after he joined young Apple Computer in the early 1980s: mesmerizing .... emotionality. The founders of many of those little startup entities-"organizations" is too.
Hot Groups "With Attitude":
A New Organizational State of Mind Jean Lipman-Blumen
Harold J. Leavitt
Today's organizations need, not more teams, but more "hot groups," goal-focused, impassioned managers and employees who can turn on a dime and create great things fast.
Organizations today don't just need more groups, they need more hot groups.
Organizational survival now demands speed flexibility and creativity. Large organizations are notoriously bad at those. Hot Groups are very good at all three. They can turn on a dime and create great things fast. "Hot Group" is not a name for another kind of team, like self-managed or cross functionalteams. Such teams might become hot groups, but few of them do. A hot group is a plural state of mind, not a structural unit; it is a shared attitude obsessed with and deeply dedicated to its task, an attitude that could infect any group, no matter what its name. It is always accompanied by a sense of mission, of urgent purpose in almost all other respects, hot groups may vary enormously. Their members can be diverse or homogeneous, brilliant or average, young or old, or both. Any group can become a hot group if it can get itself into that distinctive state of mind. A few groups currently called "teams" manage to do that, but the great majority don't. Some "task forces" and other variously labeled groups also heat up, but most don't. It is not the groups name, but the contagious single-mindedness and the all-out dedication to doing something important that distinguish hot groups from all other groups. A challenging task and an accompanying sense of mission are always characteristic of the hot group predilection. The words of some hot group veterans communicate that disposition far better than we can. Here are a few quotes from members of several different kinds of hot groups: This is Bill Gates' description of the programming group he belonged to before
the birth of Microsoft, as Robert Cringely reports it in his Triumph of the Nerds: "We didn't even obey a 24-hour clock. We'd come in and program for a couple days straight, we'd - you know four or five of us - when it was time to eat, we'd get in our cars and kind of race over to the restaurant and sit and talk about what we were doing. Some times I'd get (so) excited about things. I'd forget to eat. Then we'd go back and program some more. Those were also the fun days." Here is an aerospace executive, as he recaptured the culture of a project team he worked on in the mid 1990s: "We even walked differently than anybody else. We felt we were way out there, ahead of the whole world." This is Emmy award-winning actress Barbara Babcock recalling the working atmosphere during the production of the 1980s acclaimed television series Hill Street Blues: "Everybody was involved in that show. We actors didn't just read our lines. We worked on the whole show with the writers and directors.... We knew we were doing something wonderful, something innovative and important." Here, Robert Kennedy, in Thirteen Days, describes the working style of the "ExCom," the ad hoc crisis management group advising President John F. Kennedy in October, 1962, during the tense 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis: "During all these deliberations, we all spoke as equals. There was no rank, and, in fact, we did not even have a chairman....As a result, with the encouragement of McNamara, Bundy, and Ball, the conversations were completely uninhibited....Everyone had an equal opportunity to express himself and to be heard directly. It was a tremendously advantageous procedure that does not frequently occur within the executive branch of the government, where rank is often so important." This is how Steven Levy, in his book, Insanely Great, reports John Sculley's description of the Macintosh design group as Sculley first encountered it, just after he joined young Apple Computer in the early 1980s: "It was almost as though there were magnetic fields, some spiritual force, mesmerizing people. Their eyes were just dazed. Excitement showed on everyone's face. It was nearly a cult environment." Sculley was wrong about the last part of that statement. That hot group state of mind is about as far from a cult mindset as anyone can imagine. Cults
demand conformity and uniformity. They require "groupthink." Hot group members are anything but conformists. They thrive on outspoken debate and disagreement. Hot groups, as these examples suggest, are often professionally, socially, and even intellectually diverse. They need not be composed of geniuses, although there is certainly nothing to prevent such virtuosi from participating-so long as their egos don't blow a group to pieces. Members' IQs are simply unrelated to group heat. So are personality, social rank, professional status, race, gender, and political affiliation. A street corner gang of school dropouts could be a hot group, while a set of Nobelists in economics might well be ice cold. The Gates group was a turned-on collection of deeply committed, bright youngsters, confident that they were on the trail of something great. And they were. The aerospace team was quite homogeneous; a set of engineers and technologists of more or less similar backgrounds, working within a large company. The Hill Street Blues group was also a company, but in the original sense of that word. It, as a temporary assemblage engaged in a common task, a company composed of actors, directors, producers, and camera people who had come together to engage in a specific, relatively short-term undertaking. It was a highly diverse group. Some members were probably brilliant, and some were not. Some were bigger shots in the entertainment industry than others. Some thought first about art, others about money. President Kennedy's ExCom was intentionally heterogeneous, although all of its members were experienced senior public officials working within the context of a much larger bureaucracy. The Mac group was made up of a gaggle of brash and brilliant young Northern California computer jocks, working in a struggling but confident new enterprise. Those hot groups differed greatly from one another. Their members varied on virtually every dimension: age, intelligence, occupation, race, education, status, and gender. Some groups were diverse, others homogeneous. Some were quite autonomous, others operated within tight hierarchical constraints. They went by different names, from "team" to "committee" to "company." The Gates and Macintosh groups had no special names. They were just collections of imaginative and dedicated young people. Yet, all those groups together represent only a narrow sample of the wide range of sizes, shapes, times, and places in which one can find hot groups.
