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How far is too far?

Lessons for business from ultra-high-performing military teams


James D. Eggensperger

Introduction

The author
James D. Eggensperger is Director of Graduate Programs in Journalism and Mass Communication and Assistant Professor at Iona College, New Rochelle, New York, USA.

Keywords
Team working, Armed forces, Team learning, Team performance, Organization and methods

Abstract
Management in organizations has a common focus on achieving goals in the most productive, efcient way. Many managers use teams as powerful tools in focusing on and achieving goals. It has been claimed that everyone in an organization belongs to one or more teams. In parallel to the development of business teams, the US military has developed high-performance teams to achieve discreet goals in ultra-stressful, dangerous circumstances. Teams in business and the military are focused on goals that require in-depth training, high personal investment by team members, deep commitment to the team, complementary skills, and high performance under pressure. Can business leaders learn from military teams who have lives depending on their performance? The research and analysis points to the conclusion that some lessons from military teams can be valuable for managers in business organizations, but also suggests that high performance may not be as desirable as it seems.

Large, modern organizations are managed through hierarchical structures that originated centuries ago with military organizations, and which are still used to show the full complement of equipment, skills, and job levels that are assigned to an organization. Kolenda et al. (2001) describe how Xenophon, the Greek historian and military leader, talked about leadership and control of troops in 400 BC. Xenophons goal for a military organization was for it to be a rational, orderly, and effective community while respecting the freedom and dignity of the individuals within it (p. 7). This denition could be lifted in toto and placed into the operations manual of many businesses. Borrowing between the military and business continues. Truskie (1999) refers often to military and law enforcement organizations as one model of a high-performing organization. Military management books such as Leadership: The Warriors Art (Kolenda et al., 2001) are replete with references to common business strategy terms. Both military and business organizations typically: . have specic measurements and goals; . have motivated leaders; . have established structures and communications processes; and . are under pressure to produce results. Both often use teams as key organizational and operational strategy elements for achieving their goals. However, the author observed an important difference during service as an ofcer in the US Army and as an executive with IBM from the mid1970s to the mid-1990s. The military, by its very nature, practises a high degree of urgency, and penalties for non-performance or failure can be much more Draconian and result in casualties or death. In most business organizations, failure to perform results in dismissal at worst. This paper explores those dimensions: the similarities between high performance teams in military organizations and in business and what lessons business leaders can learn from military teams, arguably the highest of high-performing teams. This paper also will examine: . the military teams that may be the highest of high-performing teams; . case histories from new battlefronts; . lessons that may be learned from the new ways that these teams operate; and . potential problems of institutionalizing very high performance teams.

Electronic access
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1352-7592.htm

Team Performance Management Volume 10 Number 3/4 2004 pp. 53-59 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited ISSN 1352-7592 DOI 10.1108/13527590410545045

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How far is too far? Lessons for business from military teams

Team Performance Management Volume 10 Number 3/4 2004 53-59

James D. Eggensperger

Command and control and communications


Military leaders, from the time of the Roman legions, have organized their ghting men into subgroups according to skills and combat capabilities, such as cavalry, artillery or infantry. Fundamental to the efcient functioning of any organization is a method of transmitting the functional information of the organization to lower levels and ultimately to the people who are responsible for carrying out the functions of the organization. Military operations, as observed by the author during military training leading to service in Vietnam, rely heavily on disciplined, highly dened command and control processes to ensure that the immediate goals of the organization are transmitted to those who must act and that there is no question as to what is expected. Command and control denes a system developed over time and under high-stress conditions. Command denes the issuing of orders based on strategic and tactical objectives, and control denes the ability to ensure that subordinates follow those orders in a specic manner based on rigid training and highly detailed methods of operation. There are distinct and important differences between military command and control processes and the management processes of business organizations. Military management has developed communications processes using terms and signals that are designed to eliminate almost all chance of misunderstanding. For example, military troops are taught to spell out the most elementary commands and data transmission in a phonetic alphabet a distinct word standing for each letter of the alphabet so that there is little chance for ambiguity. Hand signals are taught to eliminate the need for verbal communication in the heat and noise of battle. Clancy (2002) explains that each member of an Army Special Forces team can send and receive Morse code and can speak the language of the country where he is operating. Special Forces soldiers also are trained in the culture of the societies where they are working. The very nature of conict and high intensity situations dictates that each member of the team responds the same way every time to commands. Clancy quotes General Carl Stiner, a retired army general who was the commander of the US Special Operations Command, on training, Every soldier should be required to fully [italics in original] perform every task to the standard expected of him for success in combat (p. 125). Further, the observation of the author based on basic army combat training is that procedures and

