Collaboration lessons from Die Hard

John McClane relied on his CB radio survival just like I depend on my iPhone

This article is just one long spoiler for the movie Die Hard. If you haven’t seen it, you should—it’s a classic! Unless you hate seeing gunfire; then you should really not see it.

We often talk as if online collaboration is a new challenge, one minted by hybrid work, Slack and Teams. But the 1988 movie Die Hard remind us that the fundamentals of virtual collaboration aren’t about the technology: They’re about building trust when you can’t see someone face-to-face.

How can we possibly learn about building online trust from a movie that is ten years older than Google, eighteen years older than Google Docs, and nearly thirty years older than Teams?

Well, its prescient insights jumped out at me last year, during our annual holiday re-watch. I was struck by how much of the movie is propelled by an entirely virtual collaboration: the relationship between the movie’s cop-hero, John McClane, and his outside-the-crisis helper, Sgt. Al Powell.