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Open Source Software(OSS) and the Toyota Production System – unexpected similarities discovered!

"Corporate leaders seeking to boost growth, learning, and innovation may find the answer in a surprising place: the Linux open-source software community.

Linux is developed by an essentially volunteer, self- organizing community of thousands of programmers.

Most leaders would sell their grandmothers for workforces that collaborate as efficiently, frictionlessly, and creatively as the self-styled Linux hackers".

That is what Philip Evans and Bob Wolf say in an excellent article, Collaboration Rules, published in the Harvard Business Review July –August 2005 - The High Performance Organisation

Philip and Bob have discovered “surprising parallels between the anarchistic, caffeinated, hirsute world of Linux hackers and the disciplined, tea-sipping, clean-cut world of Toyota engineering.

Specifically, Toyota and Linux operate by rules that blend the self-organizing advantages of markets with the low transaction costs of hierarchies".

To me the whole ethos and approach of open-source software development embodies the key distinctions of bioteaming namely:

1. Leadership: treat every team member as a leader


2. Connectivity: connect the team members, partners and networks


3. Execution: experiment, co-operate and learn


4. Organisation: establish sustainable self-organisation

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Bioteams Books Reviews

Beyond Multinationals: a new corporate structure emerges

December 29, 2005 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

The rise of the MetaNational: In a new book, From Global to MetaNational, Strategy experts and Insead Professors, Yvez Doz, José Santos and Peter Williamsonargue that the future form of successful global enterprise has now changed from the multinational to the metanational.

Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK

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