But a backlash is setting in: the current Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a cover story on “collaborative overload” and Cal Newport of Georgetown University has just brought out a book called “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”.Ī growing body of academic evidence demonstrates just how serious the problem is. Hitherto, knowledge workers have largely suffered in silence or grumbled in private because their chances of promotion have come to be influenced by their willingness to collaborate. Facebook has built what is said to be the world’s biggest such open space, of 430,000 square feet (40,000 square metres), for its workers. Open-plan offices have become near-ubiquitous in knowledge-intensive companies. Oddly, the cult of collaboration has reached its apogee in the very arena where the value of uninterrupted concentration is at its height: knowledge work. But this hardly justifies forcing people to share large noisy spaces or bombarding them with electronic messages. Mixing with people from different departments can be useful. Talking to your colleagues can spark valuable insights. The point of organisations is that people can achieve things collectively that they cannot achieve individually. The fashion for collaboration makes some sense. Management thinkers urge workers to be good corporate citizens and help each other out all the time. Managers oblige their underlings to add new collaborative tools such as Slack and Chatter to existing ones such as e-mail and telephones. Firms shove their staff into open-plan offices to encourage serendipitous encounters. IN MODERN business, collaboration is next to godliness.
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