All these examples, however, share some core characteristics of the hot group state of mind. Each group felt itself engaged in an important, even vital, personally stretching, ennobling mission. No matter how trivial their work may appear to outsiders, hot group members always see distinction and meaning in their undertakings. In each case, the task captivated its members, temporarily monopolizing every heart and mind to the exclusion of almost everything else. The process was simultaneously arduous and intoxicating. Contrary to some fundamental tenets of organization development theory, interpersonal relationships played only secondary roles. As is the nature of most hot groups, all our examples were relatively shortlived, yet each is remembered nostalgically and in considerable detail by its participants. Two other important points: First, the fact that several individuals have worked together as a hot group in one venture does not mean that they will generate similar heat every time they collaborate. The Hill Street Blues company heated up, but many of the same participants, working together in later productions, did not strike any particular sparks. Second, the same individuals who have failed to heat up at one task can learn from that experience and ignite one another. A notable hot group of experienced veterans of politics and diplomacy stumbled disastrously in the Bay of Pigs debacle. Yet President Kennedy's later ExCom, composed of many of the same individuals, performed brilliantly in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
TEAMS ARE A JAPANESE IMPORT; HOT GROUPS ARE AS AMERICAN AS SILICON VALLEY. The team wave, as we have come to know it in American organizations, is the child of a mixed marriage. It was born of then enormously successful Japanese management practice coupled with 1950s American research about the dynamics of groups. We came to believe that those Japanese manufacturing achievements were due, in large part, to their effective use of small groups--or so said several best-selling American books about Japanese management styles. Some U.S. companies, therefore, flew their people to Kyoto
whence they returned with group techniques such as quality circles. They introduced these methods into American plants from Wichita to Jersey City, with varying degrees of success. The American portion of that team movement emerged from the re-discovery of a largely untapped backlog of Western academic research on group dynamics-the core of which was initiated at MIT in the late 1940s and 50s. It took the Japanese economic invasion decades later to make companies begin to pay attention to those early findings. The applied specialty called "organizational development" was deeply rooted in that small group theory, so "OD" then began to be taken more seriously by American organizations. Hot groups, in contrast, are the offspring of all-American parents. They came in via the audacious upstart start-ups of Northern California' s Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128. Their arrival had very little to do with either Japan or OD. They burst onto the stage with a brash bang, not on a slow boat from Asia. They were focused on ideas and work, not relationships and emotionality. The founders of many of those little startup entities-"organizations" is too formal a label for most of them--belonged to the irreverent, anti-establishment generation of the sixties. They were veterans of campus unrest, the Vietnam years, and the sexual revolution; the generation that deeply distrusted traditional institutions. Their people had never worn gray flannel suits or been apprenticed at Procter and Gamble or IBM. They were 180 degrees removed from the classic organization man. Indeed, and not surprisingly, some of them were women.
AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS BOUGHT INTO JAPANESE TEAMS BUT DISDAINED HOME-GROWN HOT GROUPS.
Our Western organizations quickly embraced the Japanese team approach, but they showed no love at all for those little hot groups that were springing up much closer to home. Why such selective attraction? Was it because we didn't yet feel the build up of pressure for more speed and innovation? Or because we didn't yet appreciate the acceleration of change, even though much of it had been generated by the new information technology pouring out of that same Silicon Valley? Was it because Japanese-style teams were fairly easy to incorporate into existing organizational architectures? Teams were only mildly disturbing to the hierarchical status quo. They could be designed and controlled from higher
up. They might even serve as a deterrent to unionization. Hot groups were another matter, decidedly unlike teams. They disturbed the established order. If stability and uniformity were to remain organizational holy grails, hot groups were just what they didn't want. Hot groups signaled risk, variability, and continual change. When organizations first met up with hot groups, therefore, they behaved in one of two ways: Either they laughed them off as trivial "children's crusades," as was the case with Apple's Macintosh group, or else they did what they had always done to those few hot groups that dared to sprout in their well ordered gardens: They treated them as noxious weeds and killed them off.
