The Secret of Teams

The Secret of Teams
Author: Mark Miller
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2011-10-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1609941101

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

The Best of Teams, the Worst of Teams
Author: Russell O. Wright
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1995
Genre: Reference
ISBN:

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

The Best Team Wins
Author: Adrian Gostick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 150117987X

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

X-Teams
Author: Deborah Ancona
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2007-05-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1422148068

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.

Let Them Lead

Let Them Lead
Author: John U. Bacon
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0358540216

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.

The Discipline of Teams

The Discipline of Teams
Author: Jon R. Katzenbach
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Total Pages: 71
Release: 2009-01-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1633691039

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.

Team Turnarounds

Team Turnarounds
Author: Joe Frontiera
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2012-07-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118239083

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

Great Teams
Author: Don Yaeger
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-07-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0718080572

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.

The Worst Team Money Could Buy

The Worst Team Money Could Buy
Author:
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2005-03-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9780803278226

Even before the New York Mets began the 1992 season, they had set a critical record: the highest payroll ever for a major-league team, $45 million. With players Bobby Bonilla, Vince Coleman, Bret Saberhagen, and Howard Johnson, winning another championship seemed a mere formality. The 1992 New York Mets never made it to Cooperstown, however. Veteran newspapermen Bob Klapisch and John Harper reveal the extraordinary inside story of the Mets? decline and fall?with the sort of detail and uncensored quotes that never run in a family newspaper. From the sex scandals that plagued the club in Florida to the puritanical, no-booze rules of manager Jeff Torborg, from bad behavior on road trips to the downright ornery practical ?jokes? that big boys play, The Worst Team Money Could Buy is a grand-slam classic.

Cellar Dwellers

Cellar Dwellers
Author: Jonathan Weeks
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2012
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0810885328

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.