4. What will your management team need to do to help EBO teams be successful? Remember, the whole point of looking into EBOs is to increase IBM’s revenue and reach. Evenings at home are the only time you can look over your management team’s monthly reports without interruptions.

141 Tonight, you’re quietly sipping coffee (decaf, naturally) as you review the reports in the comfort of your favorite chair. You are suddenly jarred, however, by a single line deep in one report, which might have gone unnoticed if you hadn’t carved out this time away from the offi ce. In discussing the prospects for a new opportunity, one of your managers wrote, “Pressures in the current quarter have forced us to cut costs by discontinuing efforts in this promising new area.” Unbelievable! As you continue reading, you can’t get this line out of your head. Why is the company abandoning “promising” avenues of growth and revenue because of external pressures? You fi nish reading the reports and resolve to discuss the issue with all of your managers—not just the one who wrote the report.

The next morning, you ask your senior vice president to investigate, and in short order, he discovers a pattern of nonconversion. In other words, even though your company, IBM, obtains thousands of patents each year, management seems to have tremendous diffi culties turning its basic research into functioning businesses.

The reason apparently stems from the company’s focus on existing markets and short-term results. Rather than focusing on turning new ideas into new products and services, IBM’s most talented and experienced executives are being rewarded based on how much revenue their divisions generate and the number of employees reporting to them. Not surprisingly, they’re more concerned with growing existing products and services than they are with developing new products and services for the future. As a result, IBM has left many innovations on the table for outsiders to scoop up. For example, IBM invented the relational database and the router, but it was Oracle and Cisco that built huge companies around them.

You call your management team together and pose this problem: “How are we going to transform the work of our research scientists into new businesses? We need to fi gure out how to recognize and nurture these emerging business opportunities. IBM has hundreds of thousands of employees and billions of dollars in revenue. Surely, we have enough resources to commercialize our great ideas!”

In response, your VP for strategy says, “I wonder if we could do it with teams.”

For this Management Team Decision, assemble fi ve to six students to act as the management team at IBM.

Teamwork is vital to the success of organizations.
And this makes creating high-performance teams an important management challenge. In this exercise, you will work with fellow students to brainstorm the creation of a high- performing team. Pay particular attention to the assumptions that you and your peers bring to this process regarding what works, and what doesn’t work, in relation to creating a highperformance team. At the conclusion of the exercise, you will have an opportunity to discuss the theory and common assumptions regarding effective team building.

Step 1: Get into groups. Your professor will organize small groups.
Step 2: Review the situation. Assume that your group has been hand-picked by the president of your college or university to work for one semester as a “campus improvement” team. At the end of the year you will submit your recommendations to the president and the board of your institution. These leaders have assured you that they will make every effort to implement your recommendations.
Step 3: Develop a plan. Brainstorm and develop a plan for working as a team to achieve the objective of delivering a set of quality recommendations to the president and the board. You should consider the following in developing your plan:
• Working well together as a team • Establishing criteria for “quality recommendations”
(such as representing the various important constituencies and interests on campus)
• Outlining steps, areas and types of work, and assignments for each member that are most likely to take full advantage of the capabilities and resources in your team Step 4: Discuss your plans as a class. Is this the sort of project that is well-suited to using a work team?
Why, or why not? How might work team characteristics such as norms, cohesiveness, and team size play a role in this team effort? What confl icts might be likely down the road, and at what stage of the process are these confl icts most likely to occur?