Self managed teams: OSS and Toyota compared
Stumble It!Harvard Business Review identifies unexpected similarities between Open Source Software (OSS) and the Toyota Production System
"Corporate leaders seeking to boost growth, learning, and innovation may find the answer in a surprising place: the Linux open-source software community.
Linux is developed by an essentially volunteer, self- organizing community of thousands of programmers.
Most leaders would sell their grandmothers for workforces that collaborate as efficiently, frictionlessly, and creatively as the self-styled Linux hackers".
That is what Philip Evans and Bob Wolf say in an excellent article, Collaboration Rules, published in the Harvard Business Review July –August 2005 - The High Performance Organisation
Philip and Bob have discovered “surprising parallels between the anarchistic, caffeinated, hirsute world of Linux hackers and the disciplined, tea-sipping, clean-cut world of Toyota engineering.
Specifically, Toyota and Linux operate by rules that blend the self-organizing advantages of markets with the low transaction costs of hierarchies".
To me the whole ethos and approach of open-source software development embodies the key distinctions of bioteaming namely:
- Leadership: treat every team member as a leader
- Connectivity: connect the team members, partners and networks
- Execution: experiment, co-operate and learn
- Organisation: establish sustainable self-organisation
Tags: OSS, self-managed teams
Digg | 
del.icio.us | 
Reddit | 
Yahoo! | 
Add to my favourites
Comments
Bioteams Books Reviews
The short message phenomenon challenged
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.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Related Team Leadership Development Articles
Team Leadership: Do you play chess or draughts with your team
According to Marcus Buckingham in his book “The one thing you need to know” mediocre leaders think of staff as draughts pieces but good leaders think of them as chess pieces...
Leaders use 3 types of networking: operational, personal and strategic
I was just about to write a post on the excellent article "How Leaders Create and Use Networks” from the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review when I discovered Jay Cross had beaten me to it!
Virtual Entrepreneurship
Bioteams Guest Author Ray Symmes describes how virtual entrepreneurs inhabit the hidden spaces in and between enterprises.
