Own the Future: 50 Ways to Win from The Boston Consulting Group

Chapter 37

Collaboration Rules

Philip Evans and Bob Wolf

Abridged and reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2005 by Harvard Business Publishing; all rights reserved.

Corporate leaders seeking growth, learning, and innovation may find the answer in a surprising place: the open-source software community. Unknowingly, perhaps, the folks who brought you Linux are virtuoso practitioners of new work principles that produce energized teams and lower costs.

By any measure, Linux is a competitive product. Its advantages extend beyond cost and quality to the speed with which it is enhanced and improved. The product's success is inseparable from its distinctive mode of production. Specifically, Linux is the creation of an essentially voluntary, self-organizing community of thousands of programmers and companies.

But Linux is software, and software is kind of weird. Toyota, however, is a company like any other—any other consistently ranked among the world's best, that is. The automaker has long been a leader in quality and lean production. We have found that Toyota's managerial methods resemble, in a number of their fundamentals, the workings of the Linux community; the Toyota Production System (TPS) owes some of its vaunted responsiveness to open-source traits.

An analysis of the characteristics shared by Linux and Toyota suggests how high-performance organizations remain productive and inventive ...