Book Review: Hot Spots by Lynda Gratton

Hot Spots by Lynda Gratton is a book about building well working teams and workplaces. It gives reasons why some teams learn to work together effectively and start create new innovative ideas. Also it tells why some teams don't ever get to this state and why even the most effective teams die away at some point.

I love the idea of the book. I think it is important to try to learn building more effective teams. The theories and ideas in the book are good ones, but still something is missing. Theories and ideas do make sense, but I'm not sure are those more than just theories. It is really easy to like the contents of the book, but still I didn't.

I had hard time to believe the contents of the book. Maybe one reason was the it used Nokia team as one of the main examples in all around the book. I've been working at Nokia for 7 years and I have seen few great teams there, but I didn't really believe the story in this one. It's so easy to use companies like Nokia as example, at the time of the example Nokia was doing so great that even the adequate teams were seen as great.

I didn't really believe any of the other examples in the book. Maybe it was the style those were written, but there was nothing really special on those teams. There was no actual prove that those teams really were hot spots as Lynda Gratton tells us.

I liked the ideas and theories, but I didn't get any actual prove that those really work. Maybe my expectations were just much higher for the book.

I don't really recommend this book. It's much praised and it has been getting good reviews, but I will not give it to anyone to read. There are good insights, but there's nothing that person who have seen many teams couldn't figure out themselves.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen