I think at least 50% of the inefficiency in any company or organization is a result of no one knowing who is responsible for a task and everyone being too scared to ask.
It seems every corporate culture trend of the last 20 years has been with the incentive of encouraging better collaboratoin. MBA programs across the nation have been preaching about design thinking and open office plans and mega-cafeterias, all of these tactics with the goal of getting smart people to come up with even smarter ideas by working together. And I think having a culture where collaboration is championed and promoted is absolutely essential for any company to avoid drowning in its own employees' egos.
But I don't think we should be promoting collaboration at the expense of accountability. These ideas are not mutually exclusive, yet collaboration implemented poorly often makes them seem so. Everyone loves to do things in groups until a ball gets dropped and nobody owns up to the error.
Apple is a company where collaboration has always been foundational to its DNA. The design of Apple Park itself was chosen specifically for this reason: to encourage these casual encounters among smart people that lead to great ideas. But in my short time working at Apple, I noticed many teams have an almost religious tendency to use the phrase "DRI" in meetings, meaning "Directly Responsible Individual." I always found it so ironic that a company who credits so much of its success to intense collaboration would use a phrase so exclusive and almost militaristic sounding.
Until I realized it's not really exclusive or militaristic. It's just an acknowledgment that even in a hyper-collaborative environment, the buck has to stop somewhere. Someone needs to have their name on the line to ensure the task gets done. And inputs can be gathered from as many people as possible, but it needs to be one person held accountable at the end of the day. That's not a direct contrast to collaboration. It's actually what allows the collaboration to work.
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