Extreme Team Leadership by Father Ted

The current focus on 'social networking' might make us think we should spend most of our efforts warming up distant relationships and creating new ones. However it would be a big mistake to neglect the relationships we already have. We can learn a lot about relationship ecosystems from Jim Henson the inventor of the Muppets.

Mobile teams, who spend much of their day on the road, face communication challenges that cannot be solved by web-connected laptops alone. This case study shows how the Intermediate Care Team at DaisyHill Hospital addressed these challenges with a Bioteams approach supported by integrated mobile phone and web "swarm" technology.

Kevin Kelly gives a fascinating talk on TED on the next 5,000 days of the web arguing that it has currently about the same processing power as a single human brain. However over the next 30 years Kelly suggests it will rapidly grow to the power of 6 Billion human brains and exceed the total combined processing power of the human population.

Be ye content with thine own content! The UK Daily Telegraph reports that bloggers have been given Ten Commandments by a recent Christian conference in response to how quickly religious blogs can descend into vitriol. Maybe they should apply to all bloggers?

At certain times a team leader needs to facilitate rather than direct. However when a leader acts too much as a facilitator or a facilitator starts to try to lead a team you get problems. Enjoy what happens when the Red Dwarf crew get themselves in a real mess over this point.

If, like me, you think that Company Mission Statements are often not worth the fancy cards they are embossed on check out Dilbert's Automatic Mission Statement Generator. Unfortunately it looks like many of our major enterprises and public organizations used it already!

When large companies are organized in the traditional divisional structure, strategic decisions often fall to managers under short-term budgetary pressure. Success in one unit hides failures in others and ventures that promise strong future growth are starved if they can't contribute short-term.

IT Knowledge Exchange reports that The Wall Street Journal has just launched a heavy web2.0-focused redesigned website which goes against the grain of almost all current social networking sites - you have to pay a subscription to join.

One of the key lessons from NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is the importance of being congruent. If you don't really believe what you are saying your incongruence will "leak" to your audience.

Robin Good at MasterNewMedia publishes an excellent paper by Mikkel on Information Overload which explains very clearly what it is and how it is constantly impacting our lives even if we don't recognise it.

Alexander Kandybin, of Booz & Company, suggests consumer products companies need to look to the power of natural selection to break out of the incremental innovation trap.

KartOO is a meta search engine which presents its results nicely grouped into a graphical map showing the different clusters of search results so you can easily select and continue searching within the relevant clusters.

Nature has a way of automatically right-sizing a group to tackle the job at hand. Just like the Russian Matryoshka Dolls (dolls within dolls), small groups link into bigger ones, which in turn link into still bigger ones. In this follow-up article to Why penguins have no commanding officer and Did ants invent the perfect system for communicating via mobile technology?, Ken Thompson writing for NESTA explores what we can learn about teamwork and group/community size from nature's most successful teams.

Neither snap judgements nor sleeping on a problem are any better than conscious thinking for making complex decisions, according to new research. The finding debunks a controversial 2006 research result asserting that unconscious thought is superior for complex decisions, such as buying a house or car. If anything, the new study suggests that conscious thought leads to better choices.

Auren Hoffman, chief executive of Reputation Technology company Rapleaf, writing for BusinessWeek, reviews how the current presidential candidates have become exceptionally adept at "microtargeting" persuadable voters and in using the latest social media software to go beyond seeking traditional support ("give us your money and vote") towards also seeking active advocacy ("call three swing voters").