MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Work Groups Encourage Productivity and Continuous Learning

According to Deloitte’s John Hagel, the best collaborative teams are diverse and built from the bottom up.

MIT Sloan Management Review: John, we talked to you about 18 months ago. Is there anything new in your research that you’re particularly excited about?

John Hagel: We just completed a major research initiative around business practice redesign, but the whole focus was a bit contrarian. For several decades, the whole thrust in the business world has been around business process reengineering. Our view is that processes are increasingly becoming prisons and the key to accelerating learning and performance improvement is actually at the level of small frontline work groups that are confronting new situations. We did a series of case studies around work groups that are accelerating their performance improvement and identified nine practices that seem to be contributing to that acceleration.

About the Author

Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane is a professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and the MIT Sloan Management Review guest editor for the Digital Business Initiative. He can be reached at gerald.kane@bc.edu and on Twitter @profkane.

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