Tag Archives: communication

‘Board Talk’

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Today we launched Board Talk, the bulletin board for the Printed Circuit Board industry, a service brought to you by UP Media Group, Printed Circuit Design & Fab and CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY magazines.

The bulletin board — the URL is www.theprintedcircuitboard.com — is open to anyone in the industry. We’ve set up categories for PCB design, fabrication, assembly, market data, trade shows and press releases. Members are invited to create their own topics (threads) for discussing anything industry related that they have on their mind.

We also are happy to announce an agreement with the IPC Designers Council to offer Board Talk as a communications center for news, announcements and meetings, plus information on the Designers Certification program.

Please check it out!

What’s the Buzz?

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Teams shows individual members talk to each other often are more effective than those whose mode of communication runs through the boss.

So says an MIT researcher who has studied patterns of industrial communication for the past decade. What Dr. Sandy Pentland has found is that the pattern of communication is more important than the specific talents of the individual team members. In other words, a team that communicates well is greater than the sum of its parts, while the team that rigidly adheres to old school ways of sharing information will fall short.

The analogy is a beehive, where the swarm actually is able to transfer data faster and in more usable bits than alternate systems can achieve. This fosters creativity and speeds idea innovation, Pentland’s research found.

Pentland’s paper, “The New Science of Building Great Teams,” is in this month’s Harvard Business Review. An alternate synopsis of the paper is here.