Make Success Measurable! is definitely becoming the Bible at work. Very well written, and Smith's ideas are well-supported. We've received positive feedback from clients, and we've expanded our client base because of this good word-of-mouth. I strongly recommend Make Success Measurable! It's as good as Guerilla PR: Wired, which focuses on techniques to getting solid public relations coverage, especially nowadays.

You can rarely pick up a job description in the public or private sector that does not include a statement seeking "demonstrated experience and success working with the principles of quality management and a commitment to customer service." One of the cornerstones to quality management is the ability to focus on outcomes instead of activities.

Make Success Measurable is filled with practical techniques. Even more, it is a workbook, providing opportunities to apply new concepts to real work. Whether you want to be able to create more focus within your own work unit, be able to demonstrate tangible results to your manager, prioritize your own work by aligning your day to day activities with the most important initiatives, or coach customers who are seeking your expertise in developing performance measures, this book can help.

As a result of reading this book and trying the exercises, you should be able to:

1) Convert new visions, strategies, and directions into achievable outcome-based goals that can better yourself and others in your organization.

2) Set goals that are specific, measurable, aggressive, achievable, relevant, and time bound. (SMART Goals)

3) Set goals that matter to those expecting a return on their funding dollars.

4) Set goals that matter to you personally in terms of opportunities, rewards, and skills.

5) Choose from a variety of management disciplines to achieve your goals.

6) Set goals that matter to customers who want speed, quality, and prompt service.

"I believe you will benefit from this book because the challenge of setting and achieving performance goals has become very confusing". Douglas K. Smith writes, "It has been more than 30 years since Peter Drucker wrote about the importance of managing for results. His work led to the widespread practice of management by objective. But an awful lot has happened in the past 30 years. The world of business and organizations has changed dramatically, turning many of Drucker's specifics (though not his wisdom) upside down. In the aftermath of total quality, customer service, time-based competition, strategic alliances, globalization, reengineering, core competencies, continuous improvement, innovation, teams, horizontal organization, benchmarking, best place to work, information technology, diversity, environmentalism, deregulation and reregulation, eCommerce, and privatization, those of us left standing in today's organizations are unsure about what performance goals and outcomes make the most difference and why. We know that setting performance goals is key to managing ourselves and others, but we no longer know how".

Douglas K. Smith organizes his book in four parts. In the first part (Chapters 1-4), he provides the background, concepts, tools, techniques, and frameworks you need to set specific outcome-based goals that matter to successfully navigate today's most pressing performance challenges. In the second part (Chapters 5-7), he focuses on helping you align and coordinate goals throughout your organization. In the third part (Chapters 8-10), he describes the management disciplines you need to achieve your goals and how to make choices among them. In the fourth part (Chapter 11), he concludes the book with a step-by-step design for building an outcomes management system in your organization.

In this context, in Chapter 10, he reviews the management disciplines you must understand in order to succeed in the face of change, and introduces the critical distinction between decision-diven change and behavior-driven change, and describes how to manage each successfully. Hence, he argues that most change efforts fall far short of their potential. Usually that's because leaders fail to address the deep behavioral changes they are seeking. And thus, he lists the following ten management principles as the heart of any successful change effort:

1. Keep performance results the primary objective of behavior and skill change.

2. Continually increase the number of individuals taking responsibility for their own change.

3. Make sure that each person always knows why his or her performance and change matters to the purpose and results of the whole organization.

4. Put people in a position to learn by doing and provide them with the information and support they need just in time to perform.

5. Embrace improvisation as the best path to both performance and change.

6. Use team performance to drive change whenever demanded.

7. Concentrate organizational designs on the work that people do, not on the decision-making authority they have.

8. Create and focus energy and meaningful language because these are the scarcest resources during periods of change.

9. Stimulate and sustain behavior-driven change by harmonizing initiatives throughout the organization.

10. Practice leadership based on the courage to live the change you wish to bring about.

Finally, he argues that if you expect others to change their behavior, you have to change yours. It's as simple and as hard as that.

I strongly recommend.

Beautiful pictures, touching and moving story. About the restoration of the wolves.

Beautiful pictures illustrates the many different wolves that were restored to yellowstone (#10, #9etc...). Illustrates the effort the yellowstone had to put in to restore the wolf to its natural habitat. Very interesting to the average wolf lover and those who are interested in what happened in the 1995 restoration of the wolves to yellowstoen.

This book brings you right into the experience of bringing the wolves back to Yellowstone where they belong! Find out the behind the scenes activity that brought the sight and sound of the wolf back after an absence of over 60 years. You'll never be the same after reading this. Excellent!!

I found the book to be extremely informative. Douglas Smith has done a masterfull job of creating a step by step guide for the process of both Creating and Managing Change in any organization. He also points out why many Change Efforts fail. The 10 step guide that he has created should help us all avoid the common pitfalls of this process and help greatly improve our odds of success. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is either thinking about starting a change effort or currently in the midst of one now.

This is clearly the best book about the practical side of Change Management I've read so far (and I've read more then 20 by now). This book really helps me in my day-to-day work as a Change Manager. Smith has closed a big gap in the Change Management literature, this is the most practical book you can look for! Highly recommended.

Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith are partners at McKinsey & Co., the famous management-consulting firm. This article was published in the March-April 1993 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

The authors report on their research into teamwork, in particular "to discover what differentiates various levels of team performance, where and how teams work best, and what top management can do to enhance their effectiveness." Katzenbach and Smith define "a team as a small number of people, with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable." They discuss all the elements within this definition in detail. The authors then continue to classify teams in three ways: First, teams that recommend things, second, teams that make or do things, and, third, teams that run things. Each type of team face a characteristic set of challenges. The authors also believe that teams will become the primary unit of performance in high-performance organizations and that these teams will enhance existing structures without actually replacing them. The article is complemented with a useful short summary on approaches that are shared by many successful teams.

In this article the authors discuss teams, which they believe is a basic discipline. By discussing all the different elements of this discipline Katzenbach and Smith provide great insights and tools for better teamwork. The authors have written several good books on teamwork. Recommended to leaders, managers, team members, and MBA-students. The authors use simple US-English.

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!

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.

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.