What makes a great team? For one thing, I think you have to have shared goals. If you throw a bunch of people together who happen to report to the same person, but don't share goals, it's almost impossible to build a strong team. They may learn to like each other and collaborate once in a while, but it's unlikely they'll ever become a great team. One teambuilding accelerator may be cookies. Especially cookies with rum. More on that in a moment.

We designed a new learning organization that we put in place almost six months ago now, and a deliberate part of that design was interdependencies. One group is customer facing -- the advocates -- and they rely on learning & content specialists -- the architects -- who in turn rely on a team of infrastructure people in technology and development. This allows us to share content across multiple audiences, and avoid creating the same courses over and over. But it does take a lot of work in defining roles, and in having quick and clean hand-offs. Easier said than done, and we're still in the early stages. There are a few early promising signs that all this work is paying off, but the proof will be in the speed and effectiveness with which we can deliver solutions to our audiences.

One of those early solutions is creating some short modules of on-line learning, taken from some of our customer courses, and making them available, FREE, on developers.sun.com. Just register with SDN, and you'll have FREE access to 11 courses with rich content on Solaris and Java. We've also created a number of offerings of training for under $99, to allow access now to not only corporate clients, but developers and students around the world.

If you're a Sun employee, stay tuned for the hundreds of eLearning courses we will be announcing, available at no internal charge, coming within the next week.

Now back to those cookies. We met as a team last week, and since we're watching costs carefully, we decided to have a team dinner at my house. A few items were picked up from a neighborhood bistro, but I made the appetizers and cookies for dessert. (The chocolate walnut rum balls from Gourmet Magazine, recipe here, were a big hit -- even a child could make them, but don't let them -- they're really 100 proof.) Being able to stroll around a home, gather in the kitchen and help, have a drink of your choice, eat over the course of a few hours, have another drink of your choice, and enjoy the holiday spirit(s) is also part of building a team. I once read that you aren't really close to another person until you've gone through tough times together, and see how the other person treats you during those tough times. We've gone through some tough times over the last couple of months, and that night was the time to tip a glass to each other and recognize that we're in it together, for the long haul. I couldn't have a better group of people to create a new vision and reality of learning at Sun. This holiday season, I am blessed.