Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation - Hardcover

Edmondson, Amy; Reynolds, Susan Salter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1626564191 ISBN 13: 9781626564190

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2016

Synopsis

Building the Future

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. Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Salter Reynolds explore large-scale systemic innovation that calls for “big teaming”: intense collaboration between professions and industries with completely different mindsets. This demands leadership combining an expansive vision with deliberative incremental action—not an easy balance.

To explore the kind of leadership required to build the future we need, Edmondson and Reynolds tell the story of Living PlanIT. This award-winning “smart city” start-up was launched with a breathtakingly ambitious goal: creating a showcase high-tech city from scratch to pilot its software—quite literally setting out to build the future. 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. By taking a close look at the work, norms, and values in each of these professional domains, we gain new insight into why teaming across fields is so challenging. And we get to know Living PlanIT’s leaders, following 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 drive audacious innovation.

About this title

Book Description

Innovation within an organization is no longer sufficient; in a growing number of businesses, collaboration between companies and even industries is critical to success. A respected Harvard professor and a journalist team up to show how one creative startup exemplifies this new, intensely interactive form of leadership.

About the Author

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. She is the author of Teaming to Innovate, Teaming, and A Fuller Explanation, along with over seventy articles on leadership, teams, innovation, and organizational learning. She has received many awards, including the Accenture Award for significant contribution to improving the practice of management.

Susan Salter Reynolds is a former Los Angeles Times features writer and columnist. For twenty-three years, she covered thought leaders, cultural trends, and controversial issues and continues to write for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including the Daily Beast, Newsday, Los Angeles Magazine, and others.

Edition details

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1626564191
• ISBN 13: 9781626564190
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240