HOT GROUPS IN LITTLE EMERGING ENTERPRISES WERE
CHURNING UP THE INFORMATIONAL FLOOD THAT WOULD SOON ENGULF THE BIG BOYS. Even as most large organizations were seeking shelter from the Japanese typhoon via, among other things, teams, some of those entrepreneurial little outfits were generating even more threatening challenges to the status quo. They were creating an information revolution. And they were doing a lot of it mostly with natural hot groups, not management-manufactured teams. Hot groups had several characteristics that those unconventional startups loved and prized: speed, flexibility, innovativeness, enthusiasm, and unbounded bravado. Even now, don't we often associate hot groups with young institutions and young people? Unfettered by bulk and historical baggage, small, youthful "organizations" could exploit the exhilaration of the hot group. Fortuitously, perhaps, it all happened at a moment in history when the open, task-obsessed style of Silicon Valley meshed beautifully with the accelerating, impermanent demands of the new organizational game. The names of this new organizational game are "speed" and "innovation." Those require much more than ongoing, productive teams. They require more than self-managed work groups or cross-functional task forces. They require impassioned, task-focused hot groups. Still, for many organizations that cannot yet tolerate even individual wild ducks, the transition to whole flocks of them will not come easily.
HOT GROUPS. WHY NOW? In the past, organizations seemed to get along quite well without hot groups. Is now so different from then? Emphatically, yes! Back then, stability was more vital than speed, order more than innovation, predictability more than change. The volatile new world has forced a near reversal of those priorities. Speed, creativity, change--these are the new demands of our era. The new environmental pressures are unlikely to end now that they have begun. We are not heading toward some new equilibrium, some boundless oasis at which organizations will be able to refresh and tell themselves, "OK. We've changed what needed to be changed. Now we can get back to regular business." There is no regular business any more. The hectic exercise of coping with volatile, mostly unpredictable and lightning-fast change will not decelerate. In fact, the basic life patterns of those new world organizations are likely to mirror the life patterns of hot groups. Like hot groups, larger organizations will be innovating, producing, and then disappearing over relatively brief lifetimes, leaving little detritus in their wakes. The turbulent global environment is not the only force pressing organizations to change. Inside pressures are building almost as fast. This generation's people will no longer permit themselves to be depersonalized as "human resources." That was an unfortunate phrase when it arrived 20 or so years ago, and it is even more inappropriate now. Nor is the phrase "knowledge workers" an adequate successor. People working in the new world's organizations are, or should be, "complete" workers. They work with their hands, their heads, their beliefs, their total personae, and with one another. For such people, the old "be good, do as your told, and wait for your promotion," is as "retro" as saddle shoes. Our new people want and deserve challenge, growth, and meaning from their work. More than ever, in this era of rising expectations, organizational members are asking themselves tough questions: What do we really want out of our careers? What makes us feel fulfilled? Why does each of us want so much to be valued as a unique and significant individual? Psychologists, among others, have tried to approach such questions by positing concepts like needs, drives, and motives. David McClelland, for example, long ago measured individuals' needs for achievement, power, and affiliation. Abraham Maslow offered his hierarchy, from physical needs to selfactualization needs. More recently, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed the idea of flow, a more cognitive concept, describing the human sense of moving forward, of accomplishing things worth accomplishing. "The best moments [in life] usually occur," he writes, "when a person's body or mind is stretched to its
limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Hot groups give individuals opportunities to stretch beyond the usual limits, to move forward, voluntarily, in a collegial effort to do something great. Hot groups don't help individuals satisfy all their needs, drives, and motives, but they can certainly give us chances to strive toward those high-relief, "peak experiences."
WATCH OUT! HOT GROUPS CAN EVEN GROW IN AUSTERE,
HIERARCHICAL ORGANIZATIONS.
