If you’ve spent any amount of time inside the walls of an organization, you understand the promise and perils of collaboration. Great things can happen when we reach across silos and boundaries and seek to work together in pursuit of shared interests. However, as team guru Prof. J. Richard Hackman offers when talking about the potential of teams, “just don’t count on it.” I’m going to set aside my usual focus on project teams and raise my sights just a bit to the rarefied air of the senior levels of organizations. In both my executive and consulting experience, I’ve observed or have been a part of situations where otherwise really smart people crash and burn on the shores of potential internal (strategic) collaboration. In many of these cases, there's good money and important marketplace moves that were left on the table as a result of a failure to collaborate.