Deborah Gordon Ted Talk

In the TED Talk: The Emergent Genius of Ant Colonies given by Deborah Gordon, the subject of teamwork was explored on the more rudimentary level of ant colonies. The premise of the video focused on how a researcher explains the organizational behavior of ants and the way in which this benefits the whole organization. This interesting TED Talk, which may be extrapolated to human teamwork, has a run time of 20:21 minutes and can be accessed by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on the following URL: http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants.

Tom Wujec presented a TED Talk titled: Build a Tower, Build a Team which centered on the seemingly elementary activity of teams building the highest tower with spaghetti and some other simple

I found this to be exemplified in the Wujec video where recent college graduates were out performed by kindergarteners, where the ridged training received by these particular college students was too narrow in concept to satisfactorily succeed in this task (Wujec, 2010). The talk given by Shirky also reinforced this in my mind by showing how adapting to a more seamless group collaboration can facilitate goals outside of the traditional institutional boundaries (Shirky, 2005).

Another top key insight I garnered is the importance of gathering the right people to become team members; and how this acts as a catalyst to attaining the teams aim. The Wujec video emphasized how seeking specific skill sets when forming a team might be utilized to enhance a positive outcome (Wujec, 2010). I believe this to be very important in realizing these outcomes in a timely fashion as well.

The last top take-away I gained from the video clips concerns how an organizational entity can function effectively with little to no overriding control over its members. The Gordon video provided a glimpse as to how this may play out within the microcosm of an ant colony through task allocation (Gordon, 2003). The business entities in our world might benefit from further analysis of task functioning and through the developing more efficient team work devoid of any central control.

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