Customer Reviews

Go Team! Take Your Team to the Next Level

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2 star:		(1)
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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.

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).