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Rating: 
Summary: Why and How to Work in Teams
Review: A good balance of case studies, step-by-step procedures, and advice for people who want or need to work in teams but are accustomed to working in organizational "stovepipes" or matrix organizations. People who have successful experience working in Integrated Product Teams and Integrated Product and Process Development (IPPD) Environment will find the principles and processes familiar. This book dates back to 1992 and reads a lot like a Harvard Business Review article, only of book length. The Department of Defense used this book as a source reference for their IPPD guide, and Integrated Product Teams have "taken off" since that time and are integral to DoD acquisition programs today. Nevertheless, this book is still worthwhile. The DoD did a thorough job of taking the "how to" information from this book and expanding on it to great detail. The mistake they made was to leave out the "why." The case studies, omitted by DoD, really put you in the middle of successful teams to the point that they will make you want to be on a team like the ones in the book. That is the missing element when converting an organization to a team-based work environment... step by step instructions are not enough. To succeed, the team members have to want to work in this difficult but rewarding manner. That is the main value of this book: it puts you in the picture and makes you want to succeed at teaming.
Rating:
Summary: Why and How to Work in Teams
Review: A good balance of case studies, step-by-step procedures, and advice for people who want or need to work in teams but are accustomed to working in organizational "stovepipes" or matrix organizations. People who have successful experience working in Integrated Product Teams and Integrated Product and Process Development (IPPD) Environment will find the principles and processes familiar. This book dates back to 1992 and reads a lot like a Harvard Business Review article, only of book length. The Department of Defense used this book as a source reference for their IPPD guide, and Integrated Product Teams have "taken off" since that time and are integral to DoD acquisition programs today. Nevertheless, this book is still worthwhile. The DoD did a thorough job of taking the "how to" information from this book and expanding on it to great detail. The mistake they made was to leave out the "why." The case studies, omitted by DoD, really put you in the middle of successful teams to the point that they will make you want to be on a team like the ones in the book. That is the missing element when converting an organization to a team-based work environment... step by step instructions are not enough. To succeed, the team members have to want to work in this difficult but rewarding manner. That is the main value of this book: it puts you in the picture and makes you want to succeed at teaming.
Rating: 
Summary: Complete waste of time
Review: I am a Masters of Human Resource Management Student at Rutgers, and I felt that the book was very practical and could be used as a great reference guide, and I suppose that for what the book was written. However the writing was so commonplace, uneventful, and repetitive I found myself skipping paragraphs, furthermore, I felt that the case studies were not good examples of the points the book was trying to make.
Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: Jon Katzenbach and I wish to alert readers of The Wisdom of Teams that we have just published The Discipline of Teams -- a companion and sequel to Wisdom. Discipline includes exercises teams can use to learn and apply the team discipline. It also provides critical additional and new material about setting goals and virtual teaming -- that is, applying the team discipline through teamware/groupware technology such as the web, email, project management and so forth. We believe any reader of Wisdom will benefit from the new material, and expecially the exercises, in The Discipline of Teams.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly detailed framework for team development
Review: Overview:
The Wisdom of Teams presents Katzenbach and Smith's contention that real teams are the best approach to building a high-performance organization. The authors blended together their highly detailed framework for team development with examples of how several corporations successfully or unsuccessfully implemented these team principles. While acknowledging that teams may not be the best solution for every organization's problems, the authors unashamedly insisted that businesses do themselves a disservice by not considering the team-based approach. The book's twelve chapters are organized into three parts: Understanding Teams, Becoming a Team, and Exploiting the Potential.
Summary:
Part One, Understanding Teams, introduces the reader to the authors' thesis that teams present the best approach to creating a high-performance organization. Teams are defined as a "small group of people with complementary skills committed to a common purpose and set of specific performance goals" (21). Teams are not the same as work groups, committees, councils or task forces where the emphasis is on individual performance and accountability; that is, the sum of individual bests. Neither is every group that calls itself a team a true team. They may exhibit team-like characteristics or share team-like values, but those in and of themselves do not make a team. The distinguishing characteristic of teams is the synergistic effect created when individual accountability is exchange for mutual group accountability and shared group responsibility. Additionally, teams need to do real work in order be characterized as a real team. They must produce a specific work product that contributes to the organization's mission and success. However, achieving real team status is often difficult. In order to become successful, potential teams must overcome bureaucratic inertia, managerial biases, confusion about what makes a true team, negative past experiences with pseudo teams, fear of failure, and individual resistance to shared accountability. These embody a daunting array of factors to overcome, but the authors insisted that a top-level commitment to team-based solutions could lead to building a successful team.
