Teamistry – Details, episodes & analysis

Why did Concorde disappear from our skies? In the final episode, we pose this question to the people closest to the Concorde project, from the teams who engineered its first flight to those who picked up the debris after the fatal Air France crash. We also discuss Concorde's legacy, and its impact on the aviation sector, on travel itself, and on the personal and professional lives of those who built the plane. And before they turn off their mics for the season, host Nastaran Tavakoli-Far and lead producer Pedro Mendes, alongside aviation journalist Eric Tegler, take a closer look at some recent projects that promise to fly us faster than the speed of sound – again.

Guests in this episode:

Jonathan Glancey, author of 'Concorde: The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner'
Michel Polacco, French aviation reporter, and author of a book on the Concorde in French
Mike Hall, Chief Engineer for Concorde Support Operations
Katie John, Editor of Mach 2 magazine
John Britton, Chief Engineer of the British Concorde fleet
Yves Gourinat, former Airbus employee during Concorde’s last decade, and currently an Aviation professor at the University of Toulouse.
Ricky Bastin, Technical Liaison Engineer at Concorde.
Eric Tegler, Journalist covering Aerospace and Defence

For more on this episode, visit: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/teamistry/season/season-4/will-sonic-booms-return-to-our-skies

In the late afternoon of July 25th, 2000, a Concorde crashed into a hotel near Charles de Gaulle airport. Air France flight 4590 was carrying 100 passengers, most of them tourists from Germany, along with a crew of nine. All perished, including four people on the ground. The incident shocked the globe, and halted Air France Concorde operations indefinitely. On this episode of Teamistry, host Nastaran Tavakoli-Far and lead producer Pedro Mendes sit down with the team of engineers who played a leading role in piecing together the evidence from the crash site, hoping to learn exactly what went wrong. We gain insights through cockpit recordings and an interview with a friend of the pilot who tells the story of the crash – and its aftermath – truthfully and respectfully. We also address a common myth that the crash spelled the end of Concorde.

Guests in this episode:

• Jonathan Glancey, author of 'Concorde: The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner'
• Michel Polacco, French aviation reporter, and author of a book on the Concorde in French
• Mike Hall, Chief Engineer for Concorde Support Operations
• Katie John, Editor of Mach 2 magazine
• John Britton, Chief Engineer of the British Concorde fleet
• Dudley Collard, member of the Aerodynamics Design team at Concorde
• Yves Gourinat, former Airbus employee during Concorde’s last decade, and currently an Aviation professor at the University of Toulouse.
• Ricky Bastin, Technical Liaison Engineer at Concorde.

For more on this episode, visit: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/teamistry/season/season-4/rising-from-the-ashes.

In 2016, a research video played in a conference room of Mattel Inc. caused deep concern. It showed an eight-year-old playing with iconic Hot Wheels™ toy cars. "Imagine doing this for an hour," the boy said, as if it was torture. The moment confirmed what many Mattel employees already knew: kids were shifting from physical toys to digital games at increasingly younger ages. And it meant that Hot Wheels, the best-selling toy on the planet, was losing its primary audience to digital gadgets and putting the company's future in jeopardy. The moment galvanized a small group of forward-thinking employees and a risky decision was made: everyone's favorite toy car would ride the digital wave – instead of being totalled by it. The team navigated strong resistance – after all, how do you fix a toy that isn't broken? – to introduce Hot Wheels™ i-d. It's a never-before-seen product that blends the physical toy with a digital platform. And guess what? It crashes and burns. But rather than sinking the venerable company, it benefits Mattel, Inc. 

To find out how, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite talks with both the innovators who challenged the status quo and the decision-makers who had trouble stomaching the risks. Hear from Chris Down, chief design officer at Mattel, Inc., and Ron Friedman, former director of global marketing. Also hear from senior leaders Steve Totzke, Mattel's executive vice president, and Ricardo Briceno, vice president of franchise marketing.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For a transcript and extras about this episode visit: www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/reinventing-hot-wheels.

A cricket match played on April 18th 2008 between two city-based teams in India marks a historic moment in sports. It was the beginning of the Indian Premier League (IPL), a radically new tournament within the shortest format of cricket. Spearheaded by a flamboyant businessman, the IPL was to become for cricket what the National Football League (NFL) is to American football: an exciting prime-time entertainment for a new, global fanbase. And that worked – at first. Then the IPL's founder is thrown out, scandal rocks the league, and even diehard fans turn away from their beloved sport. In this episode, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite takes you back to the exciting origins of the league and behind the scenes to how the IPL rallies to save itself. Learn how a reformed league with a newly-appointed representative team restored transparency to the game, and how rival cricket boards became allies to stage a tournament during an even bigger crisis: the global pandemic. Listen to exciting analysis from Prakash Wakankar, a cricket commentator with the BBC, and hear from Simon Hughes, former English cricketer and co-author of "A New Innings," a book about the IPL. Also hear from "A New Innings" co-author Manoj Badale, lead owner of the IPL team Rajasthan Royals, and from Shane Watson, the former Aussie cricketer and founder of T20 Stars. Plus, Rehmatullah Sheikh, Teamistry's Story Producer and a massive cricket fan, joins in to talk about his experience with the IPL and the reforms that helped it bounce back from disgrace.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For the transcript of this episode and extras, go to www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/saving-an-indian-cricket-league-from-itself

In 1994, IBM sponsored the Winter Olympics and held exclusive rights to telecast the games. But Dave Grossman – an engineer at IBM – discovered Sun Microsystems had stolen the live feed and was posting the results on its website. This sparked the creation of a team of innovators that not only convinced IBM's top brass to pay attention to the Internet but influenced a seismic change in everything about IBM as an organization. 

In the first episode of season 3, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite takes us through the story of how the newly-assembled team built a website from scratch in time for the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. And how their efforts didn't just prevent IBM from further embarrassment but transformed the entire company, going from one that almost missed the Internet to becoming a pioneer of its innovations, creating a website that would influence how we shop, work, and live online today. Along with Dave Grossman, the computer engineer who left IBM as a senior manager, we hear from John Patrick, IBM's former vice president of internet technology, and Jane Harper, former director of collaborative innovation programs at IBM.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on this episode visit https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast/when-IBM-nearly-missed-the-internet where you can see IBM's first Olympic website from 1996 in all its low-res glory and check out related teamwork articles.

In Season 3 of Teamistry, filmmaker and host Gabriela Cowperthwaite returns to spotlight teams that not only achieve the impossible, but also inspire change.

These stories of leadership and courage mark a turning point in how organizations—and even whole industries—are transformed for the better. Follow along as a team of trailblazers brings IBM on to the web; a group of innovators at Mattel fuses the world's No.1 selling toy Hot Wheels with a virtual platform; a community of digital stewards in Detroit connects underserved neighbors to the Internet. And many more. Starting June 7th, a new episode drops every two weeks. 

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to www.atlassian.com/podcast.

Before corporate social responsibility was a popular concept, Patagonia declared its commitment to better outcomes for their workers, and the planet. They soon discovered that commitment would include major pitfalls, but it seems the more Patagonia doubles down on its values, the better it performs. In this episode, we hear from Craig Wilson, former lead strategist for consumer marketing at Patagonia; Bethany Patten, Senior Associate Director for MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and Maya Spaull, Vice President of apparel and home goods at Fair Trade USA. We also speak with Andrew Kenney, a journalist who got insider access to see how Patagonia is redefining its business processes.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.

In the West African country of Burkina Faso in the 1980s, an 18-year-old boy is killed in the road. Why? A case of meningitis. The meningitis epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa spurred a global race to find a vaccine, led by the founding of the Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP). This network of doctors, vaccine developers, public health officials, and UN workers converged to develop an inexpensive vaccine – without Big Pharma. Instead, they built teams as an ecosystem of thriving partnerships. In this episode of Teamistry, we hear from the original MVP team and how they persevered despite enormous challenges.

Dr. Samba Sow, Director General of the Centre for Vaccine Development in Mali, Dr. Suresh Jhadav, Executive Director of the Serum Institute of India and Dr. Marc LaForce, then Director of the Meningitis Vaccine Project. We also hear from Dr. Ngozi Erondu, an infectious disease specialist who explains MVP's legacy in building "South-South" collaborations, and Dr. Mark Alderson, project leader at PATH, describes how the team brought the vaccine from labs in one part of the globe to clinics in another.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.

In the desert plains of Northern Kenya, hundreds of people from around the world and different walks of life have gathered. The photographs they take with their GPS-enabled cameras might be humanity's best shot at saving an entire species. This is the story of Wildbook, an artificial intelligence (AI) software program that creates a live database to track animal populations. In this episode of Teamistry, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite discovers how a shared mission, and a shared technology platform supporting the work of diverse teams, is saving animals – and the biodiversity of the planet. 

We hear from Tanya Berger-Wolf, co-founder of Wildbook and Jason Holmberg, co-founder of WildMe, the organization that created and runs Wildbook. We also hear from Rosemary Warungu, zebra project manager at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, and Daniel Rubenstein, a behavioural ecologist at Princeton University, as they explain how Wildbook's global community is helping change local attitudes towards the Grevy's zebra — one photo at a time.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.

In the summer of 2018, 12 Thai teenagers and their 25-year-old soccer coach got stuck deep inside the labyrinthine – and flooding – Tham Luang caves of Thailand’s Chiang Rai province. In this episode of Teamistry, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite takes us inside the caves and alongside the people assembled from across Thailand and the world to work together on a dire rescue mission. Hour after hour, as the caves continued to flood and oxygen tanks ran low, we learn about the leadership and teamwork that enabled disparate groups to remain synchronized, overcome cultural barriers, and make difficult, life-or-death decisions. 

We hear from Narongsak Osottanakorn, the former Governor of Chiang Rai province, who marshaled the various teams and became a national hero. Lt. Col. Charles Hodges of the U.S. Air Force talks about his role in getting teams to communicate effectively, and Dr. Richard Harris, an anesthesiologist from Australia, describes his climactic moments while inside the caves with the boys. We also hear from Wharton Professor Michael Useem who offers insight into the leadership techniques that propelled the successful mission. And Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia Editor of The Times of London, revisits his daily on-the-ground reporting to tell us how this mission unfolded.

Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast