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Summary: "Most teams underperform. Yours can beat the odds. If you need the best practices and ideas for superior team building--but don't have time to find them--this book is for you. Here are 10 inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place. This collection of HBR articles will help you: boost team performance through mutual accountability, motivate large, diverse groups to tackle complex projects, increase groups' emotional intelligence, reverse the fortunes of a struggling team, prevent decision deadlock, extract results from a bunch of touchy superstars, fight constructively with top-management colleagues, and ensure productivity in far-flung teams."

From the post: "These virtual teams, largely composed of people who have never met, were not only productive but also more innovative than "face-to-face teams." "They make decisions faster with more input from others and develop policies that are implemented worldwide with fewer problems than conventional teams," said Malhotra."

it seems like the matrix form is alive and well in today's organizations - albeit having evolved from its early days. Why? Perhaps there is no bigger driver for the re-emergence of the matrix than organizations' increasing use of teams - virtual, project, cross-functional and global - to improve speed of delivery, customer responsiveness, cost concerns and productivity.

Study on productivity gain of 25% by using social media. 

A review of the literature on self-managed or self-directed work groups lends itself to the fact that more and more organizations are changing as a more competitive global society emerges. As a result, individual, team, and organizational roles are much different now than they were even twenty years ago. In order to stay competitive, organizations must allow themselves to evolve. By tapping into an ever present resource, their employees, the organization gains a wealth of expertise, enabling them to transform externally and, as a result, transforms internally to a healthier work environment. In spite of the challenges, self-managed work groups are an obvious win-win solution in our ever changing environment.

Across the technology world, many organisations are embracing new ways of working strategies that on the surface look like an interior design project but under the bonnet are improving productivity and ticking a number of strategic boxes.

Virtual workers are more productive and happier than traditional workers. This information was provided by Kate Lister and Additional information was taken from the whitepaper: Results-based Management: The Key to Unlocking Talent and Increasing Productivity.

IDEO's crowdsourcing platform where production, use and design meet.

It is a 100 page PDF describing scenarios for the future of work: Scenario 1: Global product creation in a networked company Scenario 2: E-professionals in ad-hoc self-organising teams Scenario 3: Coordinating distributed work of individual worker Scenario 4: Community-based collaborative workspace Scenario 5: Mobile workplaces in a collaborative business network Scenario 6: Mobile competence workers in global supply chain

Summary: "The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn't have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members felt freer to contribute--especially outside their established areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues. Reaping those advantages, though, demanded shrewd management of a virtual team's work processes and social dynamics. Rather than depend on videoconferencing or e-mail, which could be unwieldy or exclusionary, successful virtual teams made extensive use of sophisticated online team rooms, where everyone could easily see the state of the work in progress, talk about the work in ongoing threaded discussions, and be reminded of decisions, rationales, and commitments. Differences were most effectively hashed out in teleconferences, which team leaders also used to foster group identity and solidarity."

How to structure a virtual team and the role of social interaction in distributed work contexts

report talking about how performance is becoming more important than presence. mainly looking at the risks and possible problems of virtual work

Resources to start an intranet project for a "social" intranet. curated by Intranet tool provider Thoughtfarmer