Take a close look at the world of business, and it should be clear that companies today are operating less and less as stand-alone units. It seems every day in the media, we read about the formation of new alliances and E-marketplaces, as well as new forms and thoughts on mergers and acquisitions. The cyberatlas of business is changing at Net speed. In every sector and across sectors, collaboration networks are forming. Businesses are opening themselves up to work more closely with partners, suppliers, customers, employees, and even competitors.

Collaboration is "king" in that companies have realized they must look outside their own bounds and behaviors that define them as stand-alone players. They must transform themselves into competitive communities through external relationships to become more successful, more competitive, and more customer-focused.

A community is characterized by shared core values, core goals, information sharing, resource pooling, and real-time interaction and learning. And that's what business success is about today. You may ask yourself, "What's new here?" For an answer, try the following exercise: Pick a company, any company, and answer three questions:

• Does the company stand alone as a self-contained unit in the market?
• Does the company have a protectionist attitude toward its intellectual capital and products?
• Does the company's strategy focus mainly on organic growth?

If the answer to these questions is yes, you've got a company that likely has less-than-stellar growth, isn't creating shareholder value, and is struggling. It's likely that it should be placed on the endangered species list. If the chosen company happens to be your company, it's likely time for a corporate makeover.

This statement may lead you to ask yet another question: What's the goal of the business makeover? Is it simply to undo the stand-alone attitude and protectionism or to move away from organic growth? The answer: a resounding no. The answer can be deduced from some observations about business as we proceed into the new century and the Next Generation Economy (NGE).

The NGE company competes as a community. It needs to focus on fierce competitiveness for its survival in terms of value structure, cost structure, customer connectivity, and agility. It must have access to new hyper-economies of scale and world markets. The NGE company also needs to have a powerful, pervasive, and smart "sense and respond skin." This "skin" enables it to sense the market, its customers, its competitors, and its positioning so it can respond. Translate these lofty thoughts into actionable items, and you've defined a company that has best practices in supply-chain management, customer-relationship management, IT, competitive analysis, innovation, and more. And, quite simply, no single company can be world-class in all these areas simultaneously. Therefore, the main option of the NGE company by which it can attain and sustain a leadership position is to excel in collaboration and compete as a massively coordinated business community-a network that's networked with its own internal business community.

Seven Steps To A Collaborative Community Here's what your company can do to act and compete as a community:

Understand your business topology. Take your hierarchy and turn it into a collaborative ring. Map your needed capabilities against where you are today. Grow those capabilities by expanding the community wherever possible. Dissect your own cost structure and economies of scale. Look for new possibilities through partnerships, alliances, and shared-power pools with your competitors while thinking globally. Build your "sense and respond" skin to leverage your network for the mutual competitive positioning of all those in the community. Plan to sustain and evolve the community actively. Develop a small set of governance principles for the community. Most importantly, focus on the shared values, goals, and mechanisms for knowledge sharing and learning within the community.

DATA: Howard A. Rubin

The strength of the internal collaborative community should be clear. Look at General Motors, IBM, and, yes, even Microsoft. These companies have a strong internal community sense and shared values. All exhibit a large degree of sharing and pooling of information internally through their governance structures and technology architectures. Interestingly enough, these three Old Economy companies are definitely NGE players: They've taken the next step and transformed themselves by externalizing their community capabilities.

Consider GM's participation in E-marketplaces and its entry into lifestyle services through OnStar. Consider IBM and Microsoft and their community characteristics. They've both continually expanded their competitive footprint and capabilities through supply-chain relationships, value-added resellers, mergers and acquisitions, and various forms of venture investment.

The new business topology of the NGE company is a ring-like structure of internal and external collaborators that provide fast interchange of information and provide a massive surface area for the sense and response skin. For example, consider the organizational structure of companies such as IBM and Amazon.com. Instead of being a pure hierarchy with all parts connected through the corporate entity, the structure favors peer-to-peer communication among all divisions. In this way, competitive knowledge and opportunities in one division are available directly to everyone. This is, in essence, a fast-acting sense, communicate, and distribute "skin."

As we progress into the 21st century, new forms and ways of doing business are emerging. NGE enterprises are those that are actively redefining themselves beyond sector bounds through their interactions and relationships. They're competing as communities.

Is all this too far out? Quite simply, in this age of "techno-Darwinism," Charles Darwin sums it up nicely: It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that's most responsive to change.

The choice for businesses, then, seems straightforward: Become the most responsive to change by building your community or create a new species of business.

Howard A. Rubin is executive VP at Meta Group and professor emeritus at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He can be reached at Howard_Rubin@compuserve.com.