Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation

by Amy C. Edmondson, Susan Salter Reynolds

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.

Genres: Leadership, Business

524 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 2016

About the author

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, where she teaches courses in leadership, organizational learning, and operations management in the MBA and Executive Education programs.

Reviews

[Michael Paradise · Rating 1 out of 5]

I dislike this book very much.
I wish that less time was spent on introducing us to people who would not have a great impact on the projects, and more time on how endeavors succeeded and failed. The timeline was hard to follow, and it was difficult for me to bring out applicable pieces for my field. I have already complained to my professor for assigning it.

[Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a medium sized article trying to be a book. And I have never read so many people are the problem other than those trying to do the vision.

I wonder if google, amazon and Apple had this philosophy how they would have ended.

[Gopal Sadagopal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a bad story to tell but the author is too busy sucking up to the people she is writing about. She wants to make heros out of them by teelung us how super they are I stead of what they have done.

[Jay French · Rating 2 out of 5]

I listened on audio, and that may not have been the best way to consume this book. I saw in the subtitle this was about teaming, but also in the description, that it was about smart cities. I’m more interested in the smart cities aspect of the book, and listening on audio, I didn’t get much out of this. This tells the story of a Portuguese company that is building a technical platform for a city. And they also want to build a city using the platform. I was expecting something like “Soul of a New Machine”, where the technology is explained as an underpinning of the story. Here, the concept of a technical platform for a city is nebulous. You read a lot about techies coding, but you don’t know what the heck they are doing and what the goals are. You get lots of buzz words, but not much in the way of explaining. I fixated on this listening to the audio, and didn’t get what I was hoping for.

About teaming: There are a number of places in the book where you are told the techies don’t understand the real estate guys and vice versa. It gets repetitive. You don’t get how-to’s here on fixing the situation. Instead, you get more of a case study, where many of the players, who come and go with the company, come and go in the story as well. I did like that the authors focused on the different stakeholders of this kind of project, including the politicians and government workers. They are very important in smart cities, but may not be as important in other business stories from other industries. I appreciated their stories in this context.

I find listening on audio your mind can wander, so with some books you may miss things. I think I paid attention here, but perhaps I missed the items I thought were missing. I hate to say things I expected were not in the book, but I think I would have taken more notice of them if they were there. I’d recommend this book to someone who knows the company being profiled – Planet-IT or for those interested in a case study of a company trying to change the basic way things work across a broad spectrum of stakeholders.