University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Team
A review of

Team

Getting Things Done with Others

David Allen and Edward Lamont • Viking • 2024

Teamwork Without Tears

by Patricia Sanders

An increasing emphasis on teamwork, autonomy, adaptability, and agility has intensified stress and overwhelm for many workers. Productivity guru David Allen and executive coach Edward Lamont offer an antidote: a system to make teamwork orderly, productive, sustainable — and maybe even fun.

In 2001, David Allen published Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. By 2005, the system had gained such an ardent following that Wired called it “a new cult for the info age,” and Time magazine called Getting Things Done “the self-help business book of its time.”

But since 2001, workplace norms have evolved through systems like Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Lean to become increasingly team-oriented, adaptive, and flexible. These changes have had radical repercussions for workers: In the absence of a well-defined plan for collaborating productively with one another — particularly as team interactions become more virtual — this new world of work often feels chaotic and overwhelming.

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