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
Team leadership without formal authority
Lateral leadership skills are how to get the job done when you are not the boss.Roger Fisher, the world's leading expert on win-win negotiation, partners with Alan Sharp in Lateral Leadership (1998, 2004) to identify three fundamental problems with collaboration in organisations and what you can do to fix them.
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