Great Business Teams

Understand and decode the inner workings of great business teams with the more than 30 in-depth examples in Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance. Author Howard Guttman examines and dissects teams at top-management, business-unit, and functional levels and isolates five key factors that drive team performance to offer you insight into the ways these teams achieve success. Using this book, go directly to the marketplace to scrutinize teams in a variety of industries, evaluating the challenges they face and the methods they choose to manage these challenges.

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Chapter 1 Cracking the High-Performance Code 1

Chapter 2 The New High-Performance Leader 19

Chapter 3 The New High-Performance Player 47

Chapter 4 Aligning for High Performance 79

Chapter 5 Accelerating to High Performance 111

Chapter 6 How Great Teams Make Decisions 125

Chapter 7 How Great Teams Manage Meetings 141

Chapter 8 How Great Teams Communicate 155

Chapter 9 From Great Teams to a Great Organization 169

Chapter 10 Great Leaders and Teams: Challenges, Responses, and Remaining Issues 185

Appendix A Player-Centered Leadership 203

Appendix B The Skills of a Great Team Member 209

Index 231

HOWARD M. GUTTMAN is Principal of Guttman Development Strategies, Inc. (GDS), a Mount Arlington, New Jersey–based management consulting firm specializing in building high-performance teams, executive coaching, strategic and operational alignment, and project implementation. His articles and commentary have appeared in many publications, including Chief Executive, Financial Times, Harvard Management Update, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, and the Washington Post. He is also the author of When Goliaths Clash: Managing Executive Conflict to Build a More Dynamic Organization. GDS has been selected as one of the twenty best U.S. consulting firms in leadership development by Leadership Excellence magazine.

What makes great business teams stand apart? Some senior executive teams are undaunted by even the toughest business challenges, overcoming them and even using them as opportunities to transform the way their organization operates and performs.

In Great Business Teams, renowned business consultant Howard M. Guttman takes you inside some of the world’s most successful corporations—Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Mars Incorporated, and L’Oréal, to name a few—to discover how a powerful new high-performance horizontal model has changed the way leaders lead, team members function, challenges are met, and decisions are made. He also reveals how and why the organizations that have implemented this innovative team structure have become great companies, able to ride the crosscurrents during lean times and truly soar when opportunities arise.

Guttman bases his keen insights on more than twenty-five years of work with major corporations. In Great Business Teams, you will meet thirty-nine senior executives from twenty-five standout companies, whom he has interviewed in depth and whose performance he has tracked over time. This hands-on guide delivers all of the insights, techniques, and hardwon wisdom needed to create, operate, and sustain well-run and effective business teams that consistently achieve the highest levels of performance.

Follow Novartis Oncology’s CEO and his action teams as they successfully neutralize a competitor’s new product, which had been projected to grab twenty to thirty percent of market share. Learn how newly reorganized teams in Mars Inc.’s Latin American Division moved from double-digit losses to double-digit growth in a single year. These and many other tales from the trenches show you how to:

• Ratchet up team performance to get stellar results year after year
• Become a high-performance leader and motivate others to become high-performance players
• Align teams to drive up performance
• Redefine the concept of individual and team accountability
• Develop the skills to make every team member a leader
• Improve results through the “distributive decision-making” model
• Create great teams throughout your organization

Great teams do more than improve a company’s performance; they continually raise the bar and redefine what “high performance” means. Read Great Business Teams, crack the code, and transform your organization into teams of highly motivated top performers who are ready, willing, and able to respond to any business challenge.