"Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--

In this completely revised version of his best-selling book, Cross-Functional Teams: Working with Allies, Enemies, and Strangers, author and consultant Glenn Parker updates his definitive practical guide to include his recent work in team rewards and recognition, communications technology, and multicultural and virtual-team issues. This new edition contains fresh examples and additional case studies of successful cross-functional teams from IBM, Parke-Davis, Xerox, Boeing, BOC Gases, government agencies, and more. Parker offers concrete advice and inspiration to team leaders, team members, and senior management. Cross-Functional Teams delivers a team operating manual to executives, team leaders, human resource professionals, and students of organizational behavior and provides a tool kit of assessment surveys, worksheets, checklists, and even sample training programs to help launch and sustain effective teams.

Innovation requires teaming. (Put another way, teaming is to innovation what assembly lines are to car production.) This book brings together key insights on teaming, as they pertain to innovation. How do you build a culture of innovation? What does that culture look like? How does it evolve and grow? How are teams most effectively created and then nurtured in this context? What is a leader's role in this culture? This little book is a roadmap for teaming to innovate. We describe five necessary steps along that road: Aim High, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast, and Repeat. This path is not smooth. To illustrate each critical step, we look at real-life scenarios that show how teaming to innovate provides the spark that can fertilize creativity, clarify goals, and redefine the meaning of leadership.

New products are the major driver of revenue growth in today's dynamic business environment. In this Handbook, the world's foremost experts on new product development bring together the latest thinking on this vitally important topic. These thought-leading authors organize knowledge into useful and insightful frameworks covering all aspects of new product development: companies, collaborators, customers, context, markets, and performance. Managers will benefit from the handbook by expanding their knowledge of new product development and researchers will learn about opportunities to continue expanding on this body of knowledge.

Organizational learning centrally involves the ability to develop new, innovative products and processes that respond to existing or emerging market needs. This often requires combining previously disconnected bodies of knowledge in novel ways. One way to do this is through geographically dispersed cross-functional teams, as these can encompass diverse knowledge sources. However, empirical studies from distinct research streams have shown that member heterogeneity and graphic separation both hinder effective sharing and use of knowledge in groups. We explore this tension through a qualitative study of real-world dispersed cross-functional teams in a product development setting in a multinational company. We studied the development process in two projects with significant investment, risk, and complexity. Both teams comprised key members from at least three physical locations. Our findings suggest that knowledge diversity presents both constructive and constraining influences on the ability of a team to learn. Noting that individual members of dispersed cross-functional teams are simultaneously members of multiple intellectual and social communities, we discovered that team members rely substantially on these different communities to access specialized knowledge. We also found, however, that team members from different locations and functions often initially lacked the shared 3background knowledge4 (Nonaka 1994) that would facilitate learning from each other. One challenge for these teams thus appears to be the need to establish themselves as a new mini-community, in addition to being a task team, so as to integrate their.

Written for those interested in the topic of "shared knowledge" in organizations, this edited volume brings together a variety of themes and perspectives that emerge when multidisciplinary scholars examine this important subject. The papers were presented at a conference designed to bring together behavioral scientists who were interested in the creation, conversation, distribution, and protection of knowledge in organizations. The editors bring together a distinguished group of social psychologists who have made important contributions to social cognition and group processes. They cast a wide net in terms of the topics covered and challenged the authors to think about how their research applies to the management or mismanagement of knowledge in organizations. The volume is divided into three sections: knowledge systems, emotional-motivational systems, and communication and behavioral systems. A final conclusion chapter discusses and integrates the various contributions.