X-Teams, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed

X-Teams is an essential work on teams that shows how an externally focused team model is the key to fueling innovation and organizational success. In this updated edition, Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman describe an x-team model that is flexible, has distributed leadership, and can adapt to changes in markets, technologies, cultures, and competition. With new examples and research from organizations such as Microsoft, Takeda, and the Museum of Modern Art, X-Teams provides practical tools for building x-teams that can innovate and deliver value to the organization.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 08 August 2023
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

An essential work on teams—now updated with new research and tools and a new preface—X-Teams shows how an externally focused team model is the key to fueling innovation and your organization's success.

You build a team around top-notch talent. The team members work well together; they're committed to the mission and are highly motivated to perform. Yet the results are disappointing. You're not seeing creativity and flexibility. You're not getting breakthrough ideas.

Good teams build camaraderie, confidence in their abilities, and a solid process for working together. But these internal dynamics—while positive in themselves—can create a wall between the team and the outside world. And that wall can prevent the team from adapting to change and delivering value to the organization.

In this updated, streamlined edition, with a new preface and practical tools, Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman describe an externally focused team model—the x-team—that is even more relevant today than when it was first introduced. With their distinctively flexible membership and leadership structure, x-teams continuously reach outward to fuel the innovation process.

With new examples and research from organizations such as Microsoft, Takeda, and the Museum of Modern Art, Ancona and Bresman show you how to build x-teams that:

Keep pace with shifts in markets, technologies, cultures, and your competition.

Innovate by moving quickly from generating ideas to executing and diffusing them throughout your organization.

Employ distributed leadership to unlock crucial information, expertise, and new ways of working together—wherever these qualities reside, whether within or outside your company.

In an increasingly complex and ever-changing world, where adaptability and creativity are paramount, x-teams are the answer.

Weight: 474g
Dimension: 163 x 242 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781647824761
Edition number: Revised ed