Team
Getting Things Done with Others
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking book about how to harness the power of collaboration and work most effectively in groups—coauthored by Getting Things Done’s David Allen
When Getting Things Done was published in 2001, it was a game changer. By revealing the principles of healthy high performance at an individual level, it transformed the experience of work and leisure for millions. Twenty years later, it has become clear that the best way to build on that success is at the team level, and one of the most frequently asked questions by dedicated GTD users is how to get an entire team onboard.
By building on the effectiveness of what GTD does for individuals, Team will offer a better way of working in an organization, while simultaneously nourishing a culture that allows individuals’ skills to flourish. Using case studies from some of the world’s largest and most successful companies, Team shows how leaders have employed the principles of team productivity to improve communication, enable effective execution, and reduce stress on team members. These principles are increasingly important in the post-pandemic workplace, where the very nature of how people work together has changed so dramatically.
Team is the most significant addition to the GTD canon since the original, and in offering a roadmap for building a culture of healthy high performance, will be welcomed by readers working in any sized group or organization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With the help of executive coach Lamont, business consultant Allen (Making It All Work) expounds in this fanciful program on how the framework he outlined in 2001's Getting Things Done can improve the productivity of corporate teams. Updating the original's "five steps for achieving control," the authors recommend clarifying team objectives by asking "what's the desired outcome?" and staying on schedule by keeping a communally accessible list of tasks and who's responsible for each. Unfortunately, the guidance leans heavily on abstract navel-gazing. For instance, the authors devote several chapters to describing how teams can get on the same page about their "purpose and principles," "vision," and "goals" (terms they treat discretely but are largely interchangeable in practice) by discussing such questions as "why do we exist as a team?" (Confusingly, the authors bat away the obvious answer by insisting that making money is merely "a pleasant side effect" of a company's "actual purpose," contradicting their earlier admission that "for many, the primary reason their organization exists is to enrich the owners.") Other suggestions are outright impractical, as when the authors extol the benefits of declining some tasks to focus on more important ones without addressing the fact that many employees aren't given the luxury of being able to refuse work. This comes across more like a recipe for longer meetings than increased productivity.
