Negotiating Arms Control: Missed Opportunities and Limited Successes Book

I loved this book! I think what made it especially good was I read it with my fabulous team and it cemented with research (350,000 people) what I have always believed - that success comes mainly from teams. It summed up a and put into words a number of leadership ideas that I've had in my mind for years, but never fully articulated, that it is important to hvae the team focused on a common cause and purpose, that it is a collaborative effort where the team recognizes each other and holds each other accountable and the importance of truly bringing the team together and cultivating an environment of trust and responsibility.

I believe one of the fundamental keys to a leaders success is that everyone on their team is engaged and that without a fully engaged team success or at least world class success will be non-existent (or at least fleeting). The team needs to be passionate about what they do and passionate about their mission. For my team that is empowering managers to lead and take responsibility for their own teams - their development, their performance and their success. It is also about helping managers drive engagement on their teams. It is something my entire team is passionate about and I think made it especially wonderful to read this book together as a team.

In this book, Chester and Adrian take what they've culled from thousands and thousands of survey's and the condense it into some simple principles and nuggets of wisdom. They made this easily readable by adding in stories of many teams.

A year ago when I joined this team someone asked what I would do if things didn't change and I said that for starters, my philosophy was that as an associate working for a company that you weren't happy with you had three options - accept things the way they are, change things or leave. I told her that I would give it a full year and I believed the only answer was to change things. It's now been a year and we are well on our way to becoming a team that will literally transform the entire organization. Our little team of less then twenty has direct influence over thirteen thousand associates and approximately 300 managers.

While The ORANGE Revolution didn't really tell us anything we didn't know, it did help focus us and each chapter led us into wonderful areas of discussion and reflection (we read a chapter each week and talked about it for 30 minutes).

I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who works on a team - it doesn't matter if it is a work team, a sports team, a volunteer team or a community or church team - this book will give you great tips for taking your team to the next level.