Go Team!: Take Your Team to the Next Level [Paperback]

Ken Blanchard (Author), Alan Randolph (Author), Peter Grazier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 2007

Effective teams are increasingly recognized as crucial to business success, but few people really understand how to build a team that taps and blends the skills of each member for a winning whole. In clear, simple language, "Go Team!" shows how to create that powerhouse team. Authored by the bestselling author Ken Blanchard, whose various leadership books have sold over 13 million copies, "Go Team!" outlines a three-step process that can benefit work teams, project teams, problem solving teams, leadership teams, and more. The book begins by defining what constitutes a great team, using examples from real life. It details elements critical to using conflict effectively, making and implementing decisions, sharing leadership among members, and being accountable for results. The book then explores the three stages of a change process to achieve greatness: sowing seeds for change, dealing with discouragement, and preparing for takeoff.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ken Blanchard: Few people have impacted the day-to-day management of people and companies more than Ken Blanchard. A prominent author, speaker, and business consultant, Ken is characterized by friends, colleagues, and clients as one of the most insightful, powerful, and compassionate men in business today. When Ken speaks, he speaks from the heart with warmth and humor. He is a polished storyteller with a knack for making the seemingly complex easy to understand. Ken's impact as a writer is far reaching. His phenomenal bestselling book, The One Minute Manager, coauthored with Spencer Johnson, has sold more than ten million copies worldwide and is still on bestseller lists. The One Minute Manager has been translated into more than 25 languages and is regarded as one of the most successful business books of all time. Ken has received several awards and honors for his contributions in the field of management, leadership, and speaking. In 1991 the National Speakers association awarded him its highest honor, the "Council of Peers Award of Excellence." In 1992 Ken was inducted into the HRD Hall of Fame by Training Magazine and Lakewood Conferences and received the 1992 Golden Gavel Award for Toastmasters International. In 1996 Ken received the Distinguished Contribution to Human Resource Development Award from ASTD. Ken is chief spiritual officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies, formerly Blanchard Training and Development, Inc., which he and his wife, Dr. Marjorie Blanchard, founded in 1979 in San Diego, California. The Ken Blanchard Companies provides expertise in organizational change management through training programs and processes, seminars, and consulting. Ken is also a visiting lecturer at his alma mater, Cornell University, where he is a trustee emeritus of the Board of Trustees. Alan Randolph is an internationally known management educator and consultant. He is best known for his work in leadership, project management and empowerment, having consulted and studied in these areas for over 25 years. Alan is a consulting partner with the Ken Blanchard companies and is author or co-author of six books -- two of which have been international best sellers on Empowerment. He has published widely in both academic and practitioner journals, including The Harvard Business Review and Organizational Dynamics. Peter Grazier is the founder of Teambuilding, Inc. He has worked with well over one hundred organizations in all industries throughout North America and Europe focusing on teambuilding, and his work has been noted in more than eighty publications including The Wall Street Journal. He is the author and publisher of a bestselling book on employee involvement, and in 1994, Mr. Grazier was honored with the prestigious President's Award from the Association for Quality and Participation for his contributions to the field. In January, 2000, his website, Teambuildinginc.com, was listed by the Harvard Management Update as one of the Top 3 Websites for Managers on Teams.

Product Details

• Paperback: 143 pages
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers (June 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1576754472
• ISBN-13: 978-1576754474
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,004,129 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Few people have influenced the day-to-day management of people and companies more than Ken Blanchard. A prominent, sought-after author, speaker, and business consultant, Dr. Blanchard is universally characterized by his friends, colleagues, and clients as one of the most insightful, powerful, and compassionate individuals in business today. Ken is one of the most influential leadership experts in the world and is respected for his years of groundbreaking work in the fields of leadership and management.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is the cofounder and Chief Spiritual Officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies, an international management training and consulting firm that he and his wife, Margie Blanchard, began in 1979 in San Diego, California. In addition to being a renowned speaker and consultant, Ken also spends time as a visiting lecturer at his alma mater, Cornell University, where he is a trustee emeritus of the Board of Trustees.

