From the Publisher
With 300,000 team members around the world, thousands of trucks, and hundreds of aircraft, FedEx delivers more than 2 billion packages a year. We can only do this with exceptional teams of people. Team Genius advances our thinking on what makes highly effective and maneuverable teams.” — FREDERICK W. SMITH, founder, and chief executive officer, FedEx Corporation
“Companies thrive when employees are empowered to do their best work every day. Inclusive teams that value diverse perspectives and have passion for new ideas encourage continuous learning. Team Genius offers a practical approach to fostering top-performing teams.” — SATYA NADELLA, chief executive officer, Microsoft
“Team Genius explores a question key for any organization: What causes teams to succeed or fail? Karlgaard and Malone look at how leaders can create conditions for success by embracing differences within teams, bringing out the best in people, and understanding that we are hardwired to collaborate.” — ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, founder of Huffington Post Media and author of Thrive
“Today’s exponential entrepreneur-anyone interested in going big, creating wealth, and impacting the world-must leverage the world’s talent. Team Genius shows how.” — PETER H. DIAMANDIS, MD, chairman and chief executive officer, X PRIZE; executive chairman, Singularity University; New York Times bestselling author of Abundance and Bold
“Persuasive and crucial…Team Genius, a splendid example of team achievement, lays out what you need to know about a subject that’s becoming more important than ever to an organization’s success.” — Steve Forbes, Forbes
“What topic is this dream team of writers bringing us? The very nature and architecture of dream teams-how to think about them, staff and support them, and when to dismantle them and build anew.” — 800-CEO-Read
“This book offers valuable insights for twenty-first-century management.” — Booklist
“In Team Genius, [Karlgaard and Malone] explore the numbers game and explain the surprising correlations between success and team size.” — Success magazine
“a useful overview of the science of teams….” — Financial Times
FREDERICK W. SMITH
With 300,000 team members around the world, thousands of trucks, and hundreds of aircraft, FedEx delivers more than 2 billion packages a year. We can only do this with exceptional teams of people. Team Genius advances our thinking on what makes highly effective and maneuverable teams.
Steve Forbes
Persuasive and crucial…Team Genius, a splendid example of team achievement, lays out what you need to know about a subject that’s becoming more important than ever to an organization’s success.
Success magazine
In Team Genius, [Karlgaard and Malone] explore the numbers game and explain the surprising correlations between success and team size.
Financial Times
a useful overview of the science of teams….
Booklist
This book offers valuable insights for twenty-first-century management.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
Team Genius explores a question key for any organization: What causes teams to succeed or fail? Karlgaard and Malone look at how leaders can create conditions for success by embracing differences within teams, bringing out the best in people, and understanding that we are hardwired to collaborate.
PETER H. DIAMANDIS
Today’s exponential entrepreneur-anyone interested in going big, creating wealth, and impacting the world-must leverage the world’s talent. Team Genius shows how.
800-CEO-Read
What topic is this dream team of writers bringing us? The very nature and architecture of dream teams-how to think about them, staff and support them, and when to dismantle them and build anew.
SATYA NADELLA
Companies thrive when employees are empowered to do their best work every day. Inclusive teams that value diverse perspectives and have passion for new ideas encourage continuous learning. Team Genius offers a practical approach to fostering top-performing teams.
Financial Times
a useful overview of the science of teams….
Booklist
This book offers valuable insights for twenty-first-century management.
Frederick W. Smith
With 300,000 team members around the world, thousands of trucks, and hundreds of aircraft, FedEx delivers more than 2 billion packages a year. We can only do this with exceptional teams of people. TEAM GENIUS advances our thinking on what makes highly effective and maneuverable teams.
Library Journal
06/01/2015
Karlgaard (publisher, Forbes magazine; Life 2.0) and technology author Malone (Bill & Dave) could be a top-flight writing duo. Their research-based fundamentals on team management, historical examples, and personal narratives are sound. The value of teams is a given; however, neither the explication of anthropological, social, and biological bases of teams, from mating pairs to legendary musicians, sports stars, and military commanders, nor the extensive taxonomy of team types will be as useful for would-be managers of high-performance groups as practical advice would have been. Leaders need concrete suggestions of how to create the ideal team for a given task from the ranks of available employees. VERDICT Gems of insight and wisdom are offered here, such as the need for balance between creative and analytical skills to maintain a team's forward momentum, but not all readers will persevere to find and employ them. For fans of business history and theory.—Elizabeth Wood, Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH
SEPTEMBER 2015 - AudioFile
Narrator Tom Parks does a great job delivering the authors’ discussion of teamwork—from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. Parks’s tone is casual, and his timing is perfect; he also provides ample pauses at the ends of sentences for listener comprehension. As the authors present examples from the fields of biology, business, anthropology, and more, Parks expertly moves through the terminology and names with ease, weaving a seamless narration. Overall, this fascinating look at how teams become more than the sum of their parts is read in an engaging style. E.N. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2015-04-15
An exploration of the importance of teams in human activity. Drawing from a broadly based foundation in multiple branches of scientific and academic research, as well as technology and business studies, Forbes magazine publisher Karlgaard (The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success, 2014, etc.) and technology writer Malone (The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company, 2014, etc.) assemble their case for the imperative of cooperative teamwork. Along the way, they debunk traditional ideas of business success as attributable to either of "two antipodes," the "lone hero and the giant enterprise." The authors focus on teams and the way technological networking effects compound the continual cheapening of overall cost. In the digital world, people are the limiting boundary to an organization's ability to adapt to change. Karlgaard and Malone draw from anthropology, ethnography, history, psychology, and evolutionary microbiology to show that, rather than competition, "cooperation may be the default tendency in human beings." They present research supporting the notion that the evolutionary requirements for clustering demand coordination, communication, and achievement of an optimal size. Teams, they suggest, consistently outperform, and are more likely to come up with new ideas, solitary inventors. Within teams, bringing together people with different perspectives, skills, and experience will tend to improve the performance of the team. As the authors note, "diverse teams need to be actively managed," and they consider how large-scale enterprises are actually hierarchies of teams. The key to their success often lies in finding the appropriate size, whether pairs, trios, or larger clusters. "The teams in which we work, and the teams we lead, may not change the world," write the authors. "But they can…make our company…more successful and secure, and give ourselves and our teammates a more rewarding and fulfilling career." An intriguing counter to the excesses of both individualism and organizations.
