New breakthrough thinking in organizational learning, leadership, and change Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities. The pace of change and the fluidity of most work structures means that it's not really about creating effective teams anymore, but instead about leading effective teaming. Teaming shows that organizations learn when the flexible, fluid collaborations they encompass are able to learn. The problem is teams, and other dynamic groups, don't learn naturally. Edmondson outlines the factors that prevent them from doing so, such as interpersonal fear, irrational beliefs about failure, groupthink, problematic power dynamics, and information hoarding. With Teaming, leaders can shape these factors by encouraging reflection, creating psychological safety, and overcoming defensive interpersonal dynamics that inhibit the sharing of ideas. Further, they can use practical management strategies to help organizations realize the benefits inherent in both success and failure. Presents a clear explanation of practical management concepts for increasing learning capability for business results Introduces a framework that clarifies how learning processes must be altered for different kinds of work Explains how Collaborative Learning works, and gives tips for how to do it well Includes case-study research on Intermountain healthcare, Prudential, GM, Toyota, IDEO, the IRS, and both Cincinnati and Minneapolis Children's Hospitals, among others Based on years of research, this book shows how leaders can make organizational learning happen by building teams that learn.

Extreme Teaming provides new insights into the world of increasingly complex, cross industry projects. Amy Edmondson and Jean-Francois Harvey show vividly through their international cases how the complex demands of collaboration impact on management and revolutionize our understanding of teams.

Innovation requires teaming. (Put another way, teaming is to innovation what assembly lines are to car production.) This book brings together key insights on teaming, as they pertain to innovation. How do you build a culture of innovation? What does that culture look like? How does it evolve and grow? How are teams most effectively created and then nurtured in this context? What is a leader's role in this culture? This little book is a roadmap for teaming to innovate. We describe five necessary steps along that road: Aim High, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast, and Repeat. This path is not smooth. To illustrate each critical step, we look at real-life scenarios that show how teaming to innovate provides the spark that can fertilize creativity, clarify goals, and redefine the meaning of leadership.

Red Teaming is a revolutionary new way to make critical and contrarian thinking part of the planning process of any organization, allowing companies to stress-test their strategies, flush out hidden threats and missed opportunities and avoid being sandbagged by competitors. Today, most — if not all — established corporations live with the gnawing fear that there is another Uber out there just waiting to disrupt their industry. Red Teaming is the cure for this anxiety. The term was coined by the U.S. Army, which has developed the most comprehensive and effective approach to Red Teaming in the world today in response to the debacles of its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the roots of Red Teaming run very deep: to the Roman Catholic Church’s “Office of the Devil’s Advocate,” to the Kriegsspiel of the Prussian General Staff and to the secretive AMAN organization, Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. In this book, author Bryce Hoffman shows business how to use the same techniques to better plan for the uncertainties of today’s rapidly changing economy. Red Teaming is both a set of analytical tools and a mindset. It is designed to overcome the mental blind spots and cognitive biases that all of us fall victim to when we try to address complex problems. The same heuristics that allow us to successfully navigate life and business also cause us to miss or ignore important information. It is a simple and provable fact that we do not know what we do not know. The good news is that, through Red Teaming, we can find out. In this book, Hoffman shows how the most innovative and disruptive companies, such as Google and Toyota, already employ some of these techniques organically. He also shows how many high-profile business failures, including those that sparked the Great Recession, could easily have been averted by using these approaches. Most importantly, he teaches leaders how to make Red Teaming part of their own planning process, laying the foundation for a movement that will change the way America does business.

A 2014 Garden Writers Association Media Award Winner Just as he demystified the soil food web in his ground-breaking book Teaming with Microbes, in this new work Jeff Lowenfels explains the basics of plant nutrition from an organic gardener’s perspective. Most gardeners realize that plants need to be fed but know little or nothing about the nature of the nutrients and the mechanisms involved. In his trademark down-to-earth, style, Lowenfels explains the role of both macronutrients and micronutrients and shows gardeners how to provide these essentials through organic, easy-to-follow techniques. Along the way, Lowenfels gives the reader easy-to-grasp lessons in the biology, chemistry, and botany needed to understand how nutrients get into the plant and what they do once they’re inside.

Niccolò Machiavelli famously wrote, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." That's what this book is about--innovation far more audacious than a new way to find a restaurant or a smart phone you can wear on your wrist. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson and journalist Susan Salter Reynolds explore how to bring into being systems that transform human experience and make the world more livable and sustainable. This demands "big teaming": intense collaboration across professions and industries that may have completely different mindsets and even be antagonistic to each other. To do this successfully requires practicing new forms of leadership that combine an expansive vision with incremental action--not an easy balance. To reveal how pioneers build the future, Edmondson and Reynolds tell the story of Living PlanIT, an award-winning "smart city" start-up with a breathtakingly ambitious goal: building a showcase high-tech city from scratch to pilot its software. This meant a joint effort spanning a truly disparate group of software entrepreneurs, real estate developers, city government officials, architects, construction companies, and technology corporations. We get to know Living PlanIT's leaders and follow them and their partners through cycles of hope, exhaustion, disillusionment, pragmatism, and renewal. There are powerful lessons here for anyone, in any industry, seeking to transform the world.

"Finally, an approach that puts the person at the helm and offers concrete ideas for genuine support, pride, dignity and personalized participation of a labeled person and their support staff. You are going to love this book - and give it to everyone with whom you work." -- Publisher's website.

Essential reading for business leaders and policymakers, an in-depth investigation of red teaming, the practice of inhabiting the perspective of potential competitors to gain a strategic advantage Red teaming. The concept is as old as the Devil's Advocate, the eleventh-century Vatican official charged with discrediting candidates for sainthood. Today, red teams are used widely in both the public and the private sector by those seeking to better understand the interests, intentions, and capabilities of institutional rivals. In the right circumstances, red teams can yield impressive results, giving businesses an edge over their competition, poking holes in vital intelligence estimates, and troubleshooting dangerous military missions long before boots are on the ground. But not all red teams are created equal; indeed, some cause more damage than they prevent. Drawing on a fascinating range of case studies, Red Team shows not only how to create and empower red teams, but also what to do with the information they produce. In this vivid, deeply-informed account, national security expert Micah Zenko provides the definitive book on this important strategy -- full of vital insights for decision makers of all kinds.

Learn the secrets about creating a successful team culture.

A Science “Reading List for Uncertain Times” Selection “A must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in the present and future of higher education.” —Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Lower Ed “A must-read for the education-invested as well as the education-interested.” —Forbes Proponents of massive online learning have promised that technology will radically accelerate learning and democratize education. Much-publicized experiments, often underwritten by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been launched at elite universities and elementary schools in the poorest neighborhoods. But a decade after the “year of the MOOC,” the promise of disruption seems premature. In Failure to Disrupt, Justin Reich takes us on a tour of MOOCs, autograders, “intelligent tutors,” and other edtech platforms and delivers a sobering report card. Institutions and investors favor programs that scale up quickly at the expense of true innovation. Learning technologies—even those that are free—do little to combat the growing inequality in education. Technology is a phenomenal tool in the right hands, but no killer app will shortcut the hard road of institutional change. “I’m not sure if Reich is as famous outside of learning science and online education circles as he is inside. He should be...Reading and talking about Failure to Disrupt should be a prerequisite for any big institutional learning technology initiatives coming out of COVID-19.” —Inside Higher Ed “The desire to educate students well using online tools and platforms is more pressing than ever. But as Justin Reich illustrates...many recent technologies that were expected to radically change schooling have instead been used in ways that perpetuate existing systems and their attendant inequalities.” —Science