The Discipline Of Teamwork

In The Discipline of Teams, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith explore the often counter-intuitive features that make up high-performing teams—such as selecting team members for skill, not compatibility—and explain how managers can set specific goals to foster team development. The result is improved productivity and teams that can be counted on to deliver more than just the sum of their parts. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

The author explores the consequences that arise for workers and organizations in today's world of work, analyzing how participative workers create a discipline of teamwork.

The definitive classic on high-performance teams The Wisdom of Teams is the definitive work on how to create high-performance teams in any organization. Having sold nearly a half million copies and been translated into more than fifteen languages, the authors’ clarion call that teams should be the basic unit of organization for most businesses has permanently shaped the way companies reach the highest levels of performance. Using engaging case studies and testimonials from both successful and failed teams—ranging from Fortune 500 companies to the U.S. Army to high school sports—the authors explain the dynamics of teams both in great detail and with a broad view. Their conclusions and prescriptions span the familiar to the counterintuitive: • Commitment to performance goals and common purpose is more important to team success than team building. • Opportunities for teams exist in all parts of the organization. • Real teams are the most successful spearheads of change at all levels. • Working in teams naturally integrates performance and learning. • Team “endings” can be as important to manage as team “beginnings.” Wisdom lies in recognizing a team’s unique potential to deliver results and in understanding its many benefits—development of individual members, team accomplishments, and stronger companywide performance. Katzenbach and Smith’s comprehensive classic is the essential guide to unlocking the potential of teams in your organization.

The authors explore the counter-intuitive features that make up high-performing teams such as selecting team members for skill, not compatibility, and explain how managers can set specific goals to foster team development.

The author explores the consequences that arise for workers and organizations in today's world of work, analyzing how participative workers create a discipline of teamwork.

MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES IN PRINT • “One of the seminal management books of the past seventy-five years.”—Harvard Business Review This revised edition of the bestselling classic is based on fifteen years of experience in putting Peter Senge’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas of the Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices. Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning blocks that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations, in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create the results they truly desire. Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will: • Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them • Bridge teamwork into macrocreativity • Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets • Teach you to see the forest and the trees • End the struggle between work and personal time This updated edition contains more than one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies such as BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, and Saudi Aramco and organizations such as Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank.

"James R. Barker′s contributions to the extant literature on one of the most significant transformations in contemporary organizational practice include 1) Embedding the discussion of teamwork within the broader context of organizational and social culture, 2) Broadening the treatment of participative management to include both local control and positive discipline, and 3) Demonstrating the important theoretical and practical links between the concepts of member participation and member identification. As a bonus, readers are introduced to the ′discursive foundations′ for fashioning productive conversations about participative management that can be both valid and valuable." --David Whetten, Professor of Management, Brigham Young University "James R. Barker′s The Discipline of Teamwork makes a number of important contributions simultaneously. It demonstrates the power of good analytical theory, drawing on a classical tradition of writers such as Weber, Durkheim, and Foucault to illuminate the organizational, moral, and discursive realities of a major management change program in an organization. Beyond mere advocacy of a change process, as in the ′popular′ management literature, it provides analysis of how and what such changes in process mean for the lived-experience and self-understanding of the people who have to make sense of these changes that consultants and managers advocate." --Stewart Clegg, Faculty of Business,University of Technology, Sydney "The Discipline of Teamwork represents a major work at the fulcrum of organizational culture, organizational communication, and social change. Barker spent over two years collecting data through depth participant-observation and intensive interviewing in a high-tech manufacturing company that made and intentional shift in its organizational structure and culture from traditional methods of assembly to the use of self-directed work teams. From his position of trust within the ranks of both employees and management, he documents and analyzes this radical transition, carefully studying how the changes were implemented, their latent and manifest outcomes, and the modification made to them from both bottom and top levels. This work documents a paradigmatic revolution in the business world that has ultimately anticipated and the laided the ground work for the quality management movement and its successor, thinking out of the box." --Patricia A. Adler, University of Colorado Recent years have brought team-based and collaborative management to the forefront of our organizational leadership. Teamwork has permeated all aspects of the work world and continues to gain momentum. In The Discipline of Teamwork James R. Barker explores the social consequences of this participatory work environment. Writing from the team member perspective, James R. Barker focuses on the human cost of participation and the effects of this discipline on team members. He details how the discipline develops, matures, and creates social consequences for organizational participants, and provides insight into how we can make teamwork a positive experience for all involved. This lively and well-written book will provoke team members, as well as management scholars, students, and executive consultants, to consider how the discipline of teamwork affects them and what they ought to do about these consequences.

The past half-century has witnessed a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research. The growing scale of science has been accompanied by a shift toward collaborative research, referred to as "team science." Scientific research is increasingly conducted by small teams and larger groups rather than individual investigators, but the challenges of collaboration can slow these teams' progress in achieving their scientific goals. How does a team-based approach work, and how can universities and research institutions support teams? Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science synthesizes and integrates the available research to provide guidance on assembling the science team; leadership, education and professional development for science teams and groups. It also examines institutional and organizational structures and policies to support science teams and identifies areas where further research is needed to help science teams and groups achieve their scientific and translational goals. This report offers major public policy recommendations for science research agencies and policymakers, as well as recommendations for individual scientists, disciplinary associations, and research universities. Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science will be of interest to university research administrators, team science leaders, science faculty, and graduate and postdoctoral students.

BUSINESS STRATEGY. "The 4 Disciplines of Execution "offers the what but also how effective execution is achieved. They share numerous examples of companies that have done just that, not once, but over and over again. This is a book that every leader should read! (Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School, and author of "The Innovator s Dilemma)." Do you remember the last major initiative you watched die in your organization? Did it go down with a loud crash? Or was it slowly and quietly suffocated by other competing priorities? By the time it finally disappeared, it s likely no one even noticed. What happened? The whirlwind of urgent activity required to keep things running day-to-day devoured all the time and energy you needed to invest in executing your strategy for tomorrow. "The 4 Disciplines of Execution" can change all that forever.

Why do good teams fail? Very often, argue Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman, it is because they are looking inward instead of outward. Based on years of research examining teams across many industries, Ancona and Bresman show that traditional team models are falling short, and that what’s needed--and what works--is a new brand of team that emphasizes external outreach to stakeholders, extensive ties, expandable tiers, and flexible membership. The authors highlight that X-teams not only are able to adapt in ways that traditional teams aren’t, but that they actually improve an organization’s ability to produce creative ideas and execute them—increasing the entrepreneurial and innovative capacity within the firm. What’s more, the new environment demands what the authors call “distributed leadership,” and the book highlights how X-teams powerfully embody this idea.