Dysfunctions Of A Team

Image Credit, Amazon. 

I logged into Amazon to see what today's Kindle Daily Deal might be.  The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (J-B Lencioni Series) by Patrick Lencioni.  $2.99 today, ordinarily probably about $13.

Amazon.com, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Well today is the Fourth  Month-a-versary of my retirement so what the hell, I decided to treat myself to a book that I will probably never read.  The premise of the book looks interesting to me.  This guy writes business fiction that teaches the business lesson in the form of a "parable" within the novel.  My particular interest in this book is that it is about teamwork which I found to be a rather interesting subject both at work and when I was taking business classes at college.

My experience with teams at work is that they generally only function when you have a team of specialists that  must provide input because no one else can provide the expertise. When you have X number of people on a team, equally qualified to work on a problem, you will end up with one self appointed advertising executive shouting to the world all of the amazing things this group will accomplish and otherwise does nothing, two people who actually do the all work and X-2 people who come to the meetings either as prisoners or vacationers but offering little in the way of help. But I have generally found that when it comes to taking credit, the team will return to its original number of X members...especially if a recognition dinner is involved and there is a chance to schmooze with the royalty.

I belonged to a product team that had a leader from marketing that envisioned himself as the head coach of the Steelers.  "Ok, Jane, you are my quarter back. Bob, you are my wide receiver. Sextant, you are my ah? ah?  Well sit over there for now."  What the hell is this guy talking about?  We manufacture large highly specialized, highly reliable heavy electrical equipment that can weigh as much as 90 tons and this guy sounds like an announcer from ESPN, talking a bunch of crap that I know nothing about. I don't follow sports. "OK team! It third and 10 and you are my first string...make me proud!"  Go to hell, Jack, I am not "YOUR" anything. I come here to do my job, but don't give me this "rah rah go team" bullshit. I started working here when you were still shitting your diapers.  Damn, that guy could get under my skin.  Well as you can see I wasn't much of a team player, although many times I ended up being one of the two worker bees. However, True Confession: unless I was directly responsible for something, I tended toward the obviously pissed off prisoner status--that way the pollyannas would generally leave me alone and find some other poor sap to do the stupid tasks.  I quit going to recognition dinners, when I realized that, schmoozing with the bosses in a place that looked like a 18th century French bordello and served food that was undercooked, tasted like hell, had a name that I couldn't pronounce and served with too many forks was really not my thing.  You know, if we would have went to a Pizza Hut, I might have at least enjoyed the meal.  For the most part I regarded these stupid teams as being the result of someone reading too many issues of the Harvard Business Review.      

Then my experience at college. I was in my late 40s, my boss told me that I should take some college courses to show that I was a go getter. Hmmm! Me a go getter?  So I figured business courses would reflect go gettingness without getting bogged down in the heavy math requirements of engineering which is what I really should have been taking.   Every rotten business class I took emphasized a team project and team presentations, and team this and team that.  What a crock of shit. Then for some of these presentation we were required to wear formal business dress. So here I am a middle aged cranky man with a bunch of college kids.  We would set up a meeting, one kid would show up. Divide up the work.  Nothing from any body but the one kid that showed up at the meeting.  The first mile stone presentation is coming up and 4 members haven't done a damn thing.   Then it occurred to me.  I do reports and presentations at work that are far more complicated than this crap and it actually applies to the real world where there is real money and real human life at stake.  Why am I crapping around with these young punks...just do the whole damn thing yourself and be done with it.  I presented my offer to the rest of the group, they gladly accepted.  And that was how I handled team projects for the rest of my classes.  All the rest of the group only had to read their email.  I would send them their part of the presentations.   The day of presentation, invariably four of us would be in formal business attire, and a fifth member (aways a guy) in a grubby tee shirt, reading his part off  the paper that I brought to class verbatim. We always got an A, but we shouldn't have.  The idiot with the tee shirt on should have dragged our grades down.  I hated those stupid team projects.  Yet they seemed to be the hallmark of business education in the late 90's.  One semester, I had a project at work that was turning to shit quick and was going to occupy a lot of my time so I dropped the semester and somewhere along the line decided that I was not a go getter and the only place I was going was out the door when I either got laid off or retired.  So much for business education. It was most intellectually stultifying courses I had ever taken.  

“Franky, Brandon, I am concerned.  Our forecasted
 marginal cost  savings realized from leveraging
 our suppliers in Singapore is diminished within
 the integral of the flattened demand due to the
 Apple announcement and the increase in production
 from our competitors in Shanghai.  Did you get the
 power point done?  Brandon, we have a presentation
in 5 minutes with the team, where are your pants?
  Oh God, you are so like those guys in my group
 projects at Harvard, never ready for presentation.”

So here I am retired and I bought a business fiction book on the joys of team work.  Will I read it?  I may, it is fiction after all, and I spent thirty five years as a character in the fiction of team work.  Business fiction?  Hmmmm.  Maybe some product development team at a publishing house can start pushing the Business Fiction genre which would naturally evolve into romantic business fiction...will his supply curve match her demand curve, and will their hearts meet at the asymptotic saturation?  Which would then of course evolve into erotic business fiction.  And I can expand my book club empire by becoming the grand poobah of the Kindle Erotic Business Fiction Book Club...lessons in business and one night team work that will rip your bodice.