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Douglas K. Smith

Jon R. Katzenbach

The Wisdom of Teams: Creating The High-Performance Organization (Collins Business Essentials) Paperback – February 18, 2003

by Jon R. Katzenbach (Author), Douglas K. Smith

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Teams -- the key to top performance

Motorola relied heavily on teams to surpass its competition in building the lightest, smallest, and highest-quality cell phones. At 3M, teams are critical to meeting the company's goal of producing half of each year's revenues from the previous five years' innovations. Kodak's Zebra Team proved the worth of black-and-white film manufacturing in a world where color is king.

But many companies overtook the potential of teams in turning around tagging profits, entering new markets, and making exciting innovations happen -- because they don't know how to utilize teams successfully. Authors Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith talked with hundreds of people in more than thirty companies to find out where and how teams work best and how to enhance their effectiveness. They reveal:

The most important element in team success

Who excels at team leadership ... and why they are rarely the most senior people

Why companywide change depends on teams ... and more

Comprehensive and proven effective, The Wisdom of Teams is the classic primer on making teams a powerful tool for success in today's global marketplace.

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Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publication date

February 18, 2003
Dimensions

5.2 x 0.88 x 7.9 inches
ISBN-10

0060522003
ISBN-13

978-0060522001

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From the Publisher

THE WISDOM OF TEAMS:CREATING THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE Additional Content

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jon R. Katzenbach is a founder of Katzenbach Partners, consultants in the areas of team, leadership, and workforce performance. His published works include Real Change Leaders, Teams at the Top, The Work of Teams, and Peak Performance. Mr. Katzenbach and Mr. Smith are both formerly of McKinsey & Company.

Douglas K. Smith is a leading consultant on organization, performance, and change. His published works include Make Success Measurable!, Taking Charge of Change, and Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. Mr. Katzenbach and Mr. Smith are both formerly of McKinsey & Company.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperBusiness
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 18, 2003
Edition ‏ : ‎ Reprint
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060522003
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060522001
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.88 x 7.9 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #578,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #97 in Human Resources & Personnel Management (Books)
- #420 in Business Management (Books)
- #1,680 in Business Processes & Infrastructure
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(272)

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Douglas K. Smith
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Jon R. Katzenbach
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Jon R. Katzenbach is now with Strategy& (part of the PwC network) where he founded and continues to lead The Katzenbach Center. The Center is focused on taking innovative ideas in organization beyond best practice. With over 45 years of consulting experience, Jon is a recognized expert in organizational performance, collaboration, corporate governance, culture change and employee motivation. Prior to joining Booz & Company, Jon was a Founder of Katzenbach Partners LLC, a firm specializing in organization, leadership, governance and strategy. Before founding Katzenbach Partners LLC, Jon was a Director with McKinsey.
Jon has personally done work for George and John Paul Getty (Founder of Getty Oil), Edgar Kaiser (CEO of Kaiser Industries), John Reed (CEO of CitiGroup), David Rockefeller (Chairman and Chief Executive of Chase Manhattan Bank), Jack Rowe (CEO of Aetna), Larry Spitzer (CEO of Memorex), Charles Williamson (CEO at Unocal) and others.
Jon has authored several articles and books, including Why Pride Matters More Than Money, Peak Performance, Teams at the Top, Real Change Leaders, The Myth of the Top Management Team, and Firing Up the Front Line. He also co-authored (with Douglas Smith) The Discipline of Teams and the bestseller The Wisdom of Teams. Jon and Zia Khan’s new book, Leading Outside the Lines, discusses how leading enterprises can accelerate behavior change and performance by mobilizing the informal elements of their organization to complement the formal.
Jon attended Brigham Young University and graduated with distinction from Stanford University in 1954 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics. He obtained his MBA from Harvard University in 1959 where he was a Baker Scholar. Jon also served in the Navy during the Korean War as a Lt (jg) in the Pacific on the USS Whetstone (LSD 27) and on the USS Nicholas (DDE 449).
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Customer reviews

272 global ratings

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Customers find the book's content positive, describing it as wonderful and good common sense reading. The team content receives praise, with customers highlighting its focus on shared accountability and effective team performance.

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12 customers mention content, 11 positive, 1 negative

Customers praise the book's content, describing it as wonderful and good common sense reading, with one customer highlighting its useful examples and stories.

...This book talks about every aspects you may meet in team. It is very good book.Read more

Amazing; every single lines is like the simplest, most direct common sense, except that until you read it, you din't really think of it....Read more

It is really good book based on very intersting stories about different stories from different industries. Some good points to take.Read more

...validation till I had the good fortune of discovering this wonderful book. "...Read more

8 customers mention team content, 8 positive, 0 negative

Customers appreciate the team content of the book, highlighting its focus on shared accountability and team-based philosophy. One customer notes its highly detailed framework for team development, while another mentions it introduces the team performance curve.

