Book Reviews
Predictably Irrational teams
Teams, networks, groups and their members behave in an irrational way but quite predictably so. A good team leader will understand this and use it to everyone’s advantage. One key point is to knowing each team members motivations and whether they are operating in “social economy” or “market economy” mindsets.
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The Truth about Office Life
David Bolchover, author of The Living Dead: The Truth about Office Life, writing for the UK Times Newspaper in “Sickness at work: the big story” asks the big question: Why do smaller companies have fewer absences? And what can the big corporations do?
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Effective Brainstorming: Top Tips
Brainstorming, despite the popularity of the term, is one of the most challenging collaborative activities to carry out. While most people think they know how to brainstorm, very few really understand how to consistently make a session work. Ken Thompson and Robin Good share some of the secrets gleaned from "The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm"
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Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Steven Poole, writing for the Guardian on Saturday March 15, reviews "Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration", by Keith Sawyer and concludes that the book's big idea is that there is no such thing as the lone genius: everything turns out to be collaborative.
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BIOTEAMS book just published
You followed the blog; you listened to the podcasts; you watched the movies; now read the book! “Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Most Successful Designs” is now available from Amazon.
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Seven team decision-making methods
The way a team decides to decide is one of the most important decisions it makes. In the excellent book, “Why Teams Don’t Work” the authors, Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley, identify seven key decision-making methods for teams.
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The Starfish and The Spider
The Book "The Starfish and The Spider" uses the amazing capabilities of starfish to survive and regrow damaged limbs as a powerful metaphor for leaderless organisations.
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The Cult of the Amateur
Read this book if your future is anyway connected to Web2.0. Andrew Keen’s central thesis is that if all content (e.g. music, video, news, books, encyclopaedias) is produced by “amateurs” and no-one will pay for “professional” versions then its curtains for quality or independent publishing.
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Collaborative thinking: four key roles
In his unique book Dialogue and the art of thinking together William Issacs introduces the Four-Player System originally developed by David Kantor. This is a very important technique for supporting real collaborative thinking in teams.
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When collaboration goes bad
Poor organisational intelligence leads to 'coblaboration' instead of collaboration.Harvard Professor, David Perkins, in his latest book, "King Arthur's Round Table : How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations", discusses the importance of "organisational Intelligence" and "developmental leadership" and how the absence of these leads to coblaboration rather than collaboration in organisational teams.
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