Organizations knew what they were doing when they tried to kill off nascent hot groups. Hot groups may look like innocent Christmas tree ornaments, but they're really more like live hand grenades, potentially explosive and portending serious organizational upheaval. So, should you encounter a little hot group somewhere inside an otherwise traditional, formalistic organization, at least one of these four conditions is also likely to prevail:
1) The organization doesn't yet know the group is there. If it finds out, it will try to kill it. Thus, in a large government-sponsored research organization, several different project managers told us how they "protected" certain groups' activities. They used devices like setting aside some of last year's budget to fund non-approved, current hot projects. They found ingenious ways to keep needed people, even when they had been ordered to reduce personnel. They might, for example, lay employees off, then immediately rehire them as temporaries for the maximum of 364 days, then give them a day off, then hire them again for another 364 days. Legal? Probably. Ethical? Not so clear. Hot groups often skirt the edges of the rule book. Those R&D directors didn't do those things for personal gain. They did them to get good work done. Could any large bureaucracy function if its people played strictly by every mindless rule? Remember the chaos that resulted from work-to-rule" strikes, when employees did just what the book specified--and no more?
2) The CEO or some other senior patron is the "eminence grise" behind the group, supporting and protecting it. Perhaps that patron feels the group
has spotted a highly promising project. Or perhaps he or she is intentionally using the hot group as a change agent to awaken the whole sleeping giant. By itself, that tactic has about a 50/50 chance of working. It will surely upset the organizational equilibrium, but from there onward it may go either way, in the intended direction or some quite unintended one. Here is one case where a chairman's use of a hot group paid off: A large, conservative engineering firm that we'll call "A&B Engineering" was known for doing first-class work and was also generally viewed as rather old fashioned and slow-moving. The executive offices on the 10th floor of its headquarters were imposing, thickly carpeted, hushed. The food in the executive dining room was worthy of at least one Michelin star. Executive seniority averaged well over 20 years. Turnover was almost non-existent. As far back as anyone could remember, promotions had come entirely from within. The firm was a safe, comfortable haven in which senior executives could pass their golden years. This was not a milieu for noisy, ill-disciplined hot groups! Then, quite unexpectedly, the chairman made a radical and unprecedented move. Concerned about his organization's future, he recruited two newly retired military engineering officers directly into the company's upper ranks. By A&B standards, they were young. They, in turn, brought along a small, even younger cadre of their former military mates. This new group was given lots of leeway by the chairman. It soon heated up. Its members quickly moved into strategic positions in the key divisions of the company. Wherever they went, they infused a sense of energy and urgency. The not-yet-suppressed junior engineers were turned on by these lively new arrivals. Nirvana had fin8llv been reached! Ideas, long withheld or ignored, came bubbling to the surface. The veteran seniors did not view the new group in the same way. They felt threatened, and they were angry. Among themselves, they dubbed the new arrivals the "Military Mafia." But their obvious disapproval only seemed to turn up the Mafia's thermostat. Despite rising tensions, the patron/chairman held his ground. He gave the "Mafiosi" lots of space. The whole culture of the company began to shift in a more spirited, more pro-active direction. The Mafia itself, in the manner characteristic of hot groups, eventually broke up. Its members metamorphosed into individual managers of various divisions. By then, however, the organization had clearly changed.
3) A major crisis is at hand, so normal regulations and procedures have been temporarily suspended. In desperation, the organization is willing to tolerate almost anything, even hot groups. Crises are frequently crucibles for the formation of hot groups. World War II generated them by the hundreds: the British code breakers, for example, and the nuclear physicists working beneath the stands of Chicago Stadium, along with numberless military and underground paramilitary groups. In industrial crises, too, hot groups form. In the 1970s, when several bottles of Tylenol had been poisoned, Johnson and Johnson transformed itself into a whole network of hot groups. The near disaster of the Apollo 13 crisis also quickly formed super-heated group after group associated with NASA.
