2024-03-12
Brim-DeForest offers a new vision for organization at the team level in this business book.
The author draws on 15 years of entrepreneurial experience to present his new strategy for solving a range of organizational challenges. At first glance, however, readers may feel that it seems deeply counterintuitive. Instead of dealing with a new problem by throwing lots of personnel at it, Brim-DeForest proposes just the opposite: using small, agile teams that are “self-healing and self-evolving.” These small groups, he says, can be scaled up to meet larger challenges as needed, but their tight cohesion is crucial: “Top-down control becomes unwieldy and slow, and eventually falls apart,” he writes. “In contrast, building a system out of small autonomous units is sustainable.” Brim-DeForest effectively tackles every possible objection such a system might elicit, including concerns about transparency (noting the importance of embracing “real-time feedback”) and tendencies toward “information control and siloed decision-making” that are natural to all organizations. The key to his small-team vision, he notes, is immediacy; for things to work, everything from communication to decision-making must happen in real time, and the additional bureaucracy that larger groups bring to the process would be lethal. Throughout, Brim-DeForest is a vivid writer who effectively combines extensive experience with broad observations about the nature of entrepreneurship. Many of these insights are intriguing, as when he stresses the key importance of being “intellectually honest” with oneself and others about “why the organization exists. If…you can’t articulate a good answer, perhaps it’s time to rethink what the business is responsible for producing.” Moments such as these will have supervisors productively rethinking some of their common practices.
A highly engaging, team-oriented approach to management.
