The Secret of Teams


Book Description

Teams are critical to the success of every organization. Departmental, interdepartmental, cross-functional, ad hoc, task-specific—teams do everything from planning the office party to setting the annual budget to establishing performance goals. But what separates the teams that really deliver from the ones that simply spin their wheels? What is the secret of high-performance teams? As he did in The Secret, Mark Miller uses a compelling business fable to reveal profound yet easily grasped truths that can dramatically transform any organization. Debbie Brewster, the heroine of The Secret, has been promoted and is now struggling with taking her new team to the next level. Her old mentor, Jeff Brown, the company’s CEO, sends her out to find the secret of teams. On her journey she learns from three very different teams—the Special Forces, NASCAR, and a local restaurant. Debbie and her team discover the three elements that all successful teams have in common. But that’s just the beginning. The devil is in the details, as the story of Debbie’s efforts to actually implement the three elements shows. You’ll learn how to change entrenched ways of thinking and acting, what you have to do to optimize each of the three elements of a successful team, how to measure your progress, and more. Creating high-performance teams does more than just give your organization a competitive advantage. It can be a performance multiplier that significantly improves results while honoring and developing people. It may be the ultimate win-win-win that your organization is seeking.




The Best of Teams, the Worst of Teams


Book Description

Were the Yankees of Ruth, Gehrig and Hoyt better than the Yankees of Mantle, Berra and Ford? What was the best Kansas City Royals team of all time? What team holds the single season record for home runs per game?For the baseball fan and researcher alike, this book is a detailed statistical portrait of each of the 28 major league teams. Using a unique game-by-game analysis, clubs can now be compared across eras. Part I examines winning and losing percentages. Part II evaluates the offensive highs and lows of each team. Part III does the same for defensive statistics. In Part IV the best teams of each franchise are scrutinized. Finally Part V is a statistical recap of the best and worst for each team in all categories examined in the book.




The Best Team Wins


Book Description

The New York Times bestselling authors of The Carrot Principle and All In deliver a breakthrough, groundbreaking guide for building today’s most collaborative teams—so any organization can operate at peak performance. A massive shift is taking place in the business world. In today’s average company, up to eighty percent of employees’ days are now spent working in teams. And yet the teams most people find themselves in are nowhere near as effective as they could be. They’re often divided by tensions, if not outright dissension, and dysfunctional teams drain employees’ energy, enthusiasm, and creativity. Now Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton share the proven ways managers can build cohesive, productive teams, despite the distractions and challenges every business is facing. In The Best Team Wins, Gostick and Elton studied more than 850,000 employee engagement surveys to develop their “Five Disciplines of Team Leaders,” explaining how to recognize and motivate different generations to enhance individual engagement; ways to promote healthy discord and spark innovation; and techniques to unify customer focus and build bridges across functions, cultures, and distance. They’ve shared these disciplines with their corporate clients and have now distilled their breakthrough findings into a succinct, engaging guide for business leaders everywhere. Gostick and Elton offer practical ways to address the real challenges today’s managers are facing, such as the rise of the Millennials, the increasing speed of change, the growing number of global and virtual teams, and the friction created by working cross-functionally. This is a must-read for anyone looking to maximize performance at work, from two of the most successful corporate consultants of their generation, whom The New York Times called “creative and refreshing.”




X-Teams


Book Description

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.




Debugging Teams


Book Description

In the course of their 20+-year engineering careers, authors Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman have picked up a treasure trove of wisdom and anecdotes about how successful teams work together. Their conclusion? Even among people who have spent decades learning the technical side of their jobs, most haven’t really focused on the human component. Learning to collaborate is just as important to success. If you invest in the "soft skills" of your job, you can have a much greater impact for the same amount of effort. The authors share their insights on how to lead a team effectively, navigate an organization, and build a healthy relationship with the users of your software. This is valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular series of talks—including "Working with Poisonous People"—has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.




Let Them Lead


Book Description

An uplifting leadership book about a coach who helped transform the nation’s worst high school hockey team into one of the best. Bacon’s strategy is straightforward: set high expectations, make them accountable to each other, and inspire them all to lead their team. When John U. Bacon played for the Ann Arbor Huron High School River Rats, he never scored a goal. Yet somehow, years later he found himself leading his alma mater’s downtrodden program. How bad? The team hadn’t won a game in over a year, making them the nation’s worst squad—a fact they celebrated. With almost everyone expecting more failure, Bacon made it special to play for Huron by making it hard, which inspired the players to excel. Then he defied conventional wisdom again by putting the players in charge of team discipline, goal-setting, and even decision-making – and it worked. In just three seasons the River Rats bypassed 95-percent of the nation’s teams. A true story filled with unforgettable characters, stories, and lessons that apply to organizations everywhere, Let Them Lead includes the leader’s mistakes and the reactions of the players, who have since achieved great success as leaders themselves. Let Them Lead is a fast-paced, feel-good book that leaders of all kinds can embrace to motivate their teams to work harder, work together, and take responsibility for their own success.




Team Turnarounds


Book Description

How any manager can turn a struggling team into business champs In today’s uncertain economic environment, teams are asked to do more with less. With resources stretched thin, turning around a struggling team has never been harder, and managers must work to identify and maximize whatever potential strengths a team already has. As sports fans already know, behind every great underdog story is a leader who roots out the competitive advantage that will propel the team to victory. In Team Turnarounds, Joe Frontiera and Dan Leidl share how this fine art of the turnaround really works, from how to inspire the team to the actual tools for change. Through interviews with team managers and turnaround masters in the NFL, MLB, and the NCAA, as well as managers at top global firms who have successfully reversed their fortunes, they show the six steps every team takes to make a 180 in their performance. • Presents a six-step model for turnarounds in any organization, based on the authors’ extensive research with owners and general managers of sport franchises in the MLB, NFL, and NBA • Features first-hand accounts of sport turnarounds, from the legendary worst-to-first story of Bill Polian and the Indianapolis Colts to Jeffrey Lurie’s efforts to transform the Philadelphia Eagles • Offers behind-the-scenes accounts of effective turnarounds at major organizations like Dominos Pizza, Juniper Networks, iContact, and the Broadway play, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark No matter how bad the circumstances, how awful the performance, or how far shares have plummeted, Team Turnarounds shows how any organization can make the climb back up to the top.




