Saturday, August 29, 2020

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni is subtitled A Leadership Fable and the book introduction notes "it is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare."

Lencioni provides the dysfunctions through a fictional story of a newly hired CEO at a technology startup, and after completing the fable about the company and its management team goes over the dysfunctions and how teams can overcome them.

1. Absence of trust - Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. The first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another, overcoming their need for invulnerability and speaking openly and honestly about their strengths and weaknesses. Lencioni notes that a good way to tackle this is to have people talk about themselves, their background, their lives, and families.

2. Fear of conflict - If there's not trust, there's likely going to be an aversion on the part of team members to having open, constructive, ideological conflict or debate.

3. Lack of commitment - It's a failure to buy into decisions. People don't have to always agree with a decision, but they want to have their views heard and understood before they commit to something, especially if they not 100% behind at first. The concept to go for is disagree and commit.

4. Avoidance of accountability - Once there's clarity and buy-in, people can hold each other accountable.

5. Inattention to results - Status and ego can cause people to become focused on themselves and individual rather than team results. Part of having goals is to have them be simple enough to grasp, and specific enough to be actionable, like for instance adding a certain number of new customers in a certain time frame. Also noted was the statement that "politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think."

The flip side positive view of the model is that teams...
1. Trust one another
2. Engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas
3. Commit to decisions and plans of action
4. Hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans
5. Focus on the achievement of collective results

Countdown 1945 by Chris Wallace

Countdown 1945 by Chris Wallace is a good book with the subtitle The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World.

It starts with Vice President Harry Truman elevating to the Presidency with the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945 and covers Truman and others involved in the effort to build and then drop the two atomic bombs on Japan August 6 and 9.

In addition to giving details about the events, Wallace writes about the compelling people involved in them. Featured are Truman, Manhattan Project scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer, military head General Leslie Graves, Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr. who piloted the plane that dropped the first bomb, one of the women working control dials in the uranium separation plant in Oak Ridge, TN, and a young girl in Japan. Wallace details how after being sworn into office, Truman was told by his Secretary of War that there was an urgent matter they had to speak about, a project underway to develop a new explosive of great power.

Along with the development of the bombs, there's also interesting material in the book about Truman wrestling with the decision of whether or not to drop them. Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 and projections Truman received had the invasion of Japan by American troops costing the lives of an estimated 250,000 Americans. He had to balance that information against dropping weapons of such destructive power.

The test of the bomb was done on July 16, and the weapons-grade uranium for the bomb was delivered to the Far East about the USS Indianapolis, sunk days later by a Japanese torpedo. Tibbets and his flight crew flew the Enola Gay and the bomb codenamed Little Boy close to seven hours from Tinian Island to Hiroshima. It exploded 1,890 feet above the city, with the Enola Gay then six miles away, flying fast to try to get away from the blast and accompanying shock wave. On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the dropping a day later of the bomb Fat Man was a mission riddled with near misses. The plane, Bock's Car, was short on fuel, not enough to make it back to Tinian so landed on Okinawa. Also, the original target was the city of Kokura, but weather conditions there led to the alternate target of Nagasaki being bombed.

Japan surrendered shortly after and the epilogue of the book covers the lives after the war of people featured in the book, and how they viewed the dropping of the bombs and creation of the nuclear age.