{"id":23887541,"date":"2008-07-30T05:31:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-30T05:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/2008\/07\/30\/Engines-of-Democracy-Fast-Company\/"},"modified":"2009-02-12T10:18:35","modified_gmt":"2009-02-12T10:18:35","slug":"Engines-of-Democracy-Fast-Company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/?p=23887541","title":{"rendered":"Engines of Democracy | Fast Company"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='sustuff'>Stumbleupon Review of : <a href='http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/magazine\/28\/ge.html'>http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/magazine\/28\/ge.html<\/a><a href='http:\/\/www.stumbleupon.com\/click_redir.php?t=4993bddea33c5&#038;src=blog&#038;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fastcompany.com%2Fmagazine%2F28%2Fge.html'><img src='http:\/\/bunty.tv\/images\/smallstumble.png'><\/a><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<ul style=\"display : block; margin : 15px 30px 20px 30px; padding : 10px 10px 10px 20px; border-left : 2px solid #aaa; font : normal 1.2em Lucida Casual, Helvetica; color : #888;width : 650px; background : #111;\">\nPart of his education at GE\/Durham has involved something that many teams stumble over: how to get around the truism that committees don&#8217;t make decisions, people do. At GE\/Durham, virtually every decision is made by a team, by consensus. Consensus is another of the founding principles of GE\/Durham. It is so ingrained that technicians have turned consensus into a verb: The people at the plant routinely talk about &#8220;consensing&#8221; on something.<\/p>\n<p>The average group of 15 or 16 people can&#8217;t reach consensus on where to go for lunch &#8212; let alone how to run a factory. How to organize a production line, whether to hire someone, how to assess someone&#8217;s skills for promotion, even how to pick who will work over the weekend &#8212; those kinds of issues inspire strong disagreement. &#8220;Everybody doesn&#8217;t see things in the same way,&#8221; says Williams. &#8220;But we&#8217;ve had training on how to reach consensus. We&#8217;ve had training on how to live with ideas that we might not necessarily agree with.&#8221; And the team members always have the power to change things that don&#8217;t work out. Says Williams: &#8220;All the things you normally fuss and moan about to yourself and your buddies &#8212; well, we have a chance to do something about them. I can&#8217;t say, &#8216;They&#8217; don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going on, or, &#8216;They&#8217; made a bad decision. I am &#8216;they.&#8217; &#8220;<\/p>\n<p>\nFrom Teams to Tribes<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Teams,&#8221; &#8220;teamwork,&#8221; &#8220;teaming&#8221; &#8212; these are such overused words, such overworked concepts, that they have been all but drained of meaning. GE\/Durham isn&#8217;t so much a team environment as it is a tribal community. There are rules, rituals, and folklore; there is tribal loyalty and tribal accountability. There is a connection to a wider world, beyond the tribe.<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stumbleupon Review of : http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/magazine\/28\/ge.html Part of his education at GE\/Durham has involved something that many teams stumble over: how to get around the truism that committees don&#8217;t make decisions, people do. At GE\/Durham, virtually every decision is made by &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/?p=23887541\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1113794],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23887541"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23887541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23887541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23887541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23887541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/su.blog.bunty.tv\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23887541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}