Teams Books

This paperback textbook was required for a college course. Since I could purchase a new copy of the book for over $20 less than the college bookstore was selling it for and I wanted to get it as quickly as possible, I paid the extra $20 for overnight delivery. The book came the next day, as promised, was packed well and arrived in excellent condition. Plus, even with the extra shipping charge, I came out ahead of the game.

This text definitely earns its Handbook title. It is a complete 178 page manual on how to initiate, grow and support a successful collaboration between not-for-profits, community groups and institutions.

It starts with detailed story of a fictional "Tri-County Collaboration for Homeless Services" that goes through every stage of development. This story is then referenced through out the second part of the book which gives detailed insight and advice on the specific tasks, stages and milestones throughout the life of a successful collaboration. The manual concludes with annotated resources and 30 pages of simple template forms and worksheets that cover everything from meeting agendas and decision-making protocols to joint agreements, promotional plans and guides to systems change.

The book has excellent formatting with lots of easily digested and referenced lists, information boxes and sub-headings. The many illustrative examples help provide real world context and the side bar quotes are a nice spice that help keep the text light. The perspective and language is from the front lines of community organizations in the USA, although generally applicable to collaboration between any type of organizations in any location.

The target audience is definitely real world organization leaders and consultants who aim to coordinate effective teamwork between multiple organizations either for funding reasons or out of their own initiative. At times the language and metaphors may cause a raised eyebrow or two from a hard nosed executive director, but such flowery bits are brief and easily overshadowed by concrete tasks and experienced insight.

Michael Winer and Karen Ray did a great service in authoring this handbook back in 1994. It would be interesting to see what revisions would be made in a second addition that could take into account the web technologies and techniques that are now part of our everyday work. Until then this handbook is still a very useful resource for the good people who want to do good work together.

Although I do not work in special education, I happened to stumble across Collaboration. I use it with my staff of business executives in team building exercises. Our production and sales have skyrocketed since we bagan to use Cramer's book - Collaboration. Les Morris

Ever wondered why in the world a college calls their athletes their particular nickname? With this book you will never wonder again! In this well-reasearched guide, Lessiter "left no stone unturned" and spoke with the Sports Information folks at every single Division I school to find out about the orign of each school's nickname(s). Small school or large, perpetual top 25 ranked team or cellar-dweller, they are all here for your reference and enlightenment. Several enjoyable drawings are sprinkled throughout the text.

Small but packed with how-to for the colored pencil artist. I particularly liked the Technique and Practice section where I learned about using hatching, ringed shading, and using the direction of the stroke.
The advice is practical, compact and to-the-point, and the illustrations show what can be accomplished with this medium. I'm trying to do nature journaling and was pleased with the help it gave me for drawing flowers and animals using tones and surface textures.

Frank Nesser was my grandfather. I don't remember him; but, reading about him was very nice. Charles Nesser was my uncle and I have many fond memories of him. If you want to know about football's roots and the people who really lived and breathed football at the turn of the last century, read and enjoy this book. They were real people and I grew up hearing all about my grandfather and his brother's and their love of the sport...this book made it all come alive for me. Thank you Chris Willis for all your hard work and dedication to this endeavor. June 11, 2008

Firstly, am sorry that this book is out of print, for it provides critical information to people who wants to help their family members and friends recover from brain injuries that are happening so frequently throughout the world.

This book, and the information it contains, is a gift to humankind. For I have personally witness people who are functionally blind, mute and immobile got themselves to read, talk, & walk with the procedures described.

The book gives a good overview on the principles out of which treatment procedures are developed. These treatment methods are primarily formulated at the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia. Many people around the world go to the Institutes for help. The programs are considered extremely challenging to do. It requires a lot of determination, love as well as pure & simple sanity.

Belbin sees Biologically-based teams as the next step

Dr R Meredith Belbin, regarded as the father of "team-role" theory and one of the worlds foremost experts on teams predicts that we will evolve into bioteam forms.

Specifically he suggests our organisations will evolve into those forms "which combine the devolved but integrated strengths of the higher insects with the directive and strategic abilities of humans".

In his book "The Coming Shape of Organisation" [1] he picks out five observations human teams need to learn from "a diminutive masterclass" of social insects such as bees, ants and termites:


Five Observations
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1. Division of Labour
They have no overall single leader but rather a co-operating leadership caste.


2. Superior use of Intelligence
Social insects are superior to humans in their ability to rapidly integrate new information from a wide range of senses and share it widely to ensure urgent action happens immediately rather than passing it up and down hierarchical chains of command.


3. Flexibility of Member Castes
Social insect colonies consist of a number of distinct castes of insects playing specialised roles such as foragers, attackers and nest maintainers. However these castes are are flexible and grow and shrink as required and can even change their roles in a crisis.


4. Devolved decision making
The system is geared up to concurrent (as opposed to sequential) decision making - there is no chain of command to slow decisions down.


5. Redundancy and Contingency
Colonies are not dependent on a single individual or system. They are based on scale and interlocking systems - any one of which might fail without catastrophic consequences for the colony.


Two Immediate priorities for Teams
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He goes on to identify two guidelines which he suggests seem worth transferring immediately to human affairs:

a. transferring major decision making away from a single boss (Mr Big) to a co-operating leadership group

b. replacing monolothic organisational processes with concurrent interlinked systems


A call to humility!
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In a statement which seems to lay down a challenge to humility in our thinking about teams Belbin concludes that "evolution will almost inevitably take us in the direction of species that have arrived at superior forms of organisation before us".

I wonder who he means?

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ken thompson blogs on
http://www.bioteams.com
on all aspects of teams and collaboration
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Donna Ogle's COMING TOGETHER AS READERS: BUILDING LITERACY TEAMS, 2ND EDITION is based on the idea that student growth in literacy is strengthened when all supportive factors are integrated into the effort. The author holds background as not only a teacher and professor but former president of the International Reading Association, and provides creative ideas for using university partnerships and family involvement alike to shape reading habits at all levels of education.

I have found this book to be very helpful and down to earth help in caring fro my Alzheimer's disease parent.