Teams That Meet the Moment: 9 Practices for Unlocking Performance and Growth in Uncertain Times

“A refreshingly practical guide to fixing what’s broken in most organizations: how teams work day-to-day.”
―Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of Right Kind of Wrong

“Karina Mangu-Ward has written the playbook leaders need now: a practical, trust-building guide to turning everyday teamwork into a competitive advantage, so you can move with speed, clarity, and courage in a world that refuses to slow down.”
―Frances Frei, Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, co-author of Move Fast and Fix Things

“This difference between a great team and a meh one is everything. Stop hoping you’ll just get lucky. This book is the modern guide for teams that make a difference.”
―Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit

Unlock Your Team’s Full Potential in Turbulent Times.

In today’s uncertain world, even the smartest companies struggle—not for lack of strategy or talent, but because their people are bogged down by the messy reality of modern teamwork. Teams That Meet the Moment is a radically practical guide to fixing how work actually gets done inside complex organizations, drawn from a decade of hands-on experience. Karina Mangu-Ward and August, the company she co-leads, have helped teams inside giants like PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, and Planned Parenthood transform how they collaborate under pressure.

Rejecting outdated “best practices,” this concise and accessible book introduces nine simple yet powerful methods that empower those closest to the work to make better decisions, move faster, and pivot quickly to meet customer needs—all while making work more joyful. Mangu-Ward begins by challenging three deeply held beliefs that quietly undermine teamwork:

• Lie #1: We Just Need a Better Strategy to Win
• Lie #2: Superstar Talent Leads to Superstar Teamwork
• Lie #3: Working Harder Leads to Better Results

The truth is, even the most brilliant strategy is worthless if your teams can’t bring it to life. Through real-world stories, from the C-Suite to the front lines, this book shows you how to redesign the messy day-to-day of working together: making purpose and power explicit, reducing meeting overload, avoiding consensus traps, navigating tough trade-offs, and learning from failure.

At its core, Teams That Meet the Moment argues that great teaming is the marriage of vision and habits: a compelling purpose paired with the disciplined, repeatable practices that bring it to life. For leaders who know their organizations need to work differently but don’t know how, Karina Mangu-Ward provides the missing piece.

Karina Mangu-Ward is a partner at August, a consultancy that helps organizations transform the way they work to thrive in an uncertain world. At August, she's had the privilege of working with some of the most impactful and complex organizations in the world to rethink their teaming habits and build cultures of experimentation, trust, and learning. Before August, her adventures included conducting research on implicit bias, helping arts organizations behave as creatively behind the scenes as they do on stage, and running social innovation labs. If you buy her a coffee, she'll tell you how these experiences led her to exactly where she is now. Her motto is "get caught trying," which means she'd rather try and screw it up than not try at all. She lives with her partner and kids in Brooklyn, New York.