or you don’t benefit from the know-how you don’t use

I do a bit of flying and Ray's excellent cautionary tale, which follows here, reminds me of the 3 most useless things in aviation:

1. Runway behind you


2. Sky above you (nobody ever crashed into the sky!)


3. Fuel back at the airport

Bioteams Guest Article by Ray Symmes

In an excellent paper (PDF), The Virtual Organisation – Technical or Social Innovation? Lessons from the Film Industry, Lucas Introna, Hope Moore and Mike Cushman from the London School of Economics explore the parallels and the lessons we can learn in trying to form effective virtual enterprises, virtual organisations, virtual teams and virtual networks.

Major Oil Company exploits self-organizing virtual communities

Thanks to Brian Cleland for drawing my attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal by David Wessel entitled Motivating Workers By Giving Them a Vote.

In the US there has been a movement within large contractors in the defence and advanced engineering sectors (e.g. automobile and aerospace) to develop more agile supply chains by working differently with their suppliers. One of the leading proponents of this approach is Ted Goransen (and author of the book “The Agile Virtual Enterprise”)

A case study of a public sector learning organisation from the chief executive's perspective. I will always remember the first time I met Peter because he told me that the main way he helped enterprises was to get them to throw away most of their processes. You don’t hear many consultants say this so I got curious! Bioteams Guest Article by Peter Fryer

Thanks to Dinesh Tantri for pointing me to an interesting article on cnn.com way back in 1999 entitled “The organic enterprise thrives on your knowledge”

Copy of Ken Thompson's Bioteams presentation (pdf) presented at the "Collaboration in Financial Services Conference" June 16, 2005, London

GlaxoSmithKline, Britain's biggest pharmaceutical company, is to launch a drug development initiative to take advantage of opportunities outside the company.