Great Teams


Book Description

What makes a team great? Not just good and not just functional—but great? Over six years, long-time Sports Illustrated editor Don Yaeger was invited by some of the greatest companies in the world to speak about the habits of high-performing individuals. From Microsoft and Starbucks to the New England Patriots and San Antonio Spurs, what do some organizations do seemingly better than most of their opponents? Don took the challenge. He began building into his travel schedule opportunities to interview our generation’s greatest team builders from the sports and business worlds. During this process, he conducted more than 100 interviews with some of the most successful teams and organizations in the country. From those interviews, Don identified 16 habits that drive these high-performing teams. Building on the stories, examples, and first-hand accounts, each chapter in Great Teams comes with applicable examples on how to apply these characteristics in any organization. Great Teams includes: Life lessons from some of the most notable names in sports and business applied to team-making in any situation Interviews from well-known players from Peyton and Eli Manning to Kevin Durant Skills to allow culture to shape who you recruit, manage dysfunction, friction, and strong personalities Advice on how to win in critical situations, embrace change, build a mentoring culture, and see value others miss Great Teams is the ultimate intersection of the sports and business worlds and a powerful companion for thought leaders, teams, managers, and organizations that seek to perform similarly. The insight shared in this book is sure to enhance any team in its pursuit of excellence.




Cellar Dwellers


Book Description

In 1890, baseball's Pittsburgh Alleghenys won a measly 23 games, losing 113. The Cleveland Spiders topped this record when they lost an astonishing 134 games in 1899. Over 100 years later, the 2003 Detroit Tigers stood apart as the only team in baseball history to lose 60 games before July in a season. These stories and more are told in Cellar Dwellers: The Worst Teams in Baseball History, a colorful tribute to the sport's least successful clubs. Cellar Dwellers spans three centuries of professional baseball, recounting the seasons of those teams whose misadventures have largely been forgotten over time. Chapters not only cover the stories of the luckless teams, they also include reams of statistics and detailed player profiles of those who helped the clubs--and those who helped them fail. In addition to the Alleghenys, Spiders, and Tigers, the cellar dwellers of baseball include: -1904 and 1909 Washington Senators -1916 Philadelphia Athletics -1928 and 1941 Philadelphia Phillies -1932 Boston Red Sox -1935 Boston Braves -1939 St. Louis Browns -1952 Pittsburgh Pirates -1962 New York Mets While many books revel in the glories of teams whose exploits have become legendary, the stories found in this volume offer an engaging alternative to the thrill of victory. Embellished with comical and amusing anecdotes alongside historical perspectives, Cellar Dwellers will entertain baseball fans and fascinate those who love baseball history.




Global Teams


Book Description

Working for a matrix international organisation, with its ensuing diverse global teams, based in a variety of geographic locations is a fact of life for most leaders and managers today. These teams may be permanent, or they may come together temporarily to deliver a specific project. The challenges of making decisions, setting goals, communicating, building trust and managing the team are far harder when you are separated by time, language, culture and priorities. Global Teams will enable leaders, teams and organisation to deal with the challenges they face: · How can you ensure that your global team delivers results? · How do I trade off our local goals and priorities versus the global priorities? · How do I find out what is really going on and how it will affect me? · Can I trust top management to support my agenda and me personally? · How can I lead people who I do not see and are not like me? Based on original research with some of the world’s leading companies, Global Teams is the definitive, practical guide on making the sharp end of globalisation work for you and your organisation. “In this book, Jo Owen provides not only a thorough understanding of what make a “global” organization effective, but also ideas and reflections on how to go about it, in a way that is neither simplistic nor dogmatic. Great read.” Bertrand Lavayssiere, Ayres and Co. Strategy Consultancy “A perk of my job is that I get paid to read and review books. Nothing thrills me more than to know that one of my favourite management authors, Mr Jo Owen, has another book published. I enjoy reading his perspectives on the various aspects of management as he provides insights that can be easily digested by anybody yet has the necessary depth to help you with the skills needed in management. His latest offering showcases research that he has extensively carried out and provides astute insights that will benefit any executive from any level of management, be it middle or senior management. Quickly bookmark this for your “to-read list” as it is a useful, insightful read.” Sadie Jane Nunis, Singapore Institute of Management, Publications Manager “Jo Owen has done it again – spotted a big gap in the literature and filled it elegantly and effectively with this splendidly readable, comprehensive, practical, and evidence-based treatment of a topic that is really challenging to our globalizing business world. Packed with great examples and quotes Owen leads the reader through the toughest and most interesting challenges in cross-cultural management: leadership, team dynamics, business context and systems, cultural intelligence and conflict resolution. This should be the first item for global managers to put in their hand luggage.” Nigel Nicholson, Professor, London Business School, author of “The ‘I’ of Leadership: Strategies for seeing being and doing” (Jossey-Bass, 2013) "Original and practical book on a vital topic which no one has looked at in depth before; simple and clear to read; lots of real world case examples; escapes the normal orthodoxy where globalisation means spreading western practice." Alberto Forchielli. Managing Partner, Mandarin Capital Partners.