If you spend any time talking about or reading about working from home, you may have noticed the focus tends to be on managing in the new hybrid workplace. Companies are contemplating different workplace scenarios. The office as we knew it will most probably change. There is something else that has changed as well.  

Collaboration is now more than a kumbaya moment. Collaboration is no longer theoretical. You can see the criticality of collaboration in the wealth of collaborative digital tools now available to businesses of all sizes. Using these work tools, mitigates separation and maximizes integration. Many of these have zoomed by Zoom.

• Microsoft’s Teams has leveraged its synergies with Office and its cloud-computing platform. Teams is pre-packaged in its Business Office suite.

• Salesforce.com purchased the collaborative Slack business product for $27.7 billion. 

• Google is promoting its newly organized suite of products as Google Workspace. Along with new products, Google’s advertising hypes its familiar options as a valuable collaborative tool. Google Business Email, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Meet are now dished up as a total package for “How teams of all sizes connect, create and collaborate.

When people work apart, the need for cross-functional sharing becomes more apparent. This intense focus on collaboration while working from home may finally be the death-knell for silo management and its evil twin silo mentality. Collaboration is collapsing these corporate killer constraints.

Silo management is the separation of functions where employees protect their area of responsibility from other employees. Silo management means each operational group creates its own insular management. This insularity means that information is not shared throughout the brand-business. 

Organizational silos inhibit the brand-business’ ability to deliver integrated customer-perceived brand value. Silos hamper brand-business growth and governance in these ways: 

• Silos slow brand-business development. 
• Silos impede enduring profitable growth of the brand-business. 
• Silos are dangerous. 
• Silos create segregation and selfishness.
• Silos are harmful to brand-business health. 
• Silos create all sorts of bad brand-business behaviors, such as hoarding information, stopping the spread of ideas, creating internal conflicts and reinforcing the status quo.
• Silos reinforce the lack of accountability for brand-business results. It is always the other silo’s fault.

Any farmer will tell you that silos are for storing, not sharing. 

Brand-businesses suffer when an organization allows functional isolation rather than institutional integration, as follows:

• When an organization protects management from risk. 
• When an organization deflects accountability. 
• When an organization inflates a single group or a person. 
• When an organization is less conducive to creativity and collaboration. 
• When the brand-business mindset is shareholder value supported by financial engineering.

There is really nothing more oppressive than the organizational protectionism of powerful silos.

Pandemic lock downs with work-from-home forced employees to share information. One pandemic outcome is the demonstrated wisdom of shared learning. Shared learning is valuable. There is a significant negative cost associated with information hoarding.

For example, one extremely silo-focused hospitality company discovered that resources were spent on over 100 global research studies on breakfast. Another 50 global research studies focused on fitness and gyms offerings. Each group believed its research was proprietary, not to be shared across geography and function. The purchasing department showed that millions of dollars along with hundreds of hours of time and energy were spent on gaining the same information. 

That kind of unproductive, inefficient brand-business behavior is no longer acceptable

In a Financial Times article on Microsoft, reporter Richard Waters wrote, “On a single day during the third quarter (2020), users of Teams spent 30 billion minutes – an average of more than four hours per person – doing things like participating in video conferences, working on shared documents and reviewing meetings. Given how long it normally takes new enterprise software to take hold, that makes Teams virtually an overnight success, and an important new front door to digital working life.” 

Mr. Waters interviewed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Mr. Nadella believes that Teams is an essential propeller for collaboration. In describing his views on the future of the workplace, Mr. Nardella said, “I think there will be structural change.” This change will highlight the need for software tools provide flexibility “… while still building social capital (and) building knowledge inside the enterprise by bringing people together on important tasks.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that the intense need for collaboration knocked down the barricades between CIOs (Chief Information Officer), their CIO teams and the brand-business’s other functions. The executive vice president and chief information officer at Charles Schwab Corp., the investment firm, told The Wall Street Journal, “As technology teams become more integrated into the business and develop deeper business knowledge and expertise… it leads to technology being at the table much more than in the past.”

Collaboration does exactly what Charles Schwab CIO talks about: having all parties at the table. Or, as writer (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes A Great Notion) and counterculture figure, Ken Kesey said about the merry pranksters and their psychedelic school bus, Further, “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.”

