Maximizing network value at minimum cost

Here's some brain feed on a Monday morning. I just finished a great book by Morten Hansen, Collaboration. The sub title is "How leaders avoid the traps, create unity, and reap big results", an ambitious undertaking, but the book delivers. It has some great points of view that I will try to sum up below:

• bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration
• collaboration for collaboration is no good, the goal needs to be better performance
• the right way to collaborate is disciplined collaboration:
      assess when to collaborate and when not to
      instill people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate
• there are 4 barriers to collaboration:
          
               caused by lack of motivation to collaborate
• not-invented-here, i.e. people help each other within a unit, you don't want to show weakness or cross status gaps to get help
• hoarding problems, i.e. people will not ask for help or help others outside their unit
  
  caused by lack of ability to collaborate
• search problems, i.e. people can't find the right people to help them
• transfer problems, i.e. people are unable to transfer knowledge (provide help) across units
• the different barriers needs different solutions, this is why understanding which barrier you're facing is important the solutions include:
• unification mechanisms (create the proper goals, use the right language, demonstrate value of teamwork etc.)
• T-shaped management (these leaders deliver performance in two parts the vertical is personal results and the horizontal is collaboration, pay-for-performance undermine these values)
• networks (there are six networking rules that can help you).

I loved the book, but at the network tips was a bit too much. I believe in two things is true when it comes to networks:

1. You want contacts in to as many non-redundant clusters as possible.
2. To be able to manage your network you should aim to only have one good relation into each cluster.