In a just published book Work Goes Mobile by Michael Lattanzi, Antti Korhonen and Vishy Gopalakrishnan, authors of Nokia’s mobility master plan, propose a very useful application profiling scheme to establish the degree to which a business could exploit mobile technologies in their broadest sense. This approach would also be very useful for establishing the support requirements for virtually networked teams.

John Austin, in Don’t forget to laugh pokes fun at low-cost leadership styles with some alternative versions of those motivational posters which team leaders, who know nothing about motivation, like to use. Dr Edwards Deming was the founder of the TQM movement and If you really have to stick something on your wall then it should only be his 14 Points.

BBC News (7 Feb 2006) report that Google is to integrate its popular e-mail service with its own instant messaging, known as Gmail Chat to allow users to chat and send e-mails from the same web browser window. The report also gives the current stats on the subscriber bases of the 'big 3' in Instant Messaging:

Almost all of us have been part of some team in our workforce or organisation or even a sports club. Usually this is a mixed experience - we have some victories but lots of failures too. A lot of people from the technology world, myself included, hoped that all the communication technologies like email, the Internet, broadband, instant messaging and mobile phones would make things better for teams. The reality is in many cases it's made things worse. So how is it that nature's teams seem to work much better than ours and what have we forgotten?

On Saturday 21st August 2004 at the Athens Olympic Games, Matthew Pinsent, CBE entered Olympic history. In one of the classic sporting moments of all time, he led Great Britain to victory over the Canadian World Champions by just eight one hundredths of a second. I recently heard Matthew speak about the teamwork in world-class rowing teams where he stressed the importance of two vital ingredients: distributed leadership and synchronised team member response.

UK Guardian Online reports, Feb 8, that local authorities could save millions of pounds if they adopt wider use of mobile technologies, according to a new report: Cutting The Wires. The research, published by independent thinktank the New Local Government Network (NLGN), suggests that councils should use mobile phones and IT to become better organised and more relevant to their local communities.

We have completed a short research project into the beliefs of three High Performing Teams (HPTs) in a large software organisation. Our research indicated that four beliefs were universally held: clear and public accountability, trusted competency, give and take and outcome optimism. Five other beliefs were largely or partially held suggesting that an HPT may have between 4 and 9 key beliefs.

Sharing broadband via a wireless network with your next door neighbours or even your whole apartment block is the latest social collaboration phenomenon in distributed computing. It can reduce your costs, increase your speed and enhance your download capacity. But be careful to enable your personal firewall and wireless encryption so that only those with the pin can use it and remember to disable file sharing.

Businessweek Online, Jan 23, reports that In a bid to challenge search giant Google, Yahoo the Web's most-used portal, is betting on the wisdom of crowds by developing its offer beyond algorithmic search to social search. Yahoo are doing this by acquiring companies in the social networking arena such as Flickr (photo sharing), Del.icio.us (web favourites sharing aka social bookmarking) and WebJay (music sharing).

Leading a virtual team requires different skills than leading a traditional team. For example many virtual team and virtual network outcomes are counter-intuitive due to the complex living nature of the team itself. Discovering this 'on the job' is as crazy as training airline pilots without using flight simulators! This article describes a research project which developed a PC-based simulator tool to help virtual team leaders experience decision making in various scenarios.