Grass Roots Management shows you how to grow initiative and responsibility in all your people. It might not appeal to purists, but using the narrative of a business based on a garden open to the public the author gives a very simple, accessible and readable account of 'self-managed teams'.

New research indicates that if you feel that your organisation's leader does not know your name then it is a huge de-motivator.

There are four myths about teams which are particularly deadly because each of them is nearly true. Myth1: Talent is the most important thing in any team. Myth2: The team’s goals won't suddenly change without anyone realising it. Myth3: 'Collaboration' means basically the same thing to all team members. Myth4: You should always play 'win-win'

According to research by UPS Europe Business Monitor involving a survey of around 1500 business leaders from Europe’s top 15,000 companies organisations are developing more support for policies to help women attain more senior positions.

When a new enterprise enters its market it must quickly find a viable niche in its business ecosystem or it will not survive. Similarly for cross-functional teams in major organisations : if the team does not find a value niche in that organisation's overall ecosystem then it will not deliver its potential. Amazingly certain key concepts in biological ecosystems transfer immediately into the business world.

We are bombarded with the idea its good to talk and its good to text. But is texting and other forms of mobile phone interaction a useful form of communication? Or is it even a form of communication at all or something totally different? In a mini-book "Heidegger, Habermas and the mobile phone" the author invokes some key thinkers of the twentieth century to offer an essential alternative to the new doctrine of 'm-communication': Martin Heidegger, who saw humanity as ‘the entity which talks’ and Jürgen Habermas, current-day advocate of authentic communication.

The Apprentice (BBC TV) which showcases the management style of Alan Sugar, founder and chairman of Amstrad, implies that aggressive leadership is the real secret of business success. However Sally Bibb, author of The Stone Age Company, contends that much of the success achieved by such leaders is in spite of rather than a result of their ‘no-prisoners’ style.

Authentic social experience is beyond the web.In On the Internet by Hubert Dreyfus, a UC-Berkeley philosophy professor, provides a truely unique philosophical perspective on the internet. Dreyfus seriously challenges a number of widely held assumptions such as the usefulness of search engines, the effectiveness of distance learning and the possibility of meaningful virtual relationships.

85,000 cellphones and 21,000 PDAs were left in Chicago taxis in 6 months last year! Thanks to Ray Symmes for pointing out an article in the New York Times (Feb 21), Too Many New Gadgets, Too Much Information at Risk, which suggests that companies do not realise the security risk they are running by equipping their workforces with high-data storage mobile devices in terms of wifi evesdropping, theft and loss.

In 1964 psychiatrist Dr.Eric Berne published a now famous book Games people play in which he identified the different games people play, often unwittingly, in social situations based on his concept of transaction analysis. The advent of the virtual team has created a whole new set of games including Freeloader, Pseudo-engager, Chase-me, Senior Partner, Inquisitor, Stop-Starter, Overcommunicator, Email Fixater and Attachmentitis.