

#XTEAM INTERNATIONAL HOW TO#
Coordinators – like the logistics people working on how to keep the value chain as green as possible – create rules and tools that enable the teams to reach specific targets. Each team works on its own part of the design and gets its own funding, while coordinating with other teams and outside individuals and companies. With over thirty-six teams on six continents, funding from major corporations, input from the best universities on the planet, the consortium has already created a working prototype. One example of the nimble-network approach is the Vehicle Design Summit, an MIT student-led international consortium formed to design a two-hundred mile per gallon car for sale in India. Still others have focused on strategic partnerships to spur innovative practices. Others have created more stable organizational structures and cultures designed for consistent and steady innovation over time. Some have focused on building virtual enterprises – nimble networks of ad hoc teams leveraging new information technologies to accelerate innovation. Let’s take a look at some of the ways people have reacted to the new world. The second concept is that of X-teams – teams that enable companies to practice distributed leadership and to reach beyond internal and external boundaries to accelerate the process of innovation and change. The first is the idea of distributed leadership – a way of harnessing, aligning, and leveraging the leadership capabilities that exist all across an organization to make it more agile, responsive, and creative. In doing so, the article will explore the application of two key concepts. This article examines how three very different enterprises are dealing with this new reality.

The result is a hyper-drive environment where innovation is the name of the game, rules are invented on the fly, and the challenge always is to do it better and faster or fall prey to some unknown competitor who just arrived on the playing field. In this world, information flows freely across organizational, geographic, and cultural borders. X-teams are externally oriented, and enabling them will lead the organization to step up the pace of change and innovation.īusiness pundits tell us that we live in a new world – a world that’s flat, global, diverse, and networked i. This exception is critical, since the connections that enable the firm to seize market opportunities and leverage technological breakthroughs are on the outside. There’s nothing really wrong with the way organizational teams work – except for the fact that they are inward looking.
