Who's in the Room?
How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them
Published on 8. December 2011
208 pages
978-1-118-17007-6 (ISBN)
Description
Is your company run by a team with no name?
At the top of every organization chart lies a myth--that aSenior Management Team makes a company's critical decisions. Thereality is that critical decisions are typically made by the bossand a small group of confidants--a "team with noname"--outside of formal processes. Meanwhile, other membersof the management team wonder why they weren't in the room or evenconsulted ahead of time. The dysfunction that results from this gapbetween myth and reality has led to years of unproductive teambuilding exercises. The problems, Frisch shows, are ones of processand structure, not psychology.
In Who's in the Room? Bob Frisch provides a uniqueperspective to this widely misunderstood issue. Flying in the faceof decades of organizational psychology, he argues that thesolution lies not in addressing behaviors, but in unseating thesenior management team as the epicenter of decision making. Using abroad portfolio of teams--large and small, permanent andtemporary, formal and informal--great leaders match eachdecision to the appropriate team in a fluid, flexible approach thatyou won't find described in management textbooks.
Who's in the Room? is based on interviews with CEOs atorganizations ranging from MasterCard to Ticketmaster to The RedCross.
* Understand and embrace the way decision-making actually happensin their organizations
* Use these "teams with no names" to best advantage
* Engage the Senior Management Team in the three critical tasksfor which it is ideally suited
Organizations will get better decisions and superior results byunleashing the full potential of their Senior Management Teams. Andbosses will see a dramatic drop-off in people coming into theiroffices asking, "Why wasn't I in the room?"
Reviews / Votes
"Great guide for any leader to use in mapping out his orher advisory teams" --800 CEO Read "Authoritative and pragmatic look at how to make the rightcalls" --Julian Birkinshaw, Management Today "Offers real-world strategies for making the best of howorganizations seem to work" --The Leader Lab "How to structure organizational teams in a way that isboth more realistic and more productive is at the heart ofFrisch's book" --CIO Magazine "What you really want from a book on organizationaldecision making and leadership" --New York Journal of Books "You'll know his advice is working when you see adramatic drop-off in people coming into your office andasking, "Why wasn't I in the room?" --Matthew May, Amex OPEN Forum "Who's in the Room? falls in the greatcategory...due to the book's ability to jar your perspective ofhow teams do and should operate." --Michael Wade, ExecupunditMore details
Other editions
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Book
02/2012
Jossey-Bass
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Person
Bob Frisch, managing partner of The Strategic Offsites Group, has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to German mittelstand family businesses to the U.S. Department of State. Bob's work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Fortune.
Content
Introduction: Who's in the Room? 1
PART ONE: FROM PROBLEM TO PORTFOLIO 5
1 Most Companies Are Run by Teams with No Names 7
The Myth of the Top Team Illusion and Reality
The Problem That Isn't There, But Won't Go Away
2 Team Building Won't Solve the Problem 21
When the Shrinks Go Marching In
After the Shrinks Have Gone
3 Don't Blame the Boss 29
In Search of the Ideal Leader
Inside the Box
Do the ''Rights'' Thing
4 Four Fundamental Conflicts at the Heart of SeniorManagement Teams 41
Mission Control Versus Knights of the Round Table: FunctionalSpecialists or Reflections of the CEO?
The Team Versus the Legislature: The Representative fromFinance, the Senator from Operations
The House Versus the Senate: Are Some More Equal ThanOthers?
The Majority Versus the Majority: The Impossibility ofDeciding
Maybe the Problem Is That There Is No Problem
5 Case Study: How One CEO Transformed His Top Team 57
The Past as Prologue
Moving from a Single Top Team to Multiple Teams
The Team That Sits Together Works Together
Tailoring the Structure to Suit Your Needs as a Leader
6 Best Practices: Design an Organization That Delivers theOutcomes You Need 73
The Three Centers of Gravity
Flexing in Five Dimensions
The Portfolio and the Payoff
PART TWO: THE SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM UNBOUND 91
7 Engage the Senior Management Team in Three
Critical Conversations No Other Team Can Have 93
8 Align the Senior Management Team Around a Common View ofthe World 99
The Starting Point: Aligning Around Trends
Clustering Trends into Drivers of Change
Understanding Capabilities and Assets
Walking the Boundaries of the Company: TestingWalls andFences
Defining and Selecting Opportunities
9 Prioritize and Integrate Initiatives to Hit the StrategicBull's-Eye 119
Asking the Nearly Impossible: Prioritizing Initiatives
The Real Source of the Difficulty
Changing the Conversation
It's All Relative
Hitting the Bull's-Eye: Making Initiatives WorkTogether
10 Move from ''Should We DoThis?'' to ''How Do We DoThis?'' 145
It All Depends: Why Initiatives Fail
Putting on the Brakes: The Value of Parochialism
The American Red Cross: Managing Dependencies at the Speed ofDisaster
Going from ''Should'' to''How'' Fixing What's ActuallyBroken
11 Tailor Your Portfolio of Teams for Top Performance Now167
Thinking It Through
Putting the New Approach into Motion
Repurposing the SMT
Who's in the Room?
Acknowledgments 179
The Author 183
Index 185