Sharing across function and geography promotes organizational learning. Shared learning generates new ideas and insights. Shared learning reduces redundancy of resources. Sharing creates internal alignment, leading to enterprise collaboration.

The coronavirus is forcing brand-businesses to make needed changes to the way people work together. One of the most important changes is the death of silos resulting in a new brand-business chapter of collaboration.

In 1994, when Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras wrote Built to Last, they were referring to Visionary Habits of Successful Companies. Their highly influential book focused on the results of a six-year research project into what makes enduringly great companies. Their stated goals were: “to identify underlying characteristics are common to highly visionary companies” and “to effectively communicate findings so they can influence management”.

Companies that endure are iconic; they are studied; they are analyzed; and they are held up as examples of best practices that other businesses should exemplify. The same is true for brands. GE, IBM, Kodak and Xerox are examples of brands that now realize longevity is not necessarily a prerequisite for future success.

We live in a time when replacing goods and services is par for the course. We seem to have no qualms about ditching an old iPhone for a new model, or downloading the latest app, or frequenting the newest restaurant. In fashion, we have fast fashion that by its very nature is meant to be disposable. In automotive, ownership is starting to decline in favor of renting or subscribing: “Why keep something around when I can have the newest model whenever I want?”

With the exception of some durable goods products such as large appliances, there seems to be a reluctance to buy goods and services that are built to last. We appear to prefer obsolescence to endurance. Some brands such as Patagonia have urged customers to keep wearing their old Patagonia clothes rather than buy new ones. But, even in luxury goods, where holding on to a satchel or pair of shoes as the value increases, there are websites where owners can sell these possessions to make a quick buck.

So, it is a surprise that in a past report from The Wall Street Journal’s “The Future of Everything”, we were told to hold on to possessions, some of which are so much better with age. We learned that owning these goods for the long term will enhance our future: we were asked to buy something that “is destined for an estate sale rather than a landfill.” Products identified as “keepers” were luggage, boots, watches and classic home goods. The “The Future of Everything” article reflected one of the major paradoxes of our age: the desire (and hence clash of) for replaceable and irreplaceable.

“The latest and the legacy” is a unique paradox reflecting the wish for innovation/novelty and the need for things that have stood the tests of time. Technology has accelerated the pace of new products and services. We are used to replacing phones, laptops and other digital, smart, mobile devices and connected appliances with new versions on a regular basis. We fear missing the immediate ownership of the latest. People around the world will wait on line, overnight, regardless of weather, just to buy the newest Apple device.

And, yet, at the same time, we seek the authenticity, heritage, customs and legacies of products and service steeped in tradition.  Etsy, the online craft forum, is a paean to crocheted medallion quilts, handmade dangling earrings, knitted Argyle socks, and all sorts of imaginative, high quality craftsmanship. Vintage clothing stores sell authentic outfits from our parents’ and grandparents’ decades. Millennials are buying vintage sound systems to play LPs (even though they are also streaming music from Spotify). The Future of Everything referred to these types of enduring products as “heirloom” just like the tomato seeds sold in those various seed catalogues: those cultivars from gardens of the past, not like those used in today’s industrial agriculture.

Brands have an opportunity to capitalize on the conflicting needs of being in the “now” with living with the “then”.  In the liquor category, Jim Beam and Jack Daniels are establishing their heritage credibility for a modern group of drinkers. KFC is currently making a remarkable comeback by focusing on their traditional, iconic mealtime buckets of chicken.  The familiar, timeless Colonel, and his values are back, but in a timely, humorous, contemporary manner. There is something compelling about revisiting a relevant, repackaged icon right now. Levi’s invented blue jeans. It has an amazing heritage. On its website, the brand confirms its history and its modernity, by being both now and then. Their statement is that Levi’s® Made & Crafted® builds on the legacy of 140 years “by designing tomorrow’s classics using today’s best materials and construction techniques.”

Brands in and of themselves are all about the future. Brands promise a relevant, differentiated trustworthy experience: buy this brand and you will get this experience. More than ever, brands have the opportunity to address our needs for the both the latest and the legacy: brands that are built for now and built to last. In our time-crazed world of now, it is nice to know that there are brands we can hold onto for time to come.