Ken has received many awards and honors for his contributions in the fields of management, leadership, and speaking. The National Speakers Association awarded him its highest honor, the "Council of Peers Award of Excellence." He was inducted into the HRD Hall of Fame by Training magazine and Lakewood Conferences, and he received the Golden Gavel Award from Toastmasters International. Ken also received The Thought Leadership Award for continued support of work-related learning and performance by ISA--The Association of Learning Providers. Ken has been inducted into Amazon's Hall of Fame as one of the top 25 best-selling authors of all time. The business school at Grand Canyon University bears his name. In addition, Ken teaches students in the Master of Science in Executive Leadership Program at the University of San Diego.

Born in New Jersey and raised in New York, Ken received a master's degree from Colgate University, and a bachelor's and PhD from Cornell University. An avid golfer, Ken belongs to the Loch Lomond Golf Club in Scotland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lacks details and takes a long time to basically explain why to delegate, November 20, 2005

By 

Lars Bergstrom "LarsBerg" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Go Team! Take Your Team to the Next Level (Hardcover)

The overall message of the book - delegate decision making authority down into your team but provide them with overall direction - is a great message I totally agree with. However, the way in which it was presented left it somewhat unactionable as most of the content focuses on desired results and expected emotional responses rather than on details of how to make an effective transition to this organizational style. The book is strewn with examples from companies that have "made the change" and talks about how they improved profitability, morale, and retention. Those stories unfortunately focus on the results and not on what specific changes were made or how those changes were rolled out into the teams. This book felt more like a sales pitch for his consulting company than a book on how to lead this sort of change yourself.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Repetitive and Shallow -> Perhaps the worst team book I've read, January 23, 2012

By 

Bas Vodde (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Go Team!: Take Your Team to the Next Level (Paperback)

Go Team is a small 140 page book and I expected it to be a nice easy read. Instead, I found a horrible book that was a struggle to get through the 140 pages that it was. It was slow, enormously repetitive, shallow, naive and so "selling" that it made me want to puke! After finishing this book, I didn't really want to read any other book anymore. (and of my 180 Amazon review, I believe this is my first 1 star review)

The book is about how to build teams, or what the author calls "next-level teams" which is a hyped version of just "teams." Next-Level Teams are teams that 1) Share information, 2) have clear boundaries, and 3) manage themselves (make decisions). In the first chapter, the author says he will take you through the 3 steps for becoming a next-level team:

Step 1: Begin learning next level skills
Step 2: Accelerate change
Step 3: Master the skills

The book consist of eleven chapters, which are basically 9 chapters plus an introduction and an ending chapter. These nine chapters are three chapters for each step. So for step 1 (Begin learning next level skills) there are three chapters for each of the three skills (share information, boundaries, decisions).

Considering this, chapter two is about "information sharing" in step 1. Then chapter five tells the reader they need to share more information and chapter eight says they need to share even more information. Likewise, chapter three is about setting the boundary for the team and chapter six then talks about need to expand the boundary and chapter nine tells you to expand it further. And... that is basically the whole book. (If you would remove the stories, you could automatically generate part of the book!)

To be fair to the authors, what they write isn't necessarily wrong, it is just fairly shallow. If you have interest in reading about teams, please leave this book in the bookshelf and instead pick up a team book with some substance such as Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances or even The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (Collins Business Essentials).

At chapter ten, I sort-of decided to give the book a 2 star review as it wasn't very good but not like wrong. But then chapter eleven, the conclusions, came. I found that chapter totally disgusting and it made me nearly puke over the book. In the chapter the author congratulates the reader to having reached the next-level and tells the reader how they have an advantage because they have read *this* book. If you insist on reading this book, then at least start with ripping out chapter eleven. It was such a turn-off that I'll give it a 1-star review (as Amazon doesn't have a 0-star feature yet).