In Part Two, Becoming a Team, the authors used their "team performance curve" to graphically illustrate the process necessary to create winning teams. A group does not become a team when initially formed. They may be a working group committed to better coordinating individual efforts toward individual goals benefiting the company, but they produce no joint work product. While this may be the best solution to a company's problem, the decision to become a team requires the conscious decision to assume the risk of mutual accountability and joint responsibility. If provided the right catalyst, a working group can transition to either a pseudo team or a potential team. The pseudo team fails to implement the basics of team building. They call themselves a team but are still focused on individual performance and not group results. Potential teams show an enhanced desire to formulate a group mission but have not adopted mutual accountability. They demonstrate improved team effectiveness, but their impact on the corporate problem is no greater than the working group. Real teams have a clearly defined mission for which they hold themselves mutually accountable and produce a joint work product. High performance teams are real teams that develop a deep personal commitment among the members of the team for one another's personal growth and wellbeing. These teams are both highly effective in their team effort and produce high quality results for the organization. However, to rise to that level, team members must make the critical choice to invest themselves in the team and its mission while overcoming obstacles that threaten to cause the team to regress to one of its lesser effective counterparts. Successful teams need quality leaders who help focus the group on the mission, endorse a team-based philosophy of shared accountability, and foster a climate of courage and success.
In Part Three, the authors forcefully championed their assertion that teams are the building blocks of successful organizations. Teams, they insisted, are the best organizational tool to deliver the results necessary to build customer loyalty, shareholder value, and employee satisfaction. Provided a company has a strong performance ethic and vision-driven leadership, teams can contribute the necessary skills, energy, and performance values that drive successful businesses. The ultimate decision to incorporate functional team rests with executive leadership and its willingness to transform bloated hierarchical structures, managerial parochialism, and individual-based incentives.
Review and Reaction:
Brevity and succinctness are not the strengths of this book. Once one is able to navigate the business techno babble, the mind numbing repetitiousness, and awkward sentence structures, the authors' point becomes clear: Teams are good for business. The genuine strength of the book is in the examples. The authors' ethereally academic presentation of team concepts finds a clearer voice in their reflections on how these concepts were applied in "real world" corporate environments. While not every example speaks with equal adequacy to its point, the reader can gain an understanding of what factors help build or break teams. Many of these factors, as the authors' asserted, are common sense.
Rating:
Summary: Good book, solid content
Review: This book does not present any real "revolutionary" ideas that will blow you away with originality, what it does do is lay out the things that make teamwork work. Since so much in business nowadays requires teamwork, the book has a valuable and timely message. Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Complete waste of time
Review: This book is a complete waste of time. In 40+ years I have never seen a published piece of work that is this poorly written. There is no way you can draw any conclusion about team effectiveness from the disjointed, incomplete cases prsented. Before these authors create another disaster I would recommend that they take a basic writing course. The book would only been midly anoying had the author understood how to form a basic english sentence.My recommendation - rather than buy this book just throw your money in the garbage.
Rating:
Summary: A strong working guide to team development and support.
Review: This book is the result of research into why teams are important, what separates effective from ineffective teams, and how organizations can tap the effectiveness of teams to become high-performance organizations. Liberally citing research efforts in 47 specific organizations, Katzenbach and Smith share their insights into what makes teams work. They emphasize teams as an important part of a three part cycle leading to a high-performance organization: a) shareholders who provide opportunities, b) employees who deliver value, and c) customers who generate returns. The performance targets in the high-performance organization are multidimensional, impacting all three cyclic contributors. Teams provide real benefits to employees, the result being an impact throughout the cycle. If employees increase the value they deliver, customers will increase the return, allowing shareholders to increase the opportunities available to employees. Central to the thesis is their defini! tion of team, concentrating on "a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable." [45] The distinction is far more than semantic. Working groups who do not share all of these characteristics are not to be considered teams. "Unlike teams, working groups rely on the sum of 'individual bests' for their performance. They pursue no collective work products requiring joint effort. By choosing the team path instead of the working group, people commit to take the risks of conflict, joint work-products, and collective action necessary to build a common purpose, set of goals, approach, and mutual accountability" [85] Katzenbach and Smith aren't completely negative toward working groups. On the contrary, they cite numerous situations in which the working group offers the most effective approach. But for turning ourselves into high-performanc! e organizations, the limitations of working groups must be ! overcome, and the power of teams must be