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I read an article on New York Times: Structure? The Flatter, the Better. In it, they interview Cristóbal Conde about his management style.

The whole interview is quite interesting, and I’d like to share some snippets with you.

About Collaboration

Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?

A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.

About Global Teamwork

[...] before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.

About Collaboration Platforms

But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.

Q. How do you create that culture?

A. One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer.

Q. How long have you used it?

A. About seven months. By having technologies that allow people to see what others are doing, share information, collaborate, brag about their successes — that is what flattens the organization. I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.

I think too many bosses think that their job is to be the lead, and I don’t. By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.

How does Teambox fit in

The article mentions Yammer. While Yammer is pretty cool, in the way you can share updates with your group, it’s pretty limited: Restricted to people in your company, no project management features.

Teambox brings a better collaboration tool.

• Post updates on a project wall to ask something or celebrate an accomplishment.
• Mention somebody’s @username to send them an email.
• Post updates inside a task. Plan what needs to be done.

Collaborating is reporting

Why waste time at the end of each week or month reporting? If your employees need to take the time to write down what they did, something is broken in your system.

With the proper collaboration tools, work completed is archived and useful as a report. So you can look at it at any moment later, and see what was done.

How do you use collaboration apps? Share your thoughts on this thread!