The Wisdom of Teams

Acknowledgments

We approached the idea of a book on teams cautiously. After all, we thought, teams are a well-known subject and there must be a thousand books on the subject already. Still, we suspected that most of these books focused on persuading readers that “teams are important” or providing how-to advice on building teams as an objective in itself. We were interested, by contrast, in understanding what lessons actual teams and nonteams had for others who choose to struggle with change and performance. By going down this path, we hoped to discover something to say that was (in our minds at least) different from most books on the subject.

THE CORE TEAM

Probably Carol Franco, our editor at the Harvard Business School Press, was the first ...