specic commands are highly detailed and are repeated during training drills with the specic goal of establishing habits and automated responses among soldiers so that orders are followed exactly and immediately. Such an almost unthinking response results in predictable behaviors and actions across the military organization, from top to bottom. In contrast to the militarys detailed training and practice in applying communications and culturebased information transfer, business organizations often merely publish policies and procedures in an effort to establish consistency of response and predictable results. Company manuals, today often published on intranets, contain detailed policies on topics ranging from travel and expense accounting to contacts with suppliers to relations with the press. Training and company orientations are designed to establish company cultures which dene the behavior of employees across an organization. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) detail the barriers to successful team implementation as:
. . . lack of conviction that a team or teams can work better than other alternatives; personal styles, capabilities, and preferences that make teams risky or uncomfortable; and weak organizational performance ethics that discourage the conditions in which teams ourish (p. 21).

The lack of personal conviction may be a critical factor in the inability of business to establish highperforming teams.

Attitudes of team members


Both military and business organizations have dened special, smaller groups of specially chosen employees for highly dened, specialized activities that carry out highly dened operations in support of the larger strategy of the organization. In the military, ultra high-performing teams, known as Special Operations Forces, have been dened for tactical projects that require special skills and attitudes. Potten and Sepp (2001) suggest that todays new special forces teams comprise dedicated high achievers, many of whom share the following attributes:
. . . a combat veteran, about 31 years old, conversant in a foreign language, with 12 to 14 years of Army service. He also has 13 to 14 years of formal education (about 40 percent have either an associates or bachelors degree), and a standard Army intelligence test score of around 127 (100 points is the Army mean; 110 is needed to enter West Point) (cited in Kolenda et al., 2001, pp. 333-4).

Special operations forces (the US Armys Green Berets and the US Navys SEALs are the best

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How far is too far? Lessons for business from military teams

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James D. Eggensperger

known) work in small team environments which demand the highest performance and where anything less than high performance may result in injury or death. In contrast to most military situations, where opportunities for individual initiative have consciously been limited and even frowned on because individualism can be likened to unpredictability, special operations team members are taught to work independently and respond to uid situations quickly and decisively. Members of the special forces are carefully chosen and have been called the Renaissance Men of the military (Clancy et al., 2001). Because the physiological and psychological toll of becoming such a high performer will be intense, the washout rates and qualications for military special forces are very high. Clancy et al. (2001) estimate that the training of one special forces soldier will take a full year and cost at least $100,000. They further estimate that as few as 3 percent of candidates make it through the recruitment, selection and qualication processes. Labich (1996) analyzed what he identied as high-performing teams in non-business situations with an eye toward extracting any lessons that business people might take away. He visited championship sports teams, oil-eld reghters, emergency-room doctors and the Tokyo String Quartet in search of the elements that made those teams high-performing and successful. He was not sanguine about the ability of business people to reach the levels of performance demonstrated by his examples and by the special forces mentioned above:
You cant watch such elite, high-performance teams operate without wondering what these people know that so many of their corporate counterparts have yet to learn (p. 90).

committed the members are to one another. Such commitments go well beyond civility and teamwork. Each genuinely helps the other to achieve both personal and professional goals.

Katzenbach and Smith (1993) allude to the fact that high-performing business teams outperform other business organizations:
Any group seeking team performance for itself, like any leader seeking to build strong performance standards across his organization, must focus sharply on performance. For organizational leaders, this entails making clear and consistent demands that reect the needs of customers, shareholders, and employees, and then holding themselves and the organization relentlessly accountable (p. 14).

