The Hindu Business Line : Secrets of the X-teams

Good teams, made up of talented and committed individuals, may at times, fail or slowly decline. Why? Because the team, which is otherwise good at focusing on its process and problems at hand, can dangerously ignore the task of managing externally, across team boundaries, says a new book from Harvard Business School Press.

“What is needed is an internal focus combined with an external approach,” say Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman in X-Teams ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). “Team success at leading, innovating, and getting things done means managing both inside and outside the team.”

The ‘X’ in the book title is to indicate the external orientation, the authors explain. They speak of three characteristics of X-teams, as different from traditional teams. “First, to create effective goals, plans, and designs, members must go outside the team; they must have high levels of external activity.”

This would, for example, mean ‘spending lots of time understanding customer needs before designing’ and ‘looking around the organisation for pockets of expertise’ to build on, as the book elaborates in the ‘Netgen team’ case.

“The small team was formed when Tammy Savage, a manager in business strategy, realised that Microsoft didn’t really know what technologies it needed to develop for thirteen- to twenty-four-year-olds (the ‘Netgeners,’ or Internet generation),” the authors narrate. “Microsoft gave Netgen new space and many new members. Team members got out their PDAs and contacted anyone who might be able to help or provide expertise,”

These people shopped for the best technologies within Microsoft and, when necessary, developed some of their own; worked through many technical glitches and internal disagreements; and then produced the code and moved it into Microsoft Messenger, the firm’s leading instant messaging application.

The second feature of X-teams is that they combine all productive external activity with ‘extreme execution’ inside the team, by fine-tuning their internal processes. One such process is ‘integrative meeting,’ which the Razr team at Motorola effectively used when it had to resolve a series of tricky technical issues (such as the placement of the antenna), before launching its new phone.

“Roger Jellicoe, the formal team leader, often found that team members had collected a pallet of ideas in their discussions with various external experts that were promising but not really useful when considered separately,” recount Ancona and Bresman. After evaluating the ideas in combination, through a meeting, Jellicoe found that innovation could sometimes move forward only when ideas are evaluated in an integrative manner, rather than in isolation.

The third feature of X-teams is that they incorporate flexible phases, shifting their activities over the team’s lifetime. “This ensures that teams don’t get stuck in any one mode of operating. More specifically, effective teams move through three phases, each with a different focus: exploration, exploitation, and exportation.”

Prescribed team-read.

Engineering vs science

“A field cannot consider itself a science until it can progress beyond natural history, moving from describing what is, to positing principles or theories that make predictions and impose constraints.”

Thus opens John Day’s Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals ( www.pearsoned.com). And it shouldn’t be just any theory, he insists. “We need a theory that has the fewest assumptions and the greatest breadth: a theory with the fewest concepts, the fewest special cases.”

Computer science, more particularly networking, has been slow to make this transition to be a science, the author concedes. How did this happen? “The push to commercialise networking came on very fast, before the science was really understood,” reasons Day. “‘Facts’ were often articles of faith, and desires were couched as principles, and wonderful technical doubletalk was created to obscure the lack of hard evidence…”

The pressure to commercialise networking had a tendency to freeze solutions much too early, the author rues. “But by the same token, the public success of this commercialisation led to research taking up the pattern of venture capitalists looking for a quick ROI (return on investment).”

As a result, each agency or programme director measured by how much they are on the ‘bleeding edge,’ continues Day. “This has led to research programmes that are not so much concerned with solving problems as funding for two or three years, declaring victory and moving on to the next big problem.”

With a proliferation of techniques and no theory to hold them together, there is no way to determine how good the results are, bemoans Day. “Basically, we have been engineering and not doing much, if any, science.”

Crucial lessons.

Rapid prototyping

Gruesome air crash. Panic and crisis. With these in prologue begins The Burnt House by Faye Kellerman ( www.harpercollins.co.uk).

While investigating the crash, sleuths are trying to understand rapid prototyping, which is used in the industry to construct models.

“Suppose Ford Motor Company designs an engine block on a computer,” Mike begins to explain, with an example. “Now a computer image is a two-dimensional representation of something three-dimensional. But the company needs a three-dimensional object to work with. Say, for instance, using Ford Motor again, the company wants to place it in the hood of the car to see how much room it’s going to take up.”

He then proceeds to draw a parallel with a CT scan of skull, producing one-millimetre cross section images. Feed the shots into a computer that interfaces with a prototype machine, he says.

“The computer tells the machine to laser-cut a piece of paper for every CT-scan X-ray you have. So each piece of paper represents a millimetre cross-sectional outline of skull. Not the inside part, obviously, just the perimeter.”

Then? You have a huge stack of paper silhouettes, which another part of the machine squeezes to produce ‘a three-dimensional representation of the original skull.’ The replica skull could be used for forensic purposes since ‘the model is accurate with all its bony landmarks.’

Blistering pace!

Tailpiece

“I used to think of fact and fiction as two different things…”

“Until you took up a selling job or joined the media?”

“No, until I got hooked to virtual reality games!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in