Many corporations, in their attempt to create innovative products
and services, have focused on the concept of building teams. While
many groups fizzle, on rare occasions the members of a group will
experience an extraordinary eruption of excitement, transcending an
organization's rigid confines to achieve astonishing results. These
individuals, say Jean Lipman-Blumen and Harold J. Leavitt, are
lucky enough to be members of a "hot group," a phenomenon they
lucidly and enthusiastically describe in their ground-breaking new
book Hot Groups.
A hot group is not a name for a newfangled team, task force, or
committee. Rather, a hot group is defined by a distinctive state of
mind coupled with a style of behavior that is intense and sharply
focused on its ultimate goal. Stretching themselves beyond their
own expectations, members of a hot group plunge into enterprises
that have the potential to change, even ennoble, their own and
others' lives.
Neither trendy fabrication nor new management fad, hot groups have
existed since the dawn of civilization, perhaps invigorating groups
of cavemen to hunt together furiously for food before winter's
approach. Today, examples of hot groups abound in territories such
as Silicon Valley, where impassioned people have blazed paths
through the burgeoning computer industry. Consider the hot group
that created the original Macintosh and revolutionized the personal
computer market. John Sculley, who joined Apple in the early 1980s,
described a "magnetic field" that surrounded the Macintosh hot
group members, and Bill Gates, Microsoft's mastermind, reported
that a hot programming group to which he once belonged "didn't obey
a 24-hour clock." Instead, they programmed for days at a time,
pausing only to eat and talk about software with fellow
programmers. Here also are examples of hot groups at work in other
industries: the individuals that created the blockbuster TV drama
"Hill Street Blues"; the Navy and civilian personnel that
transformed a standard cruiser into a guided missile cruiser in
less than 12 months; and even the ad hoc crisis management group
advising President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis.
Indeed, the inspiring case studies found throughout Hot Groups
illustrate that well-nourished hot groups can profoundly transform
any type of organization.
Still, Lipman-Blumen and Leavitt recognize the risks inherent in
loosening an organization's structural soil enough to accommodate
these groups. Consequently, they address such issues as how to
provide the kind of leadership required by a hot group, how to mesh
a hot group with the regimented structure of the overall
corporation, how managers can encourage new hot groups, and how
best to cope with an overheated hot group.
Drawing on decades of research and experience with groups and
organizations throughout the world, Lipman-Blumen and Leavitt have
written an intensely engaging book about a phenomenon that will
become increasingly important in our rapidly changing world.
Expertly carving a path through this unmapped terrain, they lucidly
demonstrate how managers and executives can ignite hot group sparks
in their own organizations.
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