Virtuoso Teams: Lessons from Teams That Changed Their Worlds

Virtuoso Teams is a great book. Not only for its very insightful lessons of history but moreover for its truly stimulating content: When discussing this book with colleagues and friends, everyone had at least one example of a virtuoso team to which they once belonged. And this probably is the greatest asset of this book, that it will trigger you to once again create the conditions to a virtuoso team and to relive that great successful experience! Marnix Mali

Boynton and Fisher have produced a small gem of a book that provides a refreshing, and some might say a revolutionary view of how to staff and manage transformational teams. They support their non-traditional perspective on to build virtuosity into collective endeavors by offering brief, but thoroughly engaging histories of seven such remarkable teams. Sharing the ins and outs of such diverse collaborative efforts as the production of West Side Story, the Manhattan Project, the light bulb, Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, Amundsen's successful voyage to the South Pole, Miles Davis' revolutionary jazz recordings, and Norsk Hydro's crisis management approach, Boynton and Fisher discern seven lessons for how virtuoso teams can drive transformational change. 1. Virtuoso team leaders drive the culture, vision, and action within the team context. 2. Virtuoso team leaders recruit the very best talent and never settle for what's available. 3. Virtuoso team leaders double-stretch the customer and the team to achieve ambitious goals. 4. Virtuoso team leaders spotlight the individual "I" within the team, and not the conventional "we." 5. Organizations cultivate a marketplace for talent within the organization to facilitate the creation of virtuoso teams. 6. Virtuoso team leaders actively span boundaries and act as powerful conduits of ideas. 7. Virtuoso team leaders stimulate idea flow by managing space, processes, and time. (p. 3) To insure that virtuoso teams work, the authors share "a systematic process that can serve as a catalyst to higher team performance." (p. 164) They dub this process the "Deep Dive," having adapted a similar approach used by the design firm IDEO to help their clients design and develop new products. Boynton and Fisher refocus the IDEO process use by teams charged with designing the "best solutions possible within certain constraints, to do this fast and to offer sufficient novelty in (these) solutions so as to overcome otherwise intractable problems." (p. 167) To this reader, their process seems one that could be implemented relatively quickly by a talented and highly-motivated team. Your organization may only need the kinds of transformational outcomes provided by virtuoso teams on rare occasions, but when such a need arises, here is a resource that should not be far from your desk. The creative and innovative among you might even be able to adapt some of their ideas to enliven the productivity of your on-going groups and teams. Boynton and Fisher offer a new way of thinking about how major changes might be made in organizations. It was a pleasure to travel along with them on their journey through some of history's more remarkable virtuoso teams. I heartily recommend you climb on board.

Too often books on teams take case studies from sports teams. This book draws real life examples of teams who had breakthrough experiences - from TV script writers to Antartic exploration, to oil reserves. The last section of the book has a very practical "how to do it yourself" guide to apply it to your own business or community challenge. As a buisness owner and Chairman I will be using these ideas with my people. The step by step guide on how to build your own Virtuoso team and do a "Deep Dive" is easy to follow and I believe would make sense in all cultures ( I have 10 different nationalities in my business) . It is a useful addition to the body of literature on teams - highly recommended