4) The organization's core values, especially truth-seeking values, provide a supportive surrounding for hot groups. Organizations like 3-M and the old Bell Labs are neither small nor young, nor are they unusually humanistic, yet lots of hot groups have flourished within them. What such organizations share is a culture that values the search for truth even more than the requirements of bureaucracy. Often it is a "culture of science" with deeply embedded beliefs about objectivity and high tolerance for off-center ways of thinking that pervades such organizations. Both of the authors used to work with Bell Labs, before the AT&T break-up. BTL was no small, blue-leaned, Silicon Valley parvenu. One of many seemingly conservative units of old Ma Bell, it was a mature company, with more than twenty thousand employees. We counted nine levels in the hierarchy. BTL was also a polite, gentlemanly place. No one was ever "fired" from the Bell Telephone Laboratories. People were "stimulated"--to go elsewhere. That would seem the wrong soil in which to grow hot groups, except for one all encompassing attribute: BTL's widely shared and tenaciously-held truthseeking values. Those core scientific values underlay every aspect of Bell Labs. From its beginnings, the organization had been designed as a house of science. While BTL thus wore all the trappings of a classic bureaucracy, its values were similar to those of a graduate department in a good university. A new Ph.D. in electrical engineering, fresh out of Stanford or MIT, could blend into Bell Labs with hardly a ripple. Those recruits' new bosses were just like the professors back at school, with credentials at least as impressive as those of their academic peers. Like their professors, these new patrons demanded the same discipline and responsibility, even as they encouraged the same creativity and inter-communication. Moreover, the highest status in the organization went to the people in basic
research, the ones doing the most far out, "impractical" work. In many other companies, those folks, if there were any, would have been irrelevant to the real power structure of the organization. Thus, despite BTL's otherwise rather stodgy, hierarchical, and bureaucratic structure, hot groups flourished, making one scientific or technical breakthrough after another.
CAN HOT GROUPS LIVE IN COLD ORGANIZATIONS? LET US
COUNT SOME WAYS.
There is a broad and basic mismatch between the structures and norms of traditional organizations and those of hot groups. Organizations think "individual," while hot groups think "group." Organizations value order and regularity. Hot groups value freedom and creativity. Organizations like predictability and permanence. Hot groups thrive on uncertainty and change. Large organizations need clear rules and controls. Hot groups prefer spontaneity. They like to make up the game as they go. Yet, despite the differences, accommodations are possible. The marriage can even be fruitful. Here are a few ways that organizational leaders might encourage and support the development of hot groups. •
Think "group" more; think "individual" less. Most managers, especially those in large old organizations, not only think engineering, they also think individual. They hire and fire individuals, promote individuals, evaluate individuals, and reward individuals. That intense focus on individuals causes trouble for groups, engendering intra-group jealousies, competitions, and divisions. Certainly individual rewards are needed, but let it be the group that decides how to do it. It is group members who know better than anyone, which of their colleagues have and have not contributed to the group's performance.
•
Let individualism reign within hot groups. For individuals, also caught in this whirling new world, hot groups provide a much needed refuge; not the lotus blossom refuge of tranquillity, but a refuge of opportunity, a refuge from the wheel-spinning anomie of "normal" organizational life. Hot groups give the individual, in ways both large and small, a chance to escape into adventure, to set sail, with a small crew of committed others, onto uncharted seas in search of wondrous discoveries. To the outside world, some of those quests may seem trivial. Who cares? In the eye of the hot group beholders, their pursuits always glow with promise. Every working human being deserves such a chance to
reach for a star. If limits must be set, those inside the hot group know better than outsiders where and how to set them. •
Don't dis-organize, but do un-organize! Organizations like to organize. They build formal structures, draw organization charts, and design complex control systems. Some varieties of teams and committees may actually flourish in such milieu, but hot groups won't. They need challenge more than routine, nurturing more than control, freedom more than structure. Those are what many small, new organizations can frequently offer, in part because they do not yet suffer from organizational arthritis. Ergo, if large organizations can act more like small ones, hot groups might feel more welcome.
To unorganize is not to disorganize. Good farmers are hardly disorganized. They know what they are doing and how to do it. But they don't know just how many peas will turn up in every pod. It's not anarchy we're seeking. It's what Professors (Michael) Cohen and (James) March once called organized anarchy. We still need some order, some structure, and some control. Now, however, is the time for organizations to give their people more space, to leave some things to nature--human nature--rather than seeking always to program the hitherto unprogrammable.
BEYOND THESE, ORGANIZATIONS NEED TO REMEMBER: •
When hot group seedlings sprout, feed and nurture them. Keep an eye out for them and an eye on them, but don't play psychiatrist. They can take care of most of their own social and psychological problems.
•
Emphasize selection, de-emphasize training. Look for imaginative, task-focused people. Spend less effort teaching those people how to do things the company way.
•
Loosen controls as much as you can. Micro-managing stifles hot groups. Give them resources: space, time, and discretion. A little extra budget doesn't hurt either.
•
Extend the span of control. Don't reduce it. You can supervise more hot groups because they're self regulating.
