As the sequel to The Wisdom of Teams, John Katzenbach and Douglas Smith return to uncover the tools, techniques, frameworks and disciplines required to unlock the performance potential that lie within today's teams and virtual teams.

Performance potential is not guaranteed, and you need to become an expert at the two disciplines - team and single leader and, you must be able to implement the right discipline to suit the performance need of your team.

Katzenbach & Smith identify and discuss the Six Basic Principles of Team Discipline: 1) keep team numbers to a minimum, 2) ensure that team members possess skills that compliment one another, 3) identify a clear performance purpose, 4) agree on outcome based goals, 5) provide clear roles and responsibilities and, 6) ensure mutual and individual accountability.

As a follow-up to their insights and strategies, Katzenbach and Smith provide practical exercises at the conclusion of each chapter for both team members and leaders to get them on the road to optimal performance.

The Discipline of Teams is easy to read and will provide the reader with tools, techniques and strategies to assist in becoming top performers within today's organizations. On a personal note, The Discipline of Teams provided me with some new techniques to help develop and maintain effective teams for today and in the future.

The Discipline of Teams updates and extends the best-seller, The Wisdom of Teams. "The most important characteristic of teams is discipline; not bonding, togetherness, or empowerment." You are encouraged to be sure that you use teams only when they make sense as a performance unit, rather than having a single-leader approach. Using sophisticated Marine units as models, you begin to appreciate that some tasks are better suited to individuals and some tasks need to combine team and individual elements. In fact, complex tasks may require many teams focusing on subtasks. The book also looks at virtual teams and the impact of electronic communications on teams (concluding that nothing really changes -- you just have more ways to communicate and face-to-face is still important).

A team makes sense when you need to accomplish something more than what individual performances will give you. A good example comes in new product development. Each specialist can do a good job, and the project can easily be a bust. By thinking together, potential failure can become success by tweaking each perspective in new ways. The authors also point out that many times goals are set that sound like individual performance, but better goals would set directions requiring a team.

An effective team needs to have:

(1) an understandable charter

(2) communicate and coordinate effectively

(3) have clear roles and responsibilities for individuals

(4) use time-efficient processes and

(5) have a sense of accountability.

"Whenever a small group can deliver performance through the combined sum of individual contributions, then the single-leader discipline is the most effective choice."

The book provides many ways to make both teams and single-leader groups work better. In fact, it focuses on those areas that are most likely to cause problems, like poorly defined goals, keeping the size of the group as small as possible, not having the skills needed, time pressures, and using the wrong leadership discipline). I also liked the fact that the book looked at the question of when you should fold a team.

The authors clearly understand a great deal about making teams more effective, and anyone can learn from this book. I think those who liked The Wisdom of Teams will find it to be a useful refresher with some valuable new material.

The book contains many exercises and workbook questions that I happily endorse. They make the book much more practical and useful. If you just did the exercises and the workbook questions, this would be a five star book. The explanations are just icing on the cake.

After you have finished this book, I also suggest you think about whether you have set the right priorities in your organization. Realizing that you can only do a few things at once, what should they be? Be sure to give yourself a chance to pick tasks that will benefit from teams.

Find ways to make human cooperation more beneficial . . . for that's our strength!

excellent history lessons on instruments and origens, good "overall" information but the flute building section is a little vague on dimensions but is still worth reading...lookingbear 2002

I work with Native and non Native kids, and am amazed at the information that I found in this book. It contains modern musicians as well as the older, more traditional forms. The descriptions are concise, and exacting. This publication is a must for any enthusiast of Native Americana or ethnic music! Of course, would you expect less from someone as great as Douglas Spotted Eagle?

I enjoyed Under the Lilacs immensely. It is a wonderful story of children and how they mature. The characters at times seemed rather flat and uninteresting yet the story is a very fun one. It is full of laughter and tears and eventually a happy ending. I would recommend this book to people who have enjoyed Louisa May Alcott in the past or those who enjoy a relatively juvenile book yet will be able to understand references to relatively older literature.

I was asked to read this book over the summer of 2000 and it was great. This is the first book I have read by Louisa May Alcott. I really enjoyed this book and it was sometimes boring but great. I would recommend this book to some that has lost touch with life.................

