COLLABORATE OR PERISH!

A guide to previously unattainable levels of collaboration and control in a networked global environment.

It would be hard to argue that collaboration was ever an entirely alien concept in government, business or private spheres. What former Boston, New York City and Los Angeles police chief Bratton (The Turnaround, 1998) and co-author Tumin assert is that technologically up-to-the-moment collaboration is now virtually a matter of survival. Either learn to create shared-goal cyber platforms linking all the players or, as they exclaim in their title, perish! With Bratton drawing on his front-line policing experiences, the authors present a series of highly informative, wide-ranging and frequently unsettling examples showing the rapidly expanding impact of collaboration-enhancing technology. They also suggest techniques for effective collaboration, ranging from right-sizing problems to coercing participation, if it comes to that. Their purpose, they write, is to share the wisdom they have gathered over their 40-year careers from government leaders, top executives, managers, researchers and others. “It is a book that will help you collaborate better,” they write, “and get on with the business of transforming the world as it is into the world that should be”—though they never get around to explaining the exact nature of that world. That it might be repressive, given the immense new powers of top-down control that come with collaboration as the book defines it, never arises as a topic.

Mostly enlightening reading for understanding what the world is becoming.