book shelf.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Book review

Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance.

By Howard Guttman. John Wiley & Sons, 239 pages. $24.95.

Team performance, perhaps more than ever, has become a yardstick for great companies. And within most top companies are great teams, operating more fluidly and more collegially on tough challenges.

That's the essential concept behind Howard Guttmann's book, which looks in depth at a several companies and their teams (the result of extensive interviews with 25 firms and 39 senior executives). Many, but not all, of the companies are named; they include Johnson & Johnson, Mars Inc., Novartis Oncology, Philip Morris USA and Chico's FAS Inc.

A New Jersey-based consultant who heads his own firm, Guttmann focuses on five key leadership and team-member factors that are common at these companies.

A central attribute, he writes, is that these top teams have abandoned the old "hub-and-spoke," centralized leadership structure and accentuated horizontal models that redefine the roles of "leaders" and "players." In documenting these results, he helps make a real-world case for the efficacy of "flat" organizations.

Particular cases profiled in the book--like the situation at Mars in Latin America--prove to be great turnaround tales. From a dead-in-the-water division with no growth and financials that "were a constant surprise," the unit reversed course under a new leader who reorganized the territory and fashioned seven focused teams from an original group of three subdivisions. Within a year, the division was experiencing double-digit growth.

Some of the best consultants' books are fashioned not by trotting out pet theories but by doing real legwork and finding relevant examples. Great Business Teams is the product of superior research, and merits close reading by those eager to find, or reinvigo-rate, team performance.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing--Yours Doesn't Have To.

By Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever. Yale University Press, 256 pages. $27.50.

In this thoughtful and cogent book, authors Olson and van Bever start with the premise that almost nine in 10 companies goes into a significant "stall point" when revenue growth halts, and most never regain the same top-line numbers. Moreover, most companies that stall never see the problem coming.

The authors, consultants at the Corporate Executive Board--a research and decision-support firm working principally with global corporations--ground...