Under the Lilacs is one of LMA most wonderful novels. I thought it was brilliant and outstanding. I loved all the charecters, and how they delt with their own problems and ways. Be sure to read Under the Lilacs.

This book tells the fascinating story of the invention of the first distributed personal computer systems at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and how a copier company that had grown to over $1 billion in revenue in less than 10 years based on a single new technology (photocopying) was unable to capitalize on a new technology again, despite the best intentions of its leaders.

The really innovative work at PARC was done under the direction of Bob Taylor. When Taylor was forced out, he started DEC's Systems Research Center (SRC) (later acquired by Compaq, and then HP), and he brought much of the top talent along with him.

I read this book on Bob Taylor's recommendation when I first joined DEC SRC as a researcher. But I decided to read it again recently before attending a talk by George Pake, the founding director of PARC. Pake's history of PARC agreed with the book, but he drew very different conclusions about the overall benefit of PARC's inventions to Xerox. In particular, Pake gave far more credit to PARC for contributing to Xerox, but all the examples he gave related to how computer technology has come to be used in photocopiers, which entirely misses the point. As the book's subtitle suggests, most of PARC's astounding computer innovations were largely squandered by Xerox (and "borrowed" by Steve Jobs to create the Apple Macintosh).

The first time I read the book, I was fresh out of school and didn't have much experience in the business world, so the parts of the book dealing with business issues were mostly a mystery to me. This time, it made much more sense, and I actually found the business aspects of the story more intriguing than the technical ones. Even so, the story of the first bit-mapped display, laser printer, ethernet, personal computer, and WYSIWYG editing software -- innovations we take largely for granted today -- is quite interesting!

If innovation is in any way your concern read this. It memorializes fluently almost all the things a management can do to kill creativity.

I have been a fan of the story of Xerox PARC ever since reading "Fumbling the Future" several years ago. In fact the lessons I learned contributed to my leaving engineering to get a business degree. Recently I read "Dealers of lightning" by Michael Hiltzik and was surprised to read through it and come across the Epilogue. In fact, I was actually disturbed by how easily the author relieved Xerox of its opportunity (and obligation from a shareholders perspective) to capitalize on the creativity and ingenuity of Xerox PARC. Those of us within the high-tech community certainly appreciate the open ended research that Xerox PARC conducted which has lined the pockets of so many that were never in any way associated with Xerox. However, if I was a shareholder of Xerox or any other company, I would be horrified by any management rationale that 'you are not obligated to exploit the technologies created within your labs'. Granted you may not be able to exploit all, but how about most? Xerox is not the government and is not using tax dollars for a collective good. I found the logic flawed and violates the basic motivations for establishing a commercial entity. I would recommend that for a business minded individual that you go read "Fumbling the Future" - which I have since reread. Reading "Dealers of lightning" was like watching a lawyer weave a case for premeditated murder against an accused and then claim temporary insanity as the final defense.

i had a very nice time with solving these problems

I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE THIS BOOK BUT I CANT GET TO ORDER IT HOW DO YOU ORDER.AND ALSO FORGOTTON ALEBRA

This is a delightful book. Professor Smith admits, in his introduction, that teaching con law often makes him feel "sleazy": constitutional interpretation is dismayingly unprincipled, based frequently on preference and expediency instead of text or precedent. Instead of becoming dismissive or cynical about this phenomenon (as have many of his colleagues), Smith inquires into the intellectual origins of interpretational freedom. This is a book about the allure and weakness of the 18th Century fetish of reason, an invitation to see modern constitutional creativity as a natural--and perhaps unfortunate--extension of "boastful" Enlightenment self-confidence. This is a complicated thesis, but Smith handles it deftly: he is irreverent without being dismissive and intelligent without being showy. Highly recommended for those who are troubled by judicial incoherence and/or the infection of constitutional law with the jargon of moral theory.

