In the US there has been a movement within large contractors in the defence and advanced engineering sectors (e.g. automobile and aerospace) to develop more agile supply chains by working differently with their suppliers. One of the leading proponents of this approach is Ted Goransen (and author of the book “The Agile Virtual Enterprise”)

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reports in a very short article on a “Meta Analysis of Virtual Teams” by Sheila Simsarian Webber which highlights both the opportunities and challenges facing virtual teams:

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.

Bees really do point to new foodsources by dancing

The waggle dance is a famous example of the power of one-many broadcast communications in one of natures most successful teams – honeybees!

Ron Armstrong writes a good introduction on Self-Managed Team Leadership in LeaderValues which is a rich on-line source of thinking and best practice on all aspects of leadership.

Count to three before you hit that send button

Alec Appelbaum, in The Evils of E-Mail, for CIO Magazine, discusses some of the silly things we do in email, the impact they have on the unfortunate recipients and what we can do about it.

First find out what type of team you are dealing with!

One of the most important team questions, often not properly resolved when a team is setup is:

"What type of team is it?"

Fritjof Capra says organisations are not just like living systems - they are living systems! In his latest book, The Hidden Connections, Fritjof Capra, acclaimed physicist and author of the Web of Life and the Tao of Physics, challenges us to go beyond the metaphor and see to what extent human organisations can literally be understood as living systems.

Bioteaming – the secret to high-performing, self-organising, virtually networked teams

In my research into bioteaming I have (so far) identified four action zones and about a dozen action rules.This article provides a brief introduction.

Robin Good comments on research by both Russell Research and Raindance Communications, Inc., showing that online meetings fail to engage anything like the full concentration of the participants who utilise their spare brainpower bandwidth to multi-task and do other things. We should have a prize for the person who has done the most unusual thing whilst "technically present" at an online meeting?