Nicole Gelinasn in The Wall Street Journal explores “The Rise of The Mortgage Walkers” – those that choose to simply walk away from their homes and mortgages and hand the keys back to the bank. The take-away: This may be the most rational choice many have and doing so is the smart thing to do.

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Rob May writes at BusinessPundit on how he struggles with blogging from a skeptical perspective and his wariness of current memes, such as Wisdom of Crowds and Google-worship. The fact is that group think and herd mentality can lead to disastrous decisions. The contrarian position is a healthy one, Rob. Keep it up. (Here, Rob also explores metacognition and its relevance in understanding your thought processes and exploring issues and decision-making at a deeper level)

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Here, Irwin Lazar at CollaborationLoop explores the decision by Yahoo to reject Microsoft’s bid, and the myriad of possibilities such a combination would have on the collaboration market. The New York Times has Yahoo chief Jerry Yang’s explanation of the rebuff.

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The New York Times explores the Art of Persuasion.

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Cooperation and collaboration may rival computers and communications technology as the most improved aspects of business in the past 50 years.   Optimists hope that management by fiat, grunts, and growls will sometime soon be fully replaced by a conscious attempt to arrive at the best solution, regardless of its source.  This, I’m afraid is folly.  Two major problems remain to be solved before we herald in the era of kumbayaesque business practices:

1. The transaction cost of keeping everyone happy, and
2. The elimination of poutology as a career strategy.

Let’s treat them in turn. 

Transaction costs is a technical term from economics.  In it’s simplest form this can be thought of as just what it costs to exchange things in a market place.  More generally, transaction costs can be seen as the direct and indirect costs of obtaining a certain outcome.  So, in a business decision environment we can view transaction costs as the price of paying off the foot-draggers, saboteurs, whiners, and single-focus freaks.   In a highly collaborative environment where consensus and collaboration are valued as an end in themselves (because they are believed to bring about better decision options and execution actions) this cost is not negligible.  Who hasn’t seen a decision delayed, implementation altered, or lowest-common-denominator choices prevail, because someone appeared to object.  This is especially prevalent in hiring decisions, where a single ‘uhmm’ can be seen as the prelude to a veto war. 

Poutological behavior is more pernicious.  While more common among friends and family, pouting is often employed effectively as means to an end in business.   This refers to the act of pouting to gain leverage later.  In a sense, this is a particular type of anchoring bias.  If I pout about a decision today, but then acquiesce ‘because I’m a team-player’ then next time people will, whether they realize it or not, take into account my “magnanimous” gesture.  The net effect is that the pouter has greater leverage coming into the next round of collaborative decision making.   A pouter who is perceived as being invaluable has double leverage since the implicit threat of abrupt departure hangs over the team like Damocles’s sword.

Tomorrows collaboration tools and team training in business school have to do more than just help us collaborate and achieve consensus.  Managing the process of collaborating, disarming the poutologists, and reducing transaction costs are very important to help us avoid the politics of teams, and the dreaded ‘groupthink’ which poorly configured teams often sink to.  Such tools will allow us to prioritise tasks, and maintain a goal-oriented focus, thereby making politically motivated pouting as transparent as a child’s crossed arms and foot-stomping.