Just because we might have selfish genes it does not mean we have to behave selfishly; nature knows when to be nice as well as nasty and nepotism occurs in the biological world too with equal destructiveness as our world. This is according to Richard Conniff author of The Ape in the Corner Office and reviewed in the UK Guardian Newspaper (27 May).

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UK Small companies more open to virtual working practices than big ones

According to Online Recruitment, “Big businesses are left behind as smaller firms pioneer the remote office”, May 31.

A survey of attitudes to teleworking in UK business, carried out by Mitel, finds somewhat surprisingly that small businesses (72%) are much more open to remote and flexible working practices than their larger counterparts (44%).

One might think that the larger companies more advanced IT and communications infrastructures might make them more amenable to teleworking?

However perhaps mindset may be more important than technology with the bigger companies preference for ‘command and control’ and “if you can’t see it you can manage it” holding them back in new working practices compared with a more ‘self-managed team’ approach popular with small entrepreneurial companies.

Kevin Kelly gives a fascinating talk on TED on the next 5,000 days of the web arguing that it has currently about the same processing power as a single human brain. However over the next 30 years Kelly suggests it will rapidly grow to the power of 6 Billion human brains and exceed the total combined processing power of the human population.

In a previous article, Outsourcing, virtual teams and knowledge work, I commented on the trend to outsource knowledge intensive work off-shore to developing countries. Fay Hansen, writing for Workforce Management, Where the Knowledge Workers Are, argues that we are facing a massive and unstoppable flow of R&D jobs to China, India and Russia....