Teamistry

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 ...

As teams of engineers work around the clock to keep the supersonic airplane safe and in the air, to the outside world Concorde has become a pop cultural icon. Princess Diana, Mick Jagger, Phil Collins, Joan Collins, Sting – these celebrities form an A-list of frequent flyers. The in-flight menu includes haute cuisine and expensive champaign; air travel aboard Concorde is a high-class, celebratory experience. To join this jet set in...

Years of hard work, innovation, and unprecedented collaboration between teams in the U.K. and France make the impossible, possible: the first French Concorde prototype takes flight, and a new page in aviation history is written. But the supersonic airplane isn’t ready to ferry passengers just yet. As you’ll hear in episode 3, Concorde’s journey from prototype to commercial air travel is beset by unforeseen challenges throughout the...

In this episode, host Nastaran Tavakoli-Far and Lead Producer Pedro Mendes travel to the Musée Aeroscopia in Toulouse, France, where they stand spellbound marveling at a giant, glistening Air France Concorde. And they meet with nonagenarian Dudley Collard, a member of Concorde’s Aerodynamics Design team. When the recording crew mention the beauty of Concorde, engineer Collard quips that all he can see are the flaws. Indeed, the sto...

In the opening episode, host Nastaran Tavakoli-Far and producer Pedro Mendes set the stage for what’s going to be a supersonic journey documented in six parts—and also reflect on their personal connections to Concorde. You’ll hear about the monumental 1956 meeting of the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC) that set in motion a complex network of teams from the U.K. and France to realize this ambitious project. Also in th...

Picture this: A flight from New York to London where your co-passengers are Princess Diana, Mick Jagger, and Sting. On the menu: caviar canapés, lobster, and champagne. Your journey takes a little over three hours – half of the time it takes today. And that one flight puts you in the history books, because you just flew faster than the speed of sound.

Welcome aboard for the new season of Teamistry, a podcast from Atlassian. This sho...

In March of 2020, as Will Smith is filming the biopic "King Richard," the emergence of COVID-19 abruptly shuts down all production. With unusual downtime and an urge to uplift his audience amid looming uncertainty, the actor meets with his production team at Westbrook Media to find a creative solution. What if they created a variety show with Will as the host – from his house? Smith had never hosted a variety show, and Westbrook Me...

The can is Americana itself; the product indistinguishable from the ordinary contents. It's part of a quintessential American meal, soothing the hunger and warming the souls of families for more than a hundred years. But in 2001, a toxic atmosphere hung over the workers at The Campbell Soup Company. Its headquarters stood isolated behind barbed fences in the run-down city of Camden, New Jersey. Inside, a culture of anxiety and dist...

When the pandemic struck, many pivoted their lives online – to connect with family, to work, to attend school. But many others, living in cutoff communities, like several neighborhoods in the city of Detroit, Michigan, where generations of systemic racism and poor infrastructure has left them largely isolated, this wasn't an option. Up to 40% of residents in these underserved areas have no internet at all, keeping them from the onl...

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 ...

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 fa...

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...

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 Wh...

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 Associa...

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, ...

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...

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 o...

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Iceland had become the worst-hit country in Scandinavia. But it reversed its fate, without a full lockdown. And to date, Iceland has seen very few deaths. How? Largely because of the harmonious collaboration of "The Trinity" – Iceland’s chief epidemiologist, Director of Health, and superintendent of police – who implemented the "pandemic plan" – a framework for working together, and saving lives. In ...

In the aftermath of World War II, Japan must rebuild its economy. Certain products become vital exports in the revitalization effort, including the wristwatch. Seiko leaps to the forefront of the recovery, but there's a problem: their watches aren't good. The company decides to bring R&D in-house to take advantage of constructive competition between its factories, and winds up going from industry failure to time-honored player on t...