Collaboration is indeed the business opportunity of the decade, promising to energize your organization while making more effective use of your precious assets.  My Cisco colleague Carl Wiese and I wrote a book called The Collaboration Imperative: Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organization’s True Potential to help organizations “operationalize” collaboration and capture these gains. Our goal wasn’t to write a “theory” book, but rather one that drills down into specific actions, with concrete examples of how to put collaboration to work in the real world.

As Carl noted in a previous post, effective collaboration is a function of aligning culture, process and technology.  But how do you do that?   Here is a one example from the book: Collaborative teams work best when they’re made up of people who communicate openly.

Collaboration technologies, especially video, make it easy to reach people across an organization and around the world.  Anyone who has traded their economy-class airline seat in favor of a Telepresence meeting knows the powerful benefits of collapsing space and time with an engaging video meeting.  However, as we cross departmental, cultural and time-zone boundaries, collaboration puts our personal communication skills to the test.

As we increasingly interact virtually, we work more and more with people we don’t know or have a long history with; they may actually work in a different company and teams may come and go in rapid succession.  Establishing rapport –- quickly –- is one of the most important aspects of successful collaboration, and it starts with communicating authentically.

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Tags: authentic, Carl Wiese Blog, Collaboration Imperative Blog, communication, mobility, Myers-Briggs, New Collaboration Experience, Ron Ricci Blog, social media, virtual

When does a new business relationship need to move from being a virtual (online) experience to a physical (in-person) experience?  That question was a topic of discussion with a couple of friends, over a beer after a recent TechHub event.  Moreover, I have been pondering this issue since I participated in the pilot of an International Investment Forum.

How much of our business conversations need to be face-to-face? With all the electronic communication options that are at our disposal today, does it really matter?

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Tags: collaboration, communication, HCS, relationship economy, TelePresence, WebEX

This article has been written by Jan Zanetis, Education Advocate for Cisco in Australia.  The original article was published in the December/January edition of Educational Leadership (EL). Visit EL to read the full version.

The Virtues of Video

Video-on-demand tutorials. International student collaborations. Virtual field trips to Australia. Schools can use interactive video to enrich students’ learning.

What if your struggling students could view demonstrations of difficult math concepts as often as necessary? Picture your students asking questions of an expert diver as she explores Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Or imagine a motivated student in a remote location attending an advanced placement physics class without leaving home.

Providing such enriching learning activities, even with limited funds, is no fantasy; it’s possible through live, interactive video.

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Tags: Cisco, classroom, collaboration, communication, education, higher education, jan zanetis, K-12, learning, student, teachers, technology, video, visual

At a conference on developing sustainable, connected and scalable cities, Cisco hosted an international roundtable using Cisco TelePresence, a high definition, life-sized video meeting solution, with education thought leaders from Amsterdam, Brisbane, Hong Kong, London and Lisbon.

Some participants joined via a Dialogue Cafe.  Under the auspices of the United Nations, the Dialogue Cafe Association is building a network of publically available, video-enabled spaces that make it easier for innovators, students, public leaders and businesses to connect and collaborate across geographical, cultural and sometimes political divides.

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Tags: classroom, collaboration, communication, connection, education, global innovation in education, higher education, K-12, student, teachers, technology, university, VET, video

Back in April this year I wrote a blog about a programme we drove in Europe last fiscal year called Reverse Mentoring, where a senior employee is also mentored by the junior employee. All of our 31 mentors and 31 mentees have now reached the end of the programme and I’d like to share with you their feedback – what they enjoyed, what worked well and what we can improve upon in the future. Read More »

Tags: business, Cisco, collaboration, communication, culture, employees, Inclusion and Diversity, Reverse Mentoring