies of expertise, although you won’t find many references to this concept on the Internet.  I first came across the term in a blog posting by Rod Brown (http:investmentinnovation.wordpress.com) in which he summarizes a speech in Sydney by Michael Cannon-Brookes (IBM VP – Business Development, China and India). Some essentials of the speech are:

·         Work flows to places where it is done best

·         Economies of expertise describe firms that take advantage of skill sets wherever they are

·         The horizontalization of business needs collaboration to deliver maximum results

This isn’t about reducing costs by finding cheap labor overseas to perform low skill jobs. In a speech given by Glen Boreham, also of IBM, he says “Global sourcing . . . once purely a cost play . . . is now an expertise play.” 

One response to leveraging skill sets has been the creation of centers of excellence. These centers can be located where the skills are. IBM Asia has HR functions mostly in Manila, procurement in Shenzen, accounts payable in Shanghai, accounting in Malaysia, and help desk/customer services in Brisbane, Australia where there is a significant multilingual pool of expertise.

Locating a function where specific skills are advanced and abundant certainly can yield economic benefits – possibly lower salaries (although salary gaps between the developed and developing economies are closing all the time), but also economies of scope in that each specialist function provides services across businesses and product lines.  A concentration of skills will also generate higher levels of productivity and quality.

Before continuing, let me say that I see the economies I’m talking about here as being combinations of efficiency (producing results quickly with little wasted effort or resources) and effectiveness (producing the desired effect). You can do something efficiently, but without producing the desired effect. You can also do something effectively, but in an inefficient way.  It is the optimal combination of the two that generates powerful results.

 If we take the essence of economies of expertise to be: Taking advantage of skills sets wherever they are (which I believe to be correct), we can distinguish between at least three sources of economic benefit:

Individual Expertise (IE): Utilizing the expertise of a specific individual in completing a task most efficiently and effectively - no matter where that individual is located.  

Distributed Expertise (DE): Utilizing the expertise of two or more individuals - at different locations - in efficient and effective collaborative efforts to produce outcomes that no individual could have produced alone.

Concentrated Expertise (CE): Utilizing the combined expertise of a specialized, defined group efficiently and effectively across multiple business areas.

Accountability for achieving global economies of expertise lies principally with the Chief Learning Officer, but responsibility lies with other senior executives, managers, and project team leaders who make frequent decisions about the organization of work and leveraging of expertise.   Scale and scope economies must make room for another family member.