Five Secrets of the World's Most Productive Teams

Why is it that you can take a team of perfectly capable people and in one context they will succeed, while in another they will fail miserably?

1. Good Teams Trust Each Other!

2. Good Teams Support Open, Creative Thought Process

Looking at organizations who are far and away innovation leaders, they work very hard to create a culture where creative thought will thrive. This takes a lot of work as many people are so cautious to share ideas for fear that they might be crucified. One of the great 3M stories of all time, is their accidental darling product the "Post-it" note; while attempting to make a form of super glue, a chemist screwed up, but just before they tossed the batch a group of researchers asked a great 3M question; "has he made something else instead?" when some happened to fall onto a pile of paper. In most companies this is where the story would end; somebody might think, "hey do you think that anyone would ever need to stick paper together?" but they certainly wouldn't persue it. 3M created hundreds of millions in revenue from it's ubiquotus post-its.

3. Good Teams See Problems As Opportunities and Tackle Them Together



4. Good Teams Love To Work Hard and Love to Play Harder

5. Good Teams Understand and Respect Each Other's Relative Strengths and Weaknesses

Malcolm Gladwell's Best-Selling Novel, "Blink" Explores the pheonmenom of productive decision making and communication with people. Gladwell highlights with some great examples just how intuitively brialliant human beings are. So, as Gladwell explores, maybe the key to results is to get everyone trusting their instincts, and trusting their colleagues to accept and encourage some of these instincts without a cross-examination. Corporate buraucracy has long been accused of killing ideas, but Gladwell found that these 'snap judgements even have place in the emergency ward;

"a few years ago [Cook County Medical Center] changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain."

Embracing Diversity

http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/diverse.html...