Build an adaptable, vibrant organization where everyone thrives
Ken Everett is an Australian who has lived in US, UK, Singapore and Italy. He is an Executive Fellow University of Essex Business School, and formerly worked for IBM and Wilson Learning. He is also a former school teacher. Ken is the Founder and Network Architect of TOYFNET (Think On Your Feet® Network), with 300…
Designing the Networked Organization, the new book from Australian entrepreneur Ken Everett, is a gem. The leader of TOYFNET (Think on Your Feet® Network), an affiliation of about 300 training providers in thirty countries, came to understand and appreciate the important strategic edge that networked organizations enjoy over their more traditional counterparts. While developing TOYFNET,…
The Canadian Snowbirds Demonstration Team has been thrilling audiences at high-performance air shows across North America since 1978. A branch of the Canadian Air Force, one would think such a group would be rigidly hierarchical—but it’s not. It’s really quite self-managed. One of the joys of working with the Morning Star Self-Management Institute is…
Humans have often turned to ants in the past for instructional models—references to ant behavior pepper ancient texts; the classic toy Ant Farm teaches children about work by watching ants go about their business in a model of a real farm. Can ants, the supreme self-managers of nature, provide any lessons for the scalability of…
Book Review, by Doug Kirkpatrick The Starfish and the Spider (Portfolio, 2006) is written by two superb dot-connectors, Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, who weave such seemingly random topics as anthropology, the Great Barrier Reef, chemistry, Burning Man, industrial theory, Alcoholics Anonymous, web culture and the war on terror into a tightly-knit quilt of…
I interviewed tech entrepreneur Mark Dowds at the headquarters of his company, Brainpark. Brainpark, a Bay Area software company, specializes in bringing people (and resources) together around pertinent, real-time information, thereby dissolving organizational silos and paving the way for lofty performance. Mark sat down to tell us the story behind Brainpark, where he serves as…
