Smarter Collaboration

1 The Business Case for Smarter Collaboration

Picture a huge, multinational consumer electronics company headquartered in Europe. We’ll call it PremierTech.

By all accounts, PremierTech in the early twenty-first century was a highly siloed operation, characterized by a command-and-control management style. When Jen Baker arrived as the new chief technology officer for the audio/video division, she often found herself stymied by divisional and functional barriers. The company had products in more than a dozen separate divisions—audio/video, health, home products, personal care, and so on—each of which was run as a separate P&L. Each had its own empire to support it: production, software development, sales, distribution, and so forth. This ...