Deborah G. Ancona, PhD.
Deborah Ancona , PhD
Deborah Ancona is the faculty director for the MIT Leadership Center. Dr. Ancona is engaged in research examining core leadership capabilities. Another major area of her study is teams, in particular how teams manage both their internal and external dynamics to obtain high performance.
Ancona proposes a new structure, -"the X-Team"- that allows teams to manage complex tasks while being entrepreneurial. Ancona also examines time and timing in organizations. Her work on "entrainment" and "temporal design" examines how companies organize themselves to better mesh with key rates, cycles, and rhythms in the environment.
The author and co-author of numerous articles and papers including, X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed (Harvard Business School Press, June, 2007) Managing for the Future: Organizational Behavior and Processes (South-Western College Publishing, 3rd ed., 2005), which centers on the skills and processes needed in today's diverse and changing organizations.
X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed
In today's hyper-competitive business environment success and perhaps survival depend on innovation, speed, and organizational synergies that efficiently satisfy customer needs. Traditional teams are often not up to this challenge. Professor Ancona will present a new model of teams, the X-team, that illustrates how teams can become engines of innovation and execution.
Challenging the dominant wisdom that successful teams focus on internal dynamics, Ancona builds on twenty years of research to show that when teams make external activity a top priority performance takes off. She will draw on examples from companies like BP, Microsoft, NewsCorp, and Morgan Stanley.
You will learn how to:
- identify the attributes of high-performing, innovative teams
- jump-start X-teams in your company
- create teams that are a vehicle for leadership development
- build an infrastructure of innovation in your organization