Editorial Review:
Teams are fast becoming a flexible and efficient way to enhance organizational performance. Yet today's business leaders consistently overlook opportunities to exploit their potential, confusing teams with teamwork or sharing. In this book, two senior McKinsey & Co. partners argue that we cannot meet the challenges ahead, from total quality to customer service to innovation, without teams. The authors talked with hundreds of people in more than fifty different teams in thirty companies to discover what differentiates various levels of team performance, where and how teams work best, and how to enhance their effectiveness. Among their findings: formal hierarchy is actually good for teams; successful team leaders fit no ideal profile; commitment to performance goals is more important than commitment to team-building goals; top management teams are often smaller and more difficult to sustain; and team endings can be as important to manage as team beginnings. The wisdom of teams lies in recognizing their unique potential to deliver results and in understanding their many benefits.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
The Wisdom of Teams  2008-09-19
As a professional consultant, time is well spent with the author is states clearly what he means, and justifies his stand. Good relevant information, and easy reading.
Dr. Evelyn J. Johnson
The Wisdon Of Teams  2008-03-23
This is a great book for anyone in business - mainly as it is based on fact and research - not an opinion. I have sent copies to most of my friends in business as it is a worthwhile tool and makes human behaviour more obvious - a great read.
Good overview on the what and why of teams 2007-09-09
Jon Katzenbach and Dough Smith is probably the most classical work on teams at the moment. It's a pretty good description on what teams are and what you can do to create working teams. It also covers quite well the why of teams: why would you want to have teams in your organization.
The book is divided into three parts:
- Understanding teams
- Becoming a team
- Exploiting the potential
The first part is the most important part of the book. In the first chapter the authors describe why you would want to have teams in your organization. The second chapter goes on to describe one team in action. The authors use lots of stories of teams throughout the book to make their points clear. The third chapter describes six points which they call the basics of teams:
1) Small
2) Complementary skills
3) Shared purpose
4) Clear specific goals
5) Clear working approach
6) Sense of mutual accountability
In the fourth chapter, the authors give more examples.
The second part of the book introduces the team performance curve. The authors make the distinction between working groups and real teams. They consider that real teams perform higher, but its more difficult to achieve that. Between real teams and working groups they identifies the pseudo-teams, which have a performance below average, and the potential teams, which have a performance about equal to the working groups. Next to these, the author still recognize the high-performance teams, which are exceptional, but have a level of performance above all the others. Part two mainly continues explaining and clarifying this model.
The third part is called "exploiting the potential" and talks about higher management teams and about how to build your organization to support teams.
The book is easy readable and well structured. Some of the examples and stories are nice, though some of them do not go in too much detail. In general, I felt that the book could be thinner and some of the stories could be skipped. The authors used a little too much words, hence I'll rate the book 4 stars and not 5.
Still, when interested in teams, this book is certainly recommended.
The Wisdom of Teams Displays Much Wisdom  2007-06-08
This book is an excellent read for anyone with responsibilities for leading groups of people to attain desired and sometimes even extraordinary outcomes within their organization. The insights revealed here are a critically important option for organizations that wish or need to attain productivity beyond what can be realized from the sum of individual contributions. Understanding the discipline of real teams can turn someone with average leadership abilities and potential into an extraordinary leader.
How to form high-performance teams 2007-01-24
What's nice about Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith's book is their willingness to name the truth. They know that everyone pays lip service to teams, but few people act like they truly value teams - and fewer still actually know how teams really work. The authors point out where the hype lies and what it is hiding. Then they go a step farther. They provide a manual for creating what executives say they want: high-performance teams. They illustrate their suggestions, insights and guidelines with a lot of stories of real-world teams, focusing on what makes them work. Their rules are so clear that they leave little room for protecting any cherished illusions. As a result, we find that those readers who are willing to act upon the book's counsel will get the most from it. If you're seriously interested in diagnosing nonperforming teams and creating ones that perform, you'll enjoy this book. And, if you think you're already doing everything right, but your team mysteriously just isn't working...this may solve the puzzle.
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