The difference between the two philosophies may be more than the degree of personal commitment and personal risk. Military teams go into their professions with the understanding that they and their colleagues are at risk, an environment that is true of few other professional situations. In business, few if any environments contain risk of personal harm.

Leading high-performance teams


The governing philosophy of military organizations has long been that tacticians and experienced soldiers knew best how to operate in stressful, high-intensity situations. Military management had long ago concluded that any deviations from standardized procedures could put both individuals and missions at risk. Labich (1996) concluded that business people may not be ready to make the sacrices required for inclusion on high-performing teams. We are talking here about teamwork at a rareed level, a swarm of people acting as one, he wrote. Its a state in which team members be they musicians, commandos, or athletes create a collective ego, one that gets results unattainable by people merely working side by side. Its all about humility, of course. Is that why its such a scarce thing in the business world? (p. 90). The highest of high-performing teams Small teams of highly motivated and focused combatants have been employed over the history of warfare. The American colonists in the American Revolution initially acted as bands of guerillas, striking quickly at enemy installations and attacking in unconventional patterns. Since then, and in other contexts, small combat teams with highly focused missions and specialized skills have been employed to support geopolitical strategy at the local level. Clancy (2002) estimates

An insight can be gained about the cohesiveness of a high-performance military team from the story of lieutenant junior grade Jeff Eggers, a 24-year-old Rhodes scholar who became a Navy SEAL. Eggers told Labich that one sure-re way to wash out is to try to get by without the help of fellow recruits. He was quoted as saying: If you are the sort of person who sucks all the energy out of the group without giving anything back, then you are going to go away (p. 90). That sense of all-out teamwork is carried through in the eld. SEALs never operate on their own, and their sense of identication with the group is all but total. One great source of unit pride is that no dead SEAL has ever been left behind on a battleeld. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) refer to the personal commitment orientation of highperformance business teams, writing:
What sets apart high-performance teams . . . is the degree of commitment, particularly how deeply

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How far is too far? Lessons for business from military teams

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James D. Eggensperger

that the USA has 3,500 special forces troops employed in more than 60 countries in an average week. A new model Special operations forces from the USA and other countries were inserted into Afghanistan shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The value and effectiveness of these highest of highperformance teams has been shown multiple times, and gured prominently in the fall of the Taliban months sooner than anticipated. The military teams achieved their goals by being highly responsive, highly focused and being creative in uid, dangerous situations. Priest (2002) interviewed 30 members of special operations teams who had been operating in Afghanistan and focused on one team that was chosen as the best of the best:
Team 555 had been chosen to be the rst A-team inltrated into Afghanistan during the war, the vanguard of a small, nearly invisible US ground presence that helped topple the Taliban with stunning speed and tested a new template for warfare (p. A01).

described the new format of the military response to asymmetric attacks by high performance teams when he addressed an audience at the National Defense University in January 2002:
From the moment they landed in Afghanistan, they began adapting to the circumstances on the ground. They sported beards and traditional scarves. They rode horses horses that had been trained to run into machine-gun re, atop saddles that had been fashioned from wood and saddlebags that had been crafted from Afghan carpets (Rumsfeld, 2002).

Further, Priest (2002) reported, most of the Ateams split into four detachments of three men each so they could cover more territory. Some subteams went for weeks without seeing other Americans. They maintained contact with other teams and senior ofcers via satellite radio, and created virtual teams with allies and other government forces. The success of those teams was measured in stark terms: their very survival as well as their ability to vanquish against enemy forces. US military operations in Afghanistan may have begun to refashion decades-old processes and mindsets. New ways of operating are being developed because few if any non-US ghting forces are willing to go head-to-head with the US military, globally acknowledged to be the bestequipped and trained force in the world. Barry and Hirsh (2001) took note of this transition shortly after the attacks in September 2001:
Americas increasing need for Special Forces the Green Berets in Vietnam are the prototype is, strategists say, a countermove to the shifting tactics of potential enemies. A lot of this stems from the fact that the United States has the worlds best military, and after the gulf war nobody in their right mind planned to take us on tank for tank, plane for plane, says Andrew Krepinevich, who runs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank. As seen in terrorist insurgencies, enemies are adopting strategies of the weak, the asymmetric approach (p. 37).