This is a nice collection of 70 hikes in the central arizona area, for Sedona, Prescott, the Bradshaw mountains, Sierra Prieta, Juniper Mesa, Mingus Mountain, and Grantite Mountain areas. The presentation is simple and direct. Each hike has a road-to-trailhead map and description as well as a trail map and trail description. Each also has an interesting altitude profile diagram. B&W photos are included for many hikes. Also includes latitude and longitude for tailheads so you can feed it into a GPS. If you are planning some hiking time in the Prescott, Verde Valley, or Sedona area, this is a good book to have.

This book was incredibly useful for research purposes. I had an assignment on Interpersonal skills and interviewing techinques and the book gave quotations which generally happens in practice. So i was able to compare an contrast what happens in practice with written literature.

The message: real teams are good. The authors rave about all the great things a well functioning team can accomplish and give several examples.

The authors set out to figure out what makes a real team and how people that put these together do it. It is a worthwhile purpose. The problem is that the "insights" revealed are old and rather useless. For example, the authors found that teams that had clearly stated goals performed better than teams that had not agreed on common goals. If this is news to you, you should buy the book.

1 star out of 5

This book does not present any real "revolutionary" ideas that will blow you away with originality, what it does do is lay out the things that make teamwork work. Since so much in business nowadays requires teamwork, the book has a valuable and timely message. Recommended.

Jon Katzenbach and I wish to alert readers of The Wisdom of Teams that we have just published The Discipline of Teams -- a companion and sequel to Wisdom. Discipline includes exercises teams can use to learn and apply the team discipline. It also provides critical additional and new material about setting goals and virtual teaming -- that is, applying the team discipline through teamware/groupware technology such as the web, email, project management and so forth. We believe any reader of Wisdom will benefit from the new material, and expecially the exercises, in The Discipline of Teams.

Astonishingly gripping for the first two-thirds of its length, THE BIG PICTURE has it all: great concept, superb characterizations, vivid style, and a compelling pace. The lead character, Ben Bradford, is a failed photographer who has become a dull-but-prosperous trusts-&-estates lawyer on Wall Street. Bradford's life is shattered when he discovers his wife is having an affair with the loser next door. An anguished Bradford confronts the lover, who taunts Bradford mercilessly. Bradford kills the man with a wine bottle. Rashly, he decides to cover up the murder by staging his own death and assuming the identity of the man he killed. This book is breathtakingly well-written, and perfectly captures the quiet desperation and abandoned dreams of working professionals in the 1990s. Candidly, around page 250, the book suffers from the "Indecent Proposal" syndrome, namely, once the spectacular deed is done, the intensity of the plot lurches to a disappointing halt. Things heat up again while on the lam in Montana. Still, The Big Picture is unputdownable good and Kennedy shows Grishamesque promise

Douglas Kennedy has written a well-crafted novel for yuppies burdened by mid-life crises and itching to be free. At its heart, it is as much a novel of ideas about identity, the burdens of obligations and honesty to one's self as a traditional narrative. But what makes it fun and interesting is that the story works just fine as a cliff-hanger(almost to the very end). The launching pad for Kennedy's meditation is the story of a miserable no-longer-young lawyer at a big New York City law firm who lives in the elite suburbs of Connecticut and whose marriage has been slowly disintegrating. When our hero discovers his wife is having an affair, a confrontation with her lover unexpectedly escalates into murder. Rather than throw himself on the mercy of the justice system, the lawyer determines to escape, which means, he quickly concludes, that he must disappear. From this premise, reader is invited to ponder perhaps the ultimate "what-if" question: How would my life change if I had to walk away -- irr

Although I had never heard of Douglas Kennedy, I was intrigued by the cover and the summary on the book jacket and picked The Big Picture up from the bargain book table. I am glad that I gave this work a shot, as it was a nice, entertaining read. The story is about Ben Bradford, a Wall Street lawyer who, on the surface, seemingly has everything that anyone could want. Quickly though, the reader comes to realize that, as the story goes, money cannot buy happiness. In an instant, everything in Bradford's life is turned upside down. Although it is difficult to condone what Bradford did, one cannot help but appreciate the workings of Bradford's mind as he plots his future and runs from his past. The character development was quite good - it was easy to feel yourself in the various settings, rooting for or against various characters. There was plenty of action, suspense and plot twists. This was a captivating book. I will definitely seek out other works by Kennedy.