•
Don't conduct elaborate, individual performance evaluations. Ask yourself if individual performance evaluations do any good. In fact, consider whether you really need any formal individual performance evaluations at all. Put more emphasis on informal feedback.
•
If you want an organization chart, make it look more like a map of Boston than a neat pyramid. Specifying "proper channels" slows communication flows and
impedes innovation. •
Periodically, push the throttle up to full speed. Remember, however, that keeping it there all the time can cause burnout.
If you do all those things, hot groups will probably grow profusely. The more, the better. Be prepared, however, to make appropriate adjustments because hot groups can cause fallout. Hot groups with "attitude" can spark resentment. Their demands may sometimes seem excessive. Some will fail. But on balance, the payoffs far exceed the costs. A caveat: Looseness and openness, in and of themselves, are far from sufficient. Some loose, open organizations are laissez-faire places, casual and unhurried. Hot groups don't do well in such summer resort cultures. They prefer the tension and exhilaration of white-water rafting to lying around by the pool. So it is not surprising that they frequently pop up in new, still-pliable, do-or-die young organizations, only to disappear as success generates caution, and venture capitalists insist that it's time to "get organized." Routinization is a systemic poison for hot groups. It kills both their freedom and their fight.
SUMMING UP: Here is why we believe most organizations now, in this era of impermanence, need more hot groups: •
Contemporary organizations would be wrong to await some new haven of peace and quiet when the storm of change ends. This storm won't end. Comforting normalcy is simply not in the cards.
•
The small group, more than the individual, is fast becoming the basic building block of new organizational structures-except the word "block" is too static. It implies solidity and permanence. The new groups will be neither solid nor permanent. They will be dynamic and transient. The tasks of the new world are already too big and too interconnected, even for brilliant individuals.
•
To cope with increasing environmental turbulence, large organizations are already trying to act more like small ones--to become more nimble, innovative, and continuously self-modifying. They are much more willing to combine, subdivide, form alliances, absorb pieces of one another, and spin off chunks of themselves. As they grow bigger, they try to act smaller. Hot groups-fast, fluid, and deft--are a great device for doing that.
•
Small groups imbued with that urgent, dedicated hot-group state of mind are one of the few psychological linchpins that can connect our new people to our ever-more massive organizations and these organizations to the swirling world beyond.
•
Hot groups, strangely enough, also provide a support system for individualism. They allow space for those individual eccentricities that organizations profess to value but so often reject. More than that, hot groups draw their nutriment from creative individualism.
So the time has come, we repeat, for big, often cold organizations to start seeding, feeding, weeding, and harvesting small hot groups. Hot groups are right for modern organizations, and, thank heavens, they are also good for the hearts and minds of human beings.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY For a related book that encompasses For a more thorough examination of hot many similar ideas, we strongly groups, see Jean Lipman-Blumen and recommend Jean Lipman-Blumen's The Harold J. Leavitt's, Hot Groups: Seeding Connective Edge: Leading in an Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization (New York: Oxford Interdependent World. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996). University Press, 1999). Much of this paper derives from that book. See also The concept of "organized anarchies" is Katzenbach and Smith's now classic The from Michael Cohen, M.D. and James G. Wisdom of Teams (Boston: Harvard March's Leadership and Ambiguity: The Business School Press, 1993) and the American College President. (New York: more recent and closely allied book by McGraw Hill, 1974). Warren Bennis and Patricia Biederman, Organizing Genius (Reading, MA: AddisonRobert Cringely's video Triumph of the Wesley, 1997).
Nerds; Impressing Their Friends. (Volume 1, New York: Ambrose Video Over the last 15 years, much has been Publishing, Inc., 1996) provides a written about teams in organizations. Two wonderful view into some of the hot good books are: Jack D. Osburn, Linda groups of Silicon Valley. See also Moran, Ed Musselwhite, and John H. Steven Levy's Insanely Great: The Life Zenger, (1990) Self Directed Work Teams. and Times of Macintosh, The Computer The New American Challenge (Homewood IL: Business One Irwin, 1990) and Richard That Changed Everything (New York:
S. Wellins, William C. Byham, and George R. Dixon, Inside Teams: How 20 World-Class Organizations Are Winning Through Teamwork. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996).
Viking, 1994). Robert Kennedy's Thirteen Days: Memoirs of the Cuban Missile Crisis. (New York: Norton. 1971) describes the ExCom and its work in terrifying detail.
© 2010 Jean Lipman‐Blumen | All rights reserved