The sight of empowered, creative US Army soldiers thundering across the plains in Afghanistan, with modern weapons and modern communications devices, is one of the memorable images of the incursion into Afghanistan. The US Defense Department is adapting business research and practices for ways to break its hide-bound processes and enabling people who are used to doing things in specic, highly structured ways to be creative and nd solutions depending on personal observations and readings of the situation. Ironically, they may have the most creative teams and the teams that have evolved the furthest on the continuum of high performance and innovation.

Lessons for business


Special operations forces have emerged at the cutting edge of high-performance teams. They embody and demonstrate virtually all the attributes of teams dened by leading thinkers. They demonstrate: . clear understanding of their tasks; . deep commitment to each other; . a deep sense of linkage with a larger strategy; and . specialized skills. As pioneers, the teams may have learned lessons about personal commitment, responsiveness, accepting responsibility, creativity and organizational t that can be applied to other organizations. A multitude of denitions and descriptions of high-performance teams have been created in the team literature, providing a wide variety of parameters that management can use for creating teams tied to organizational goals, for identifying both team leaders and members, for measuring the outcomes of teams, for rening the role of teams within an overall structure, and for separating teams from the ordinary functioning of the organization. Gustafson and Kleiner (1994) suggested that high-performance teams have the following attributes:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a businessman steeped in military doctrine,

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How far is too far? Lessons for business from military teams

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James D. Eggensperger
. . . . . . . .

participative leadership; shared responsibilities; denition of purpose; high communication; a focused future; focused tasks; creative talents; and rapid responses.

they are a primary vehicle for involvement and leadership for those populations who may be under-represented in many organizations.

With the possible exception of the focused future attribute, high-performing military teams t all of these criteria and add a high quotient of personal commitment to other team members. That said, the list provides little value when measured against the requirements of organizations. Except for the attributes of high communication and rapid response, the list could apply to virtually any organizational entity of a modern business enterprise at any level of performance. The term high performance has come to describe an orientation towards business outcomes or measurements such as customer satisfaction. High-performance teams should be dened as small groups that have specic, difcult-to-achieve outcomes as their goals. These outcomes should also have direct links to overall strategic direction and measurements of the meta-organization. Most denitions are general and not highly demanding, either of the organizations or individuals. Collins (1995) addresses the issue of lack of denition for high-performance teams, saying:
There is hardly any research available. When we talk about teams, self-managing or self-directing, or quality circles, many references are available. High performance teams are a different story. There are only 23 references on high performance teams. And most of them were either case studies using a variety of frameworks or simply accounts of a snapshot of the teams history.

The ve attributes begin to dene a structure for dening high-performance teams in an organization. High performance teams are dened as special and unusual and focused on extraordinary undertakings. The list would apply as well to business organizations as to military organizations, though the intensity of activity would probably be less in a business organization. Once again, personal commitment to fellow team members, to the team and to the overall organization is conspicuous by its absence. Ultra high-performing teams are proving effective in asymmetrical, uncertain warfare situations. They exemplify the ultimate in open systems, taking clues and information from the environment, processing it quickly, and responding and learning and reacting according to the feedback received (which can be deadly). The question naturally generated from this review of the highest of high-performing teams is how ultra high performance teams would operate when conditions become less harsh and demanding.

Problems of teams
Teams have grown in stature and promise based on highly publicized successes and the promise that teams hold for achievement. However, they are not a panacea which will solve organizational defects, strategic shortcomings, lack of skills or missing ethics. There are examples of high-performance teams which have produced positive results. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) cite Motorola, GE, 3M and Ford as well as the US military during the 1991 Gulf War. There are, however, other examples of how teams did not produce desired outcomes. Gladwell (2002) asserts that one of the lessons of the debacle of Enron is that even if the best and the brightest people are formed into teams and given virtually unlimited authority, they may not automatically produce positive results for the organization. Enron hired the highest-achieving students from top business schools, and provided them with plentiful nancing and other tools and resources. But in the end the rm declared bankruptcy and executives were charged with fraud. Teams accelerated the decline of the rm because they did not have a commitment to the organization: they were focused on personal gain and not on longterm results, and they did not have a focused future or regard for potential consequences.

