Jon Katzenbach – författare

Teams -- the key to top performance Motorola relied heavily on teams to surpass its competition in building the lightest, smallest, and highest-quality cell phones. At 3M, teams are critical to meeting the company''s goal of producing half of each year''s revenues from the previous five years'' innovations. Kodak''s Zebra Team proved the worth of black-and-white film manufacturing in a world where color is king. But many companies overtook the potential of teams in turning around tagging profits, entering new markets, and making exciting innovations happen -- because they don''t know how to utilize teams successfully. Authors Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith talked with hundreds of people in more than thirty companies to find out where and how teams work best and how to enhance their effectiveness. They reveal: The most important element in team success Who excels at team leadership ... and why they are rarely the most senior people Why companywide change depends on teams ... and more Comprehensive and proven effective, The Wisdom of Teams is the classic primer on making teams a powerful tool for success in today''s global marketplace.

Without a deep understanding of your company's culture, any change effort you undertake will fail. Bestselling author Jon Katzenbach and his coauthors identify the four most critical cultural elements leaders need to focus on.In a global survey by the Katzenbach Center, 80 percent of respondents believed that their organization must evolve to succeed. But a full quarter of them reported that a change effort at their organization had resulted in no visible results. Why? The fate of any change effort depends on whether and how leaders engage their culture: the self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing that determine how things are done in an organization. Culture is implicit rather than explicit, emotional rather than rational--that's what makes it so hard to work with, but that's also what makes it so powerful. For the first time, this book lays out the Katzenbach Center's proven methodology for identifying your culture's four most critical elements: traits, characteristics that are at the heart of people's emotional connection to what they do; keystone behaviors, actions that would lead your company to succeed if they were replicated at a greater scale; authentic informal leaders, people who have a high degree of "emotional intuition" or social connectedness; and metrics, integrated, thoughtful measures to track progress, encourage the self-reinforcing cycle of lasting change and link to business performance. By leveraging these critical few elements, you can tap into a source of catalytic change within your organization. People will make an emotional, not just a rational, commitment to new initiatives. You will elicit enthusiasm and creativity and build the kind of powerful company that people recognize for its innate value and effectiveness.