All in community
Cutting Through points to a great paper on "Making virtual teams work." Trust is a huge aspect of any teams, and as this paper discusses, our ability to create and maintain trust in virtual environments is somewhat limited.
Shawn Callahan at Anecdote mentions that "Chip Goodyear says $8.5B profit partly due to communities of practice efforts."
In an environment where everyone knows the goal of the system, collaboration become the way of doing business. People know what their roles are and how they support the goal. [Update: Article no longer free.]
Joy London highlighted an interesting article about the value of conversation in knowledge-intensive firms.
Dinesh Tantri talks about a new approach to best practices within in his organization where employees are encouraged to challenge best practices and work out their resolution within communities tied to those practices.
At the AIChE meeting, Cawas Cooper from Air Products talked about a project that evolved from their Innovation Week, where people were encouraged to come up with new ideas and collaborate with their colleagues to sell the idea to their respective management. Those projects that get management blessing are pursued.
Lee Lefeever has a nice article on a familiar topic for those that have been in the "internet" world for a while. The discussion has morphed from listserv vs. the Usenet to web-based forums, and now we can add the idea of weblogs. The issues remain the same. What does the group want?