High-Performance Teams: The Katzenbach-Smith Collection (2 Books)

Prologue

A Note About What to Expect

TEAM IS A word and concept well known to everyone. Accordingly, we first intended this book to explore teams in a broader organizational context. We also believed that our past experiences, plus the existing body of research knowledge, would provide us with most of the information we needed. We were wrong.

As we started our search for examples to confirm what we thought we knew, we quickly discovered how much we had overlooked and how rich the subject of teams actually is. As a result, we have spoken with hundreds of people in dozens of organizations, focusing on groups who were or might have been teams. (See Appendix.) We discovered no bad examples; we learned from all of them. We also came to recognize ...