Book review # 24 Team Turnarounds

Book Review # 24 Team Turnaround

by: Joe Frontiera and Daniel Leidl

It has been about 6 years since I quite my job at Citibank and work on my own. From quite a tiny company we have grown into somewhat a small-to-medium size company. During that time, my management team and I focus almost all of our energy to improve sales. Which is quite intuitive considering our dream of becoming a listed company one day. Along the way, our staff has gone from 30 something to 120 people. However, we still don’t have any kind of intact modern strategy to deal with human management. As a matter of fact, our management still have little to no idea what HR is. The problem is quite obvious, while the sales is growing strong, the soul of the company isn’t. I can’t even define a real company culture and I realized that this is a problem.

Before I go hire a consultant to fix the problem, I want to know more about the sciences of human resources, perhaps even into team building. Therefore, my latest books  purchase will mostly team building and human resources not just marketing and strategy like before. I have to know what the principle behind these sciences is, or else I won’t be able to distinguish good consultant from the rest of the crowd. Hence, the arrival of this book in my library. 

This book is very concise, although it has 215 pages, it feels like only a hundred. It might be becuase the spacing is so wide. Anyway, it as simple reference book that give you six steps to turn around the failing team into a winning. This book has lots of examples but most of them focus on the turnaround of sports teams (I’m sure that the author is a big fan of NFL). The six steps are 

1. leading past losing 
2. committing to growth
3. Changing behaviors
4. embracing adversity
5. achieving success
6. nurturing a culture of excellence

My favorite part of this book is on pages 165 onwards which give you a concise playbook you can use in workshops and internal meetings that is easy to understand and will generate real value if use correctly. Most exercise sample in this book has a very good  philosophy behind it. 

My experience with this kind of book is quite limited therefore it would be kind of difficult to me to compare this book with its peer. However, judging by my own personal standard, I think it’s good for managers with no HR background. The book is simple just the way I like it. I recommend those who really want the frameworks in the book in workshops and meetings should take note of your understanding of the framework before you actually use it like I did. I'm sure that it will be very useful

8.5/10

Cheers 

Tab