Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy
Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. She has received numerous awards, including the Cummings Award for mid-career achievement from the Academy of Management in 2006, the Accenture Award for significant contribution to improving the practice of management in 2004, for her article with Anita Tucker, “Why hospitals don’t learn from failures,” and selection as one of the 20 Most Influential International Thinkers in Human Resources (#7) by HR Magazine in 2013.
Overview
How Organizations Learn
This lecture presents teaming as a response to the fluid demands of today’s knowledge intensive businesses. Businesses are knowledge intensive when people have to create, work with, combine, refine, transform, or integrate knowledge to provide products or services for customers. In this type of setting, people with different skills and expertise must work together in synergistic ways to improve, solve problems, and innovate. Teamwork – more vital than ever in this environment – confronts challenges created by geographically dispersed collaborations, temporary work assignments, and very high market and technological uncertainty.
What Is Teaming?
Historically, great teams were built through familiarity and experience working together. Today’s fast paced environment makes building and sustaining stable teams difficult, if not impossible in some cases. And so, teaming – the activities of coordinating and collaborating – increasingly must replace stable teams (the structures and boundaries and routines that once held teamwork together). This kind of teamwork on the fly is how organizations learn – how they anticipate and respond to shifts in the environment, navigating unexpected twists and turns, by harnessing the problem solving abilities of employees working effectively together. The session will emphasize the leadership mindset that allows organizations and employees to thrive in this new business environment.
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