180SMART COLLABORATION
homework regarding specific clients and potential relationship
partners. A CTP also makes it far easier for contributors to respond
to RFIs and build their reputations.
Finally, a robust CTP can also help boost contributors’ skill at
raising complex issues with a client. Think back to my descrip-
tion of storytelling as a way to inspire and instill confidence. A
good CTP makes such storytelling organic: people hear about each
other’s successes “firsthand”—at least, in a virtual sense, which
is a mode that many of them trust more than a “potted” version
of reality from headquarters. Remember the example of Monica’s
video, at the opening of this section? Imagine the impact of a grow-
ing inventory of those kinds of success stories, especially as your
millennials move into greater client service roles and find that they
need their confidence boosted.
But will people use it?
Maybe you’re one of those firm leaders who has invested in a
knowledge-management system or customer relationship manage-
ment database in the past, only to see it gather virtual dust. If so,
you may be asking yourself whether people will actually use this
system.
The answer, in many cases, is yes. One executive who has direct
experience with both approaches explains why: “A traditional KM
system is static and anonymous. It requires people to invest their
precious time populating the database just in case some unknown
Other needs the information at any point. But a collaborative plat-
form lets someone respond to a specific human being—a colleague,
no less—who needs that specific input at that exact time. It’s way
more motivating.”
In other words, we humans find it more gratifying to respond
“just in time” than “just in case.” The former is about adding
value; the latter is about covering your butt.
Unless you’re the relatively unusual senior firm leader who has
embraced social media in your personal life, you may be thinking
that few of your really experienced (code for “older”) partners will
embrace, or even understand, the CTP way of sharing information.
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Collaboration for Ringmasters181
Take heart: The way you roll out the program can make a huge dif-
ference to adoption rates. Do it well, and you can expect to bring
professionals at all ages and stages on board.
Maybe looking at a specific example of a CTP rollout at a lead-
ing professional service firm best illustrates this point. Our sub-
ject company is PwC: a global accounting and consulting firm
that employs more than 180,000 people and offers services across
157 countries. As an intensive knowledge business spread across
so many locations, and with global clients expecting a joined-up
seamless service, smooth and successful digital collaboration is
critical.
In 2010, a group of global partners, working with the global
knowledge function, helped to define an explicit goal: “To pro-
vide one common social networking and collaboration platform
that accelerates our ability to connect with each other and collab-
orate together to create value for ourselves and for our clients.”
The end result of setting this goal was the launch of “Spark,”
a global social and collaboration network that has been widely
adopted.
28
“Within ten months of the initial launch, we had a hundred
thousand active users,” reports Paula Young, global head of knowl-
edge at PwC. “On average, we are now getting 1.5 million page
views per day.” How did the firm achieve such enormous uptake?
Young points to four key decisions that her team made:
• Give up control in the design phase. The then chairman of
the firm, Dennis Nally, insisted that users—rather than any
one functional area—design and control the system. “So I
completely gave up control,” reports Young. “We didn’t have
any governance groups. We didn’t actually know how people
would use the platform and realized that people might not
know themselves. We wanted to experiment, as well as to
listen, learn, and iterate.”
• Go where the energy is. The team also knew it was import-
ant to select the right initial groups to work with, so they
could share success stories that would help drive adoption
for future waves. “We didn’t always go for the most strategic
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182SMART COLLABORATION
parts of PwC to launch Spark,” explains Young. “Instead,
we went where there was a passionate partner who had a
really clear idea of the value they thought they might get and
who wasn’t going to fall at the first hurdle.”
• Empower local sponsors. CEOs from the twenty-one
biggest PwC firms each chose a local leader to become their
Spark Territory Sponsor. The firm invited each sponsor to
choose how and when to launch Spark in their country and
pick from the available toolkit of materials. For example,
rather than launching Spark immediately, the Swiss Spark
Territory Sponsors decided to piggyback it onto the appoint-
ment of their new chairman. They moved leadership
communications and their intranet into Spark at that same
time. Switzerland achieved 90 percent adoption in only a few
days, and 100 percent soon afterward.
• Tap into “advocates” at all levels. The Spark Territory
Sponsors were tasked with driving adoption locally,
but, recalls Young, “We needed an army of volunteers
on the ground to penetrate local teams, departments,
and networks.”
The Spark Advocate program was born. It aimed to involve
tech-savvy, enthusiastic, open-minded individuals who would
enjoy the chance to play with and improve Spark. “These are
people on the ground, in every part of the organization: the
guy on the security desk downstairs, the colorful character in
Purchasing, and so on,” Young explains. “You can always spot
them—they’re the ones who are going to show you the latest app
with passionate enthusiasm.”
Young invited these individuals to work with the system in beta
form before anyone else got to see it. The response, she recalls, was
amazing: “Not only did the majority say yes, they invited friends,
colleagues, and acquaintances to sign up too. By the time of the soft
launch, we had a community of more than three hundred advo-
cates in place, with membership increasing by another hundred
volunteers every week.”
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Collaboration for Ringmasters183
Within seven months of launch, Spark had nine hundred such
advocates; less than two years later, there were eighteen hundred
advocates in ninety-five countries.
So—getting back to our original question—has it stuck, or has
it fizzled? Resoundingly, Spark has stuck. In a recent thirty-day
period, 79.2 percent of PwC-ers, across 135 of the firm’s 157 ter-
ritories, used the system. Going back ninety days, the total rises to
an amazing 95.5 percent of the firm’s staff. So yes—if you build it
right, people will use it, and collaboration will be advanced.
Looking sideways at collaboration
Having devoted lots of space in this chapter to compensation, I
now propose to take a somewhat abrupt step, in chapter 7, into a
different realm—a field of endeavor in which collaboration is very
much the wave of the present and the future, but in which compen-
sation is a distinctly secondary consideration.
That field is elite medical research, which is commonly conducted
by tenured or tenure-track faculty members. The salaries of those
researchers are controlled by a central university compensation sys-
tem, so salary bands are tight and bonuses are nonexistent. How
can collaboration be fostered in such a constrained context?
The relevance of the lessons from this seemingly unrelated arena—
so far from the worlds of business and professional services—
may surprise you.
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