Open Source and Toyota teams compared
Stumble It!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:
- Leadership: treat every team member as a leader
- Connectivity: connect the team members, partners and networks
- Execution: experiment, co-operate and learn
- Organisation: establish sustainable self-organisation
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Social Propagation is the secret to organizational and team learning
and the most evolved non-human species on the planet is not who you think it is! Arie de Geus is credited by many as the inventor of the concept of "the learning organisation". In his book "The Living Company" Arie describes an interview with Professor Alan Wilson, distinguished zoologist and botanist.
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