harnessed, through increased risk. "People who call themselves teams but take no such risks are at best pseudo-teams." [85] THE WISDOM OF TEAMS describes a Team Performance Curve that correlates team effectiveness against the performance impact of the team, resulting in the organizational path from working group, to pseudo-team, to potential team, to real team, and ultimately to high-performance team. The working group describes the organization of least team effectiveness, although not without performance impact. The performance of working groups, in fact, can be very effective owing to the individual contributions of the group members. The pseudo-team - high team effectiveness, but usually less performance effectiveness - "has not focused on collective performance and is not really trying to achieve it." [91] The result is an organization that produces fewer results because of the forced team interactions. Th! e members are actually slowed down compared to the contribution they would make without the team overhead - as members of a working group. "In pseudo-teams, the sum of the whole is less than the potential of the individual parts." [91] The "group for which there is a significant, incremental performance need, and that really is trying to improve its performance impact" [91] is the potential team. Higher up the Performance Team Curve in terms of both team and performance effectiveness, the potential team can be extremely effective when targeted at a problem or process for which a team approach makes sense. Unfortunately, in addition to the results attributable to individuals on the team, the increased performance brought about by the potential team is largely attributable to luck. Still lacking from potential teams are the commitment to a common purpose and working approach, as well as the mutual accountability inherent in real teams. Finally, the high-p! erformance team "is a group that meets all the conditi! ons of real teams, and has members who are also deeply committed to one another's personal growth and success." [92] With a little reflection, any of us who has ever experienced working on a high-performance team knows it. We also quickly recognize how rare such opportunities have been. THE WISDOM OF TEAMS is a guidebook to creating a high-performance organization built around high-performance teams. Teams must have the right blend of complementary skills, including technical or functional expertise, problem-solving and decision making skills, and interpersonal skills. "It is surprising how many people assemble teams primarily on the basis of personal compatibility or formal position in the organization." [48] The authors warn, however, that too much emphasis can be placed on skill mixes too early in the team process. In their research, they "did not meet a single team that had all the needed skills at the outset. (They) did discover, however, the power o! f teams as vehicles for personal learning and development." [48] As long as the right team dynamics are present, the necessary skills will materialize or develop. The authors focus specific attention on the creation of teams at the top. "Team performance at the top of the organization is more the exception than the rule." [217] They cite several specific misguided beliefs that they find lead to lessened team effectiveness at the top: 1) the purpose of the team can't be differentiated from the purpose of the organization, 2) "membership in the team is automatic," [218] 3) the role of each team member is predefined by their functional position in the organizational hierarchy, 4) executives spending discretionary time on team activities is inefficient, and 5) the effectiveness of the team depends only on open communication. "This (last) all-too-common misconception equates teamwork with teams." [221] These beliefs create obstacles to effecti! ve team performance. "The most practical path to build! ing a team at the top, then, lies not in wishing for good personal chemistry, but in finding ways for executives to do real work together." [230] Katzenbach and Smith are citing these problems particularly for the top, although they apply just as well to teams throughout the organization. Their prescription for breaking through these obstacles includes "carving out team assignments that tackle specific issues," "assigning work to subsets of the team, "determining team membership based on skill, not position," "requiring all members to do equivalent amounts of real work," "breaking down the hierarchical pattern of interaction," and "setting and following rules of behavior similar to those used by other teams." [230-234] Katzenbach and Smith have provided a quick-injection standards program for teams. For quality professionals attempting to improve processes in their organization model, the authors have provided mater! ials at all three levels. Their definition of team - with its focus on complementary skills, mutual accountability, common approach, and shared goals - can be used as the basis for a Teams Policy Statement. Making use of this book in our organizations will allow us to move beyond calling a group of people a team hoping it will motivate and inspire them. It allows us to move forward toward high-performance organizations with a process-based approach to continuously improving team effectiveness.
Rating:
Summary: Instructions for building block of future organizations
Review: Wisdom of Team (WT) is a delightful book that balances both descriptive and prescriptive information about teams in organizations. This book DOES NOT fall prey to using sports analogies as the basis for examples and suggestions. Instead, the authors rely on examples from Fortune 500 companies and their own experiences. As I read the examples in WT, I enjoyed reflecting on my own experiences on high performance teams. Based on my experiences, I found the authors' analysis insightful and accurate. Several chapters include checklists that provide a quick summary of key learnings. These checklists make the book a valuable reference tool when creating, developing, and ending teams. Good read for managers at all levels of an organization.
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