MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Collaborate Smarter, Not Harder

Through analytics, companies can reduce overload, attrition, and other costs of collaboration — and increase its rewards.

No question, in a competitive global landscape, collaboration allows companies to serve exacting clients more seamlessly, respond more quickly to changing environments, and innovate more rapidly. But when an organization tries to boost collaboration by adopting a new formal structure, technology, or way of working, it often adds a steady stream of time- and energy-consuming interactions to an already relentless workload, diminishing instead of improving performance.

Fortunately, it is possible to improve collaboration efforts with the help of analytics.

About the Author

Rob Cross is the Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College. Thomas H. Davenport (@tdav) is the President’s Distinguished Professor of IT and Management at Babson, a fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a senior adviser to Deloitte’s Analytics and Cognitive practices. Peter Gray is a professor at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.

Learn more about MIT SMR.