NSDL Reflections

Collaboration, Alignment and Leadership by David Fulker

September 25, 2008 at 9:00 am Brandon Muramatsu Leave a comment

Leadership Principles as a Framework for Studying Outcome Variations

Though the causes for such variable outcomes are surely complex, it may be tempting to attribute the lack of growth/continuity in DLESE/NSDL primarily to weakness of collaboration, because the collaboration challenges were so obviously crucial and—perhaps obviously—better collaboration might have yielded different outcomes. However, thinking that collaboration difficulties, per se, likely are symptoms of deeper issues [2], I attempt here to look for underlying causes, with particular attention to leadership differences among the projects.

This lens is motivated by the observation that collaboration challenges—including cases where the needs were driven by scope, scale, and multiple disciplines—have been addressed effectively in both the corporate and nonprofit worlds. My informal thesis is that the two growing, sustained projects (from the above list) aligned more closely than the other two with principles of leadership excellence, and enhanced collaboration was among the consequences [3].

Pursuing this line, I examine the four examples in a framework of leadership principles that I have selected because they appear directly related to the collaborative aspects of successful organizations. The chosen principles—drawn from writings by Jim Collins in Good to Great and by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema in the Harvard Business Review article—are as follows.

• Disciplined Thought [Collins 2001 pp 65-119]
  • Willingness to confront reality
  • A simple, coherent strategic concept
• Disciplined Action [Collins 2001 pp 123-143]
  • Willingness to say “no”
  • Clear identification of who holds responsibilities
  • Advancement as a cumulative process
• Persistent Core [Collins, pp 188-201]
  • An enduring purpose
  • Immutable core values (around which to advance)
• Primary alignment with one of three value disciplines (while attending to the other two) [Treacy & Wiersema 1993]
  • Operational Excellence
  • Customer Relations
  • Product Leadership

[2] E.g., James Austin offers “Seven C’s of Constructive Collaboration”—Clarity, Complementarity, Compatibility, Communication, Creativity, Commitment, Courage—and implies that their absence yields ineffective alliances [Austin 1998]. These of course might serve as a reasonable framework for collaboration analysis, and they reinforce some aspects of the framework I have chosen.

[3] In the spirit of disclosure, I played leadership roles in three of the four projects. Specifically, I was a principal investigator and founding director for Unidata; I served on the steering committee for DLESE and was a co-principal investigator on grants for the DLESE Program Center; finally, I was a principal investigator and the first Executive Director for the NSDL Core Integration Team until 2005.

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Entry filed under: NSDL Core Integration. Tags: National Science Digital Library, NSDL, NSDL Reflections.