Team: Getting Things Done with Others

With the help of executive coach Lamont, business consultant Allen (Making It All Work) expounds in this fanciful program on how the framework he outlined in 2001’s Getting Things Done can improve the productivity of corporate teams. Updating the original’s “five steps for achieving control,” the authors recommend clarifying team objectives by asking “what’s the desired outcome?” and staying on schedule by keeping a communally accessible list of tasks and who’s responsible for each. Unfortunately, the guidance leans heavily on abstract navel-gazing. For instance, the authors devote several chapters to describing how teams can get on the same page about their “purpose and principles,” “vision,” and “goals” (terms they treat discretely but are largely interchangeable in practice) by discussing such questions as “why do we exist as a team?” (Confusingly, the authors bat away the obvious answer by insisting that making money is merely “a pleasant side effect” of a company’s “actual purpose,” contradicting their earlier admission that “for many, the primary reason their organization exists is to enrich the owners.”) Other suggestions are outright impractical, as when the authors extol the benefits of declining some tasks to focus on more important ones without addressing the fact that many employees aren’t given the luxury of being able to refuse work. This comes across more like a recipe for longer meetings than increased productivity.Agent: Doe Coover, Doe Coover Agency. (May)