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Chapter 2 Global E-business and Collaboration 89

primary value-adding activity. Even in factories, workers today often work in
production groups, or pods.
• Growth of professional work. “Interaction” jobs tend to be professional
jobs in the service sector that require close coordination and collabora-
tion. Professional jobs require substantial education, and the sharing of
information and opinions to get work done. Each actor on the job brings
specialized expertise to the problem, and all the actors need to take one
another into account in order to accomplish the job.
• Changing organization of the firm. For most of the industrial age, managers
organized work in a hierarchical fashion. Orders came down the hierarchy,
and responses moved back up the hierarchy. Today, work is organized into
groups and teams, and the members are expected to develop their own
methods for accomplishing the task. Senior managers observe and measure
results, but are much less likely to issue detailed orders or operating
procedures. In part, this is because expertise and decision-making power
have been pushed down in organizations.
• Changing scope of the firm. The work of the firm has changed from a single
location to multiple locations—offices or factories throughout a region, a
nation, or even around the globe. For instance, Henry Ford developed the first
mass-production automobile plant at a single Dearborn, Michigan factory. In
2012, Ford employed over 166,000 people at around 90 plants and facilities
worldwide. With this kind of global presence, the need for close coordination of
design, production,marketing, distribution, and service obviously takes on new
importance and scale. Large global companies need to have teams working on
a global basis.
• Emphasis on innovation. Although we tend to attribute innovations in
business and science to great individuals, these great individuals are most
likely working with a team of brilliant colleagues. Think of Bill Gates and
Steve Jobs (founders of Microsoft and Apple), both of whom are highly
regarded innovators, and both of whom built strong collaborative teams
to nurture and support innovation in their firms. Their initial innovations
derived from close collaboration with colleagues and partners. Innovation, in
other words, is a group and social process, and most innovations derive from
collaboration among individuals in a lab, a business, or government agencies.
Strong collaborative practices and technologies are believed to increase the
rate and quality of innovation.
• Changing culture of work and business. Most research on collaboration
supports the notion that diverse teams produce better outputs, faster,
than individuals working on their own. Popular notions of the crowd
(“crowdsourcing,” and the “wisdom of crowds”) also provide cultural support
for collaboration and teamwork.

WHAT IS SOCIAL BUSINESS?
Many firms today enhance collaboration by embracing social business—the
use of social networking platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and internal
corporate social tools—to engage their employees, customers, and suppliers.
These tools enable workers to set up profiles, form groups, and “follow” each
other’s status updates. The goal of social business is to deepen interactions
with groups inside and outside the firm to expedite and enhance information-
sharing, innovation, and decision making.
A key word in social business is “conversations.” Customers, suppliers,
employees, managers, and even oversight agencies continually have
conversations about firms, often without the knowledge of the firm or its key
actors (employees and managers).

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