Why not get involved with common purpose and experience it before passing judgement again.

Common Purpose is a secretive, New Labour and Brussels funded, Marxist-led, ‘Trojan Horse’ operation which is undermining British society to pave the way for the take-over of Britain by the European Union Collective of Communist Purpose (EUCCP), also known as the EU Police State.

You are a member of a 5th column movement. You should be ashamed.

Perhaps the reason for this is that when the team consists of scientists and engineers the participants tend to focus on the details and avoid the big picture. It is facilitating the big picture that brings out the best in people.

In the oil industry we have seen a major shift in team work over the past thirty years. When I started out there were teams of geologists, geophysicists, engineers, etc. all working in separate vacuums. The work passed down a chain whose links were incredibly weak. Feedback barely existed.

Then, starting around 1980 the concept of teamwork took root and flourished, culminating in the “managed asset”. Here everyone had ownership of the project and had a say in how it would progress. Failure was not necessarily a shameful admission but seen as recognition (I once read that Eastman Kodak’s research group even had a small cannon which would be fired whenever a researcher found his work was going nowhere; it was a not a signal of failure but an announcement of “moving on” and would be received with loud cheering!)

I do have mixed emotions about where the asset team approach has evolved, perhaps because the MBAs have appropriated it and reduced everything to the bottom line. The bottom line simply doesn’t have much accord with serendipity and therein lies a problem facing many companies today. Even though the right dose of serendipity can make all the difference!

I was recently asked by a NYSE-listed company to assist in their “planning for opportunity”. That s-word figured prominently in my recommendations!