Nov 27 2015
About Teams and Projects
In The Wisdom of Teams, Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith explained that, for a working group to coalesce as a team, it needs a common goal, complementary skills, and mutual accountability among members. It sounds simple, but it is in fact a tall order, and there is no evidence that it is sufficient. The authors don’t claim it is, but they found these characteristics among successful teams in sports and business, and found them lacking in unsuccessful ones.
What Makes a Great Team
Let us explore the meaning of these three characteristics in more detail:
1. A common goal. It can be organizing a successful conference, or JFK’s “before this decade is out, landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth,” or building a motorcycle that wins a race. Whatever it is, the goal must be clearly stated in few words, with obvious success criteria, for team members to sign up.
Aug 29 2021
Distributed Teams Can Work After All
The 2012 paper in Science about the CRISPR/Cas9 system has been hailed as the greatest breakthrough in biology since Crick and Watson’s discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953. It has earned its two Principal Investigators (PI), Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the 2020 Nobel prize in chemistry. Laypersons cannot really follow this paper but what we can better understand is how the research team worked. And it is remarkable.
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By Michel Baudin • Management • 1 • Tags: Project management, Team