Collaboration for Hard Times; Library Journal, 10/2/13

Irene Gashurov and Curtis L. Kendrick, Library Journal; Collaboration for Hard Times: "People have always known that they can often achieve more working with others than they can alone. Today collaboration is a vital feature of organizational life, but finding the right partner for a supportive relationship is still no simple matter. There are risks and costs, along with the tension between self-interest and resource sharing. Once the right partner is found, the team must figure out how to make the relationship work... Importance of common culture While many business transactions are the product of collaboration—particularly in our knowledge-based economy, which depends on diverse teams with different expertise to complete projects—research shows that partnerships between companies succeed only about 40 percent of the time. In their pursuit of profit, such business partners often fail to find a match with their companies’ values, goals, and cultures. One of the largest deals in American business history, the AOL–Time Warner merger, might have had the best financial rationale on paper, but the combined company fell to one-seventh of its former $350 billion valuation a decade after the merger. Pundits still argue about what caused the combined company to collapse, but a major contributing factor was the failure to close the then-substantial divide between the cultures of print journalism and digital media. The companies continued to work as separate entities, and the divisive cultural differences led to a fatal lack of trust between them."