Self organizing virtual communities
Stumble It!Major Oil Company, Schlumberger, exploits self-organizing virtual communities.
David Wessel reports in an article in the Wall Street Journal by David Wessel entitled Motivating Workers By Giving Them a Vote how in multinational organisations with thousands of employees spread all over the globe effectively sharing knowledge, expertise and experience can be a real headache.
The article describes the success Schlumberger have had in using online communities of practice with some 23 communities ranging from chemistry to well-engineering supporting 140 special-interest subgroups, and involving more than 11,750 employees as members.
Schlumberger attribute much of their success in this area to the decision they made to make the communities self-governing and even allowing each community to elect its own leaders.
Self-organisation is a critical success factor in sustainable biological communities.
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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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Thanks to Dinesh Tantri for pointing me to a very useful and possibly under-exposed report by the Information Work Productivity Council into ‘IT Support for Global Collaboration’ published in January 2004.
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