HBR's 10 Must Reads Collection (12 Books)

Building a Collaborative Enterprise

by Paul Adler, Charles Heckscher, and Laurence Prusak

A SOFTWARE ENGINEER we’ll call James vividly remembers his first day at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). The very first message he received: “Here are your Instructions” (yes, with a capital I).

“I thought I was bringing the know-how I’d need to do my job,” James recalls. “But sure enough, you open up the Instructions, and it tells you how to do your job: how to lay the code out, where on the form to write a change-request number, and so on. I was shocked.”

In this division at CSC, code is no longer developed by individual, freewheeling programmers. They now follow the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), a highly organized process that James initially felt ...