Traditional Organizational Teams Just Became Extinct

Ken Thompson, former European IT Manager with Reuters and a pioneer of the burgeoning "biomimicry" design movement, has mapped out a fundamentally new model for teams. He teaches organizations how they can look to the natural world to create high performance "bioteams" based on nature's best designs.

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 11, 2008 -- In the interconnected world of the 21st century, you and everyone you work with must be able to function in and through teams, and must also grasp what the latest concept of "team" really means. With the emergence of global Internet collaboration, social networks and mobile communications, the very meaning of the word "team" has changed entirely. Ken Thompson, former European IT Manager with Reuters and a pioneer of the burgeoning "biomimicry" design movement, has mapped out a fundamentally new model for teams. He teaches organizations how they can look to the natural world to create high performance "bioteams" based on nature's best designs.

In his book, Bioteams, Thompson offers a way to build exceptionally agile, high performing teams based on a thorough examination of the key communication principles that underpin nature's most successful groups -- from signal bursts of migrating flocks of geese, to the waggle dance of honeybees, to the pheromone trails laid down by ants. Based on nature's communication patterns, he provides a complete set of practical techniques that have been proven with real teams in the field, whose stories are described in a comprehensive set of case studies in the book.

According to Thompson, "Using the principles of bioteaming, command-and-control leadership gives way to connect-and-collaborate, where every member of an organizational team is a 'leader.' In nature and in bioteams, leaders don't give commands, they transmit information, trusting the team members' competencies and gaining accountability through transparency. True team leadership is about cooperation, not control. It's about acting on opportunities, and letting others lead the leader when they know best about getting stuff done."

Bioteams offers a vision of what successful teaming experiences look like. More than a book about team dynamics, Bioteams offers stories, principles, and guidelines showing how any individual can successfully participate in almost any work or learning-related situation faced today. Toby Coppel, Managing Director of Yahoo! Europe, said of the book, "If you are looking for the book that describes the radical new model for teams in today's world―this is it!" Jay Cross, CEO of the Internet Time Group, summarized Thompson's work, "Ironically, these are not really Thompson's rules; they are Mother Nature's."

http://www.mkpress.com

# # #