Collins (1995) surveyed four teams using 48 attributes established by Peter Vaill. She based her qualitative study of teams, all of which were regional winners of excellence awards from the Association for Quality and Participation, on interviews with team members. High performance in this case was winning an award. Based on her analysis of interviews with team members, Collins developed the following list of characteristics shared by high-performance teams: . they exhibit behaviors similar to those of a newly converted member of a religion or an elite club; . they have signicant organizational support and in turn strongly support the organization; . they are the in-house change agents and are continually shifting the way business is done; . they have tremendous inuence both inside and outside the organization; and

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How far is too far? Lessons for business from military teams

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James D. Eggensperger

Some observers have suggested that highperformance teams can have undesirable effects within a larger organization and on individual team members because of the special nature of the team, the intensity of the activity and suspicions of special treatment among the larger population of the organization. Baloff and Doherty (1989) describe negative consequences which teams may face within the overall organization:
These negative consequences fall into three categories. First, participators may be subjected to peer-group pressure against what is perceived as collaboration with management in ways that endanger employee interests. Second, the participators managers may attempt to coerce them during participation, or they may retaliate against the participators if the results of the participation displease them. Third, participators may have difculty adapting psychologically at the end of a highly motivating participation effort if they are thrust back into a narrow, rigidly traditional tasks. (pp. 51-2).

the Special Operations Command. The legislation elevated the special operations forces from the Navy, Air Force, Army and Marines and gave them organizational status equal to more traditional branches. Barry and Hirsh (2001) observed in Newsweek:
In the Pentagon, the shift to this new eld of conict portends jealous bureaucratic battles between the conventional services and Special Forces. Since the cold war, the budget for most conventional units has declined or remained stagnant; funding for Special Forces has grown (p. 38).

Insights into the future from military teams and leadership


Business has learned from military organizations for centuries, as have other organizations in society. The military is often on the leading edge because of its high prole, critical requirements and because it has funding when other organizations do not. Can any or all of the innovative operations and practices of the new, ultra high-performance military teams be extrapolated into teams from other organizations that operate in less stressful and less threatening environments? Creativity under stress in an organization that demands precise responses may be a highly desired model for modern business, as it is for the military. But its desirability in the long run is not clear, either from a business or from a military point of view. Within the rst six months of 2002, two special forces soldiers shot and killed their wives and two others committed suicide. Three of the men had been deployed to Afghanistan and had returned. The Army has not made a specic causal connection with either the roles the men played in Afghanistan or their training and experiences in special forces. The implications of high-stress, continuous pressure situations are yet to be understood clearly. The human capacity for achievement and breaking points, even in the supportive atmosphere of a high-performance team, has limits. Whether new applications of technology, changes in social mores and the demands of ultrahigh performance will combine to push team members to those limits is an area for further study. Ulmer (2001) surmises that even selfactualized individuals, the Renaissance men of the special forces, will need personalized guidance and management:
Many careful observers of organizational change have concluded that the future battleeld, full of

Within some teams a protective screen develops which separates the team members from others in the organization. According to Collins (1995), team members create and adopt a belief that:
. . . if you are a part of the team, you are considered family and special. If you are not part of the team, you are an outsider and as in families, it may be okay for you to talk about your family, but it is not okay for anybody else to talk about them (p. 24).

Military personnel exhibit similar tendencies but maintain the pattern of high intensity and exaggerated responses not found in less intense organizations. Clancy et al. (2001) make the point:
Because those in a soldiers parent branch (armor, infantry, aviation, etc.) tend to view a special forces candidate as a traitor or malcontent, failure to qualify frequently results in his leaving the service entirely (p. 24).

