Dealers of Lightning

I'm about halfway through a great book called Dealers of Lightning about the Xerox PARC research lab. It's amazing that such a small group of people could put together an office of the future; they essentially invented the following things - laser printer, mouse, personal computer, ethernet, object-oriented programming and bitmapped graphics. There's a lot to be learned from the way that they assembled the teams, how the people in the team interacted, and how they went about developing the systems. I've been lucky to have been in similar (but not quite as large) teams, and it definitely raised my expectations of how productive a talented group of individuals can be.