The Collaborative Enterprise: Managing Speed and Complexity in Knowledge-Based Businesses

Organizing for competitive advantage and profit

How can businesses best tap diverse capabilities to generate new ideas, manufacture products, and properly execute strategy? In this groundbreaking, thoroughly researched book, organizational expert Charles Heckscher argues that, in a global network of creation and production, the dominant organizations will be those that master the still-uncodified skills of collaboration--replacing the giants of the past century who thrived on the mastery of bureaucratic systems. Though there has been much discussion of teamwork and alliances in recent decades, Heckscher argues that we are still a long way from fully understanding how to manage fluid and inconstant collaborations; and that this is an area dominated far more by rhetoric than reality. Using a combination of theory and extensive real-life case studies, Heckscher pushes the boundary of organization design and illustrates how companies are able to create new, effective patterns of interactions, and how they can build a culture and infrastructure necessary to support them. For organizational leaders in search of long-term competitive advantage, The Collaborative Enterprise offers sound research findings and invaluable insights.

Charles Heckscher is director of the Center for Workplace Transformation, School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University. His previous books include The Post-Bureaucratic Organization and White Collar Blues. He lives in Princeton, N.J.