Self-managed teams: commercial examples
Stumble It!They sound neat in theory but do self-managed teams (SMTs) actually work. In, Trust People and They'll Surprise You, Jeremy Zawodny describes a couple of real examples including a jet engine plant and SouthWest Airlines. Another good example of an SMT is Capital One Bank.
About General Electric Durham:
"Not only are the teams self-managing, they have unprecedented authority and transparency.Everyone knows how much money everyone else makes, because employees are paid according to his or her skill... This plant has no time clock. Workers leave to go to their kids' band concerts and Little League games"
About Southwest Airlines:
"You might think that the SWA gates would be a madhouse, but in fact they are very orderly. People arrive and begin to lineup into three lines (A, B and C) in a quite orderly fashion. People in each row are cordial to each other asking “is this the line for B to san diego?” and exchanging niceties and often that question allows people to break into a friendly conversation. If you were to look at the gate area from above, you’d see what looks like three branches on a tree, they curve around the furniture and the walls, but they are a line".
About Capital One Bank:
"Swarming - once Capital One identify a product as a potential winner they deploy exceptionally quickly and with force to attempt to dominate and cherry pick the niche before the competition can catch up."
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Animal Instincts in the office
Just because we might have selfish genes it does not mean we have to behave selfishly; nature knows when to be nice as well as nasty and nepotism occurs in the biological world too with equal destructiveness as our world. This is according to Richard Conniff author of The Ape in the Corner Office and reviewed in the UK Guardian Newspaper (27 May).
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