Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results

CHAPTER ONE

Getting Collaboration Wrong … or Getting It Right

IN EARLY 2003, Howard Stringer, head of U.S. operations for Japanese electronics giant Sony, was plotting to respond to Apple’s amazing success with the iPod, a recently introduced small portable music player. Sony did not want to let Apple take over the market. It was, after all, a market Sony should own. It had invented the idea of carrying music around on people’s heads with the iconoclastic Walkman, which was introduced in 1979 and had sold nearly 200 million units by the time the iPod became the new kid on the block.¹ Stringer was the right man to lead the charge. A jovial, Oxford-educated Englishman in a six-foot-three-inch frame, he had been brought into Sony in 1997 to help ...