You followed the blog; you listened to the podcasts; you watched the movies; now read the book! “Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Most Successful Designs” is now available from Amazon.

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In a previous article, Virtual Enterprise Networks allow business scale through virtual collaboration I introduced the idea of a Virtual Enterprise Network or VEN as a way for smaller businesses to achieve “virtual scale” by collaborating on business development, marketing and project delivery for major enterprise customers.

One of the Ten Trends to watch in 2006, according to the McKinsey Quarterly (Jan 2006), will be the emergence of new global structures with a barbell-like structure, with a few giants on top, a narrow middle, and a flourish of smaller, fast-moving players on the bottom.

As a facilitator I do a lot of work with groups of small businesses who say they are interested in "collaborating as a network" (whatever that means). The conventional approach to working with such a group is to first build some trust, exchange company information and then start exploring collaboration possibilities. The problem is that this approach does not really work!