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
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Bioteams Books Reviews
What teams can learn from wolves
If you think that there is not much human teams can learn from nature think again! Temple Grandin in her amazing book Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (p303-307) puts forward the incredible theory that early humans only became today’s successful homo sapiens because they learned to act and think like the wolves they co-habited with.
Buy it now from:
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