Bernard Hill, playing a loveable grandfather in the BBC TV drama Sunshine, when asked by his grandson "what was the best football match ever?" gives an unexpected and poignant answer: The Christmas Truce..

Picture from the 2005 movie Joyeux Noel

The Christmas Truce is the true story of how British and German soldiers in the trenches on Christmas Eve 1914 called a truce and celebrated Christmas Day by singing carols, exchanging gifts and playing football together.

This heart-warming story is an example of a natural collaboration strategy known as Tit for Tat which is nature's preferred co-operation strategy and has been proven to be the best long-term tactic for win-win collaboration between two parties.

It is also a crucial strategy for team members to use to evolve win-win outcomes with their team mates.

Ken Thompson is an expert practitioner in the area of bioteaming, swarming, virtual enterprise networks, virtual professional communities and virtual teams and has published two landmark books:

Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Best Designs

The Networked Enterprise: Competing for the future through Virtual Enterprise Networks

Ken writes the highly popular bioteams blog which has over 500 articles on all aspects of bioteams (aka organizational biomimicry) - in other words how human groups can learn from nature's best teams.

Ken is also founder of an exciting European technology company Swarmteams which provides unique patent-pending bioteaming technologies for all shapes and sizes of groups, social networks, business clusters, virtual/mobile communities and enterprises. Swarmteams enables groups to be more responsive and agile by fully integrating their mobile phones and the web with bioteam working techniques. The latest Swarmteams implementation is SwarmTribes which helps musicians and bands form a unique collaboration with their fans for mutual benefit.

Tags: cooperation, tit for tat

Bioteams Books Reviews

Leadership under pressure: the two worst mistakes

August 7, 2008 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

I have been thinking a lot about what happens when a leader gets under severe pressure, usually because things are not going according to plan. It seems to me this is the very essence of real leadership and where leaders can really justify their salaries. BUT according to Professor Dietrich Dorner, in his excellent book The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations, there are two very tempting but ultimately disastrous tangents a leader can pursue in a crisis instead of addressing the real issues.

Buy it now from:
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Amazon.Co.UK

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