Team-focused organizations may also be difcult for an overall organization to accommodate. When the war in Vietnam ended, history repeated itself in a pattern which is instructive for scholars of modern organizations. The point is made that special operations teams have long been out of the mainstream of the US military and more conventional military organizations and ofcers have repeatedly sought to bring unconventional forces inside the tent, eliminating the special privileges and the unique training and uniforms of the special forces. For example, after Vietnam, there was a concerted movement by the mainstream military to bring special operations forces back into a more structured and controlled situation (Marquis, 1997). Congress countered the military establishment and passed legislation establishing

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How far is too far? Lessons for business from military teams

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James D. Eggensperger

speed and enhanced lethality and smaller operating units and an urgency for local decision making to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, will require more and better leadership, not less. The thinking is that with routinely widely dispersed information combined with the need for local innovation to move inside the enemys own decision cycle there must be particularly strong mutual trust between leader and follower (p. xxxvi).

Academic research on teams often mentions management and leadership only in passing. Management is needed to dene tasks that need to be done, to form teams of members with complementary skills and personalities and then to empower the team to do its job. Sundstrom (1991) suggests that the role of management is primarily facilitation: providing the tools and even ofce space which will foster the work of teams. In the nal analysis, this may be what separates ultra-high performing teams from high-performing teams. The higher the stakes, the more intense the reaction and the fewer the people who will even try to be part of the team. The challenge for management is to provide a team with a challenge that is reachable, not one that will endanger both the team and the organization.

Katzenbach, J. and Smith, D. (1993), Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Team, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Kolenda, C.D, McCaffrey, B.R. and Ulmer, W.F. Jr (Eds) (2001), Leadership: The Warriors Art, 2nd ed., The Army War College Foundation Press, Carlisle, PA. Labich, K. (1996), Elite teams get the job done, Fortune, February 19, p. 90. Potten, R. and Sepp, K.I. (2001), The renaissance force: selecting soldiers and forging teams for special operations, in Kolenda, C.D., McCaffrey, B.R. and Ulmer, W.F. Jr (Eds), Leadership: The Warriors Art, 2nd ed., The Army War College Foundation Press, Carlisle, PA, p. 327. Priest, D. (2002), Team 555 shaped a new way of war: special forces and smart bombs turned tide and routed Taliban, Washington Post, April 3, p. A01. Rumsfeld, D. (2002), 21st century transformation of US armed forces, speech given on January 31, available at: www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2002/s20020131secdef.html (accessed June 23. Sundstrom, E.D. (1991), Supporting Work Team Effectiveness: Best Management Practices for Fostering High Performance, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Truskie, S.D. (1999), Leadership in High Performance Organizational Cultures, Quorum Books, Westport. CT. Ulmer, W.F. Jr (2001), Introduction, in Kolenda, C.D., McCaffrey, B.R. and Ulmer, W.F. Jr (Eds), Leadership: The Warriors Art, The Army War College Foundation Press, Carlisle, PA, p. xxxvi.

References
Baloff, N. and Doherty, E. (1989), Potential pitfalls in employee participation, Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 51-62. Barry, J. and Hirsh, M. (2001), The ght ahead. Commandos: the real tip of the spear, Newsweek, October 8, p. 37. Clancy, T. (2002), Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces, Putnam, London. Clancy, T., Gresham, J. (contributor) and Yarborough, W. (2001), Special Forces: A Guided Tour of US Army Special Forces, Pan Macmillan, London. Collins, M. (1995), High-performance teams and their impact on organizations, Journal for Quality and Participation, Vol. 18 No. 7, unpaginated download from Ebsco Business Source Elite. Gladwell, M. (2002), The personnel department, The New Yorker, July 22, pp. 28-30. Gustafson, K. and Kleiner, H. (1994), New developments in team building, Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 26 No. 9, pp. 17-22.

Further reading
Arostegui, M.C. (1995), Twilight Warriors, St Martins Press, New York, NY. Entin, E. and Serfaty, D. (1999),Adaptive team coordination, Human Factors, Vol. 41 No. 2, p. 312. Likert, R. (1961),New Patterns of Management, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. National Institute of Standards and Quality (1998), Ten years of business excellence for America, available at www.nist.gov/public_affairs/baldrdist.pdf (accessed September 2, 2002). US National Archives and Records Administration (n.d.), Eli Whitney and the need for an invention, article on Digital Classroom Web site, available at: www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/ cotton_gin_patent/cotton_gin_patent html (accessed September 2, 2002).

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