Click Here To Purchase From Amazon More Quick Team-Building Activities for Busy Managers: 50 New Exercises That Get Results in Just 15 Minutes

Authors: Brian Cole Miller

ISBN-10: 0-8144-7378-4 (Paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8144-7378-8 (Paperback)

Publisher: American Management Association (New York, NY)

More Quick Team-Building Activities for Busy Managers is a 191 page, softbound book, priced at $17.95 (US).  Preceded by an acknowledgments and introduction and followed by an index and brief biography of the author, Chapters 1 and 2 comprise the first part, appropriately entitled getting ready, and the remaining 5 chapters provide the “50 new exercises” addressed in the book’s title.

Sections and activities/exercises are nicely organized into (1) icebreakers, (2) healthy competition, (3) cooperative, (4) creative or out-of-the-box, and (5) appreciation and helping others in their day to day behaviors and endeavors.  Each of the 50 activities (I counted 52) is addressed in a few pages, providing the reader/manager with the opportunity to take a few minutes, here and there and throughout, for example, a very busy workday (or workdays), to read an exercise, digest and consider its application, and proceed to another exercise for review and consideration.  Clearly, Brian Miller has organized this material, very efficiently, to allow the very busy reader/manager the latitude to investigate these activities piecemeal.  It would, for example, be a very simple matter for the manager to highlight or mark those pages that he/she feels most relevant or applicable, or even novel and warranting experimentation at some future point.  I particularly liked the left margin, bold-faced tips or notes: here’s how, tips for success, try these variations, and so on.

Having recently re-watched the film, Hoosiers, with Gene Hackman, I was reminded that a seemingly small and/or inferior team – a David, if you will – can achieve victory over a presumably superior opponent – the Goliath counterpart.  In the increasingly competitive, global environment, where “best practices,” “total quality management,” “continuous improvement” and comparable buzzwords and techniques appear to bombard all in business, industry and even government, even a very small handful of the 50 activities, if successful, could easily be valued at many times the cost of this book.  I liked this book, consider it to represent an excellent primer, and recommend it to those seeking to improve their supervisory and/or managerial and, of course, team-building skills, in this increasingly global and competitive environment.