This concise book presents a wonderful strategic plan for teams that can be adopted by any kind of organization, large or small....Read more

...The Wisdom of Teams" offers rich and invaluable research validation on the critical ingredients of high performance teams....Read more

...It has a lot of great themes and concepts regarding teamwork, but very few concrete examples or applications....Read more

Jon Katzenbach and Dough Smith is probably the most classical work on teams at the moment....Read more

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Paul Mathew
Invaluable Contribution towards Understanding Team Dynamics
Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2012
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As a corporate trainer for over 15 years, I have repeatedly experienced the power of teams. This ability to deliver excellence under change, challenge, and pressure, and actually enjoy it, has been behaviourally demonstrated and reinforced consistently by hundreds of teams and thousands of participants spanning a wide range of culture, industry, and hierarchy. However, all I had with me was behavioural validation till I had the good fortune of discovering this wonderful book.

"The Wisdom of Teams" offers rich and invaluable research validation on the critical ingredients of high performance teams. The authors, Jon Kastenbach, and Douglas Smith, have researched teams from a wide range of industry, both high performance teams as well as teams that have failed, and listed very clear parameters that make teams either powerful or ineffective. The findings point to one of the prime responsibilities of leadership as the formation of 'teams'. Once a group of people become a team, they invariably find the competencies, and get the resources needed. Simply because the basic instinct of a 'natural' team is to win. No team is comfortable being second. Integration, collaboration, communication, creativity, managing time, enjoying change, taking on challenge, are attitudinal traits naturally available to a team.

This invaluable book defines what converts a group of people into powerful 'natural' teams. This is a must read for all team players, team builders, and leaders of teams and organizations.

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3 people found this helpful

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Michael Andrew Smith
A great book on teams and their value to organizations...
Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2014
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The helped me better understand the difference between work groups and teams. It has also helped me to understand the great benefits of teams.

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Brian Prucey
Highly detailed framework for team development
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2004
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Overview:

The Wisdom of Teams presents Katzenbach and Smith's contention that real teams are the best approach to building a high-performance organization. The authors blended together their highly detailed framework for team development with examples of how several corporations successfully or unsuccessfully implemented these team principles. While acknowledging that teams may not be the best solution for every organization's problems, the authors unashamedly insisted that businesses do themselves a disservice by not considering the team-based approach. The book's twelve chapters are organized into three parts: Understanding Teams, Becoming a Team, and Exploiting the Potential.

Summary:

Part One, Understanding Teams, introduces the reader to the authors' thesis that teams present the best approach to creating a high-performance organization. Teams are defined as a "small group of people with complementary skills committed to a common purpose and set of specific performance goals" (21). Teams are not the same as work groups, committees, councils or task forces where the emphasis is on individual performance and accountability; that is, the sum of individual bests. Neither is every group that calls itself a team a true team. They may exhibit team-like characteristics or share team-like values, but those in and of themselves do not make a team. The distinguishing characteristic of teams is the synergistic effect created when individual accountability is exchange for mutual group accountability and shared group responsibility. Additionally, teams need to do real work in order be characterized as a real team. They must produce a specific work product that contributes to the organization's mission and success. However, achieving real team status is often difficult. In order to become successful, potential teams must overcome bureaucratic inertia, managerial biases, confusion about what makes a true team, negative past experiences with pseudo teams, fear of failure, and individual resistance to shared accountability. These embody a daunting array of factors to overcome, but the authors insisted that a top-level commitment to team-based solutions could lead to building a successful team.

In Part Two, Becoming a Team, the authors used their "team performance curve" to graphically illustrate the process necessary to create winning teams. A group does not become a team when initially formed. They may be a working group committed to better coordinating individual efforts toward individual goals benefiting the company, but they produce no joint work product. While this may be the best solution to a company's problem, the decision to become a team requires the conscious decision to assume the risk of mutual accountability and joint responsibility. If provided the right catalyst, a working group can transition to either a pseudo team or a potential team. The pseudo team fails to implement the basics of team building. They call themselves a team but are still focused on individual performance and not group results. Potential teams show an enhanced desire to formulate a group mission but have not adopted mutual accountability. They demonstrate improved team effectiveness, but their impact on the corporate problem is no greater than the working group. Real teams have a clearly defined mission for which they hold themselves mutually accountable and produce a joint work product. High performance teams are real teams that develop a deep personal commitment among the members of the team for one another's personal growth and wellbeing. These teams are both highly effective in their team effort and produce high quality results for the organization. However, to rise to that level, team members must make the critical choice to invest themselves in the team and its mission while overcoming obstacles that threaten to cause the team to regress to one of its lesser effective counterparts. Successful teams need quality leaders who help focus the group on the mission, endorse a team-based philosophy of shared accountability, and foster a climate of courage and success.

In Part Three, the authors forcefully championed their assertion that teams are the building blocks of successful organizations. Teams, they insisted, are the best organizational tool to deliver the results necessary to build customer loyalty, shareholder value, and employee satisfaction. Provided a company has a strong performance ethic and vision-driven leadership, teams can contribute the necessary skills, energy, and performance values that drive successful businesses. The ultimate decision to incorporate functional team rests with executive leadership and its willingness to transform bloated hierarchical structures, managerial parochialism, and individual-based incentives.

Review and Reaction:

Brevity and succinctness are not the strengths of this book. Once one is able to navigate the business techno babble, the mind numbing repetitiousness, and awkward sentence structures, the authors' point becomes clear: Teams are good for business. The genuine strength of the book is in the examples. The authors' ethereally academic presentation of team concepts finds a clearer voice in their reflections on how these concepts were applied in "real world" corporate environments. While not every example speaks with equal adequacy to its point, the reader can gain an understanding of what factors help build or break teams. Many of these factors, as the authors' asserted, are common sense.

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Rachel Lilly
Amazing; every single lines is like the simplest
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2015
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Amazing; every single lines is like the simplest, most direct common sense, except that until you read it, you din't really think of it. Great examples, well done.

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Ignacio Zepeda Trujillo
Could be half long if focused on results they found
Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2021
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
Initially i was excited of the premise they said. The results found investigating a lot of companies...but they were too extreme with that.
A few examples would be ok, not almost the entire book.

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L. Kerner
Go to Book for Team Building
Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2021
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Highly recommend for those who want to learn how to build a good team.

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Edgar Serrano
A wonderful strategic plan
Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2015
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This concise book presents a wonderful strategic plan for teams that can be adopted by any kind of organization, large or small. We are using it in our church and it's giving us great results.

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Portalnd
very good book
Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2012
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This is a text book we use in the class. This book talks about every aspects you may meet in team. It is very good book.

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haniasofia
Nunca llego el libro
Reviewed in Mexico on August 1, 2020
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El libro nunca llegó y nunca tuve mi dinero de regreso

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Thom Z.
Great examples and insights!
Reviewed in Canada on November 13, 2022
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
For those considering the use of teams, this a great place to start

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JLM
The Book on Teams
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 12, 2016
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
This book is unashamedly pro-teamworking. This does not detract from its usefulness. It has a ring of authenticity, derived from observational study of about 50 teams in a variety of service and manufacturing industries; and it offers clarity - the points it makes are coherent and insightful. Each chapter has an interesting perspective (in contrast to many popular business books that are too often one-trick ponies). The book also includes a few sets of questions as aids to reflection and analysis. The scope of the material covered ranges from ideas that would help a small task-and-finish group up to and including perspectives gained from observing a team leading a strategic reconfiguration of a major multinational firm. The book was recommended as 'the' go-to book on teams and it did not disappoint. My one criticism would be that it is very much a product of the heyday of corporate America. For a modern-day / future-facing perspective, Laloux's 'Reinventing Organisations' develops many of the themes championed by this book.

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Atul Ranjan
Great Read
Reviewed in India on January 15, 2026
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Amazing Book

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John O Hanlon
MEET PERFORMANCE GOALS
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 27, 2014
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A Team
"A team is a small group of people with complementary skills committed to a common purpose and set of specific performance goals.
They are committed to working with each other to achieve the team’s purpose and hold each other fully accountable for the team’s results".
Teamwork
"A set of values that encourages behaviours such as listening, constructively responding to points of view expressed by others, giving others the benefit of the doubt, providing support to those who need it, and recognising the interests and achievements of others".
Source... The Wisdom of Teams , Jon R. Katzenback and Douglas K. Smith , HBS Press , 1993
Now I know the difference, this is as relevant now as when it was written in 19993. This book is a must for every accountable manager. I wish I read it in 1993.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Nunca llego el libro

5.0 out of 5 stars Great examples and insights!

5.0 out of 5 stars The Book on Teams

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read

5.0 out of 5 stars MEET PERFORMANCE GOALS

Nunca llego el libro

Great examples and insights!

The Book on Teams

Great Read

MEET PERFORMANCE GOALS