Press Release: Building the Future

Building the Future:
Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation
By Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Salter Reynolds

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian Renaissance Historian, Politician, Diplomat, Philosopher, Humanist, and Writer.

In Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation ($29.95, 288 pages, 6.125" x 9.25", ISBN 978-1-62656-419-0), releasing April 2016 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, authors Amy Edmondson and Susan Salter Reynolds explore how to bring into being systems that transform human experience and make the world more livable and sustainable. This mindset demands, “big teaming”: intense collaboration across professions and industries that may have completely different mindsets and even historically be, antagonistic to each other. To do this successfully requires practicing new forms of leadership that combine an expansive vision with incremental action—not an easy balance.
To reveal how pioneers build the future, Harvard Professor Edmondson and Journalist Reynolds tell the story of Living PlanIT, an award-winning “smart city” start-up with a breathtakingly ambitious goal: building a showcase high-tech city from scratch to pilot its software. This meant a joint effort spanning a truly disparate group of software entrepreneurs, real estate developers, city government officials, architects, construction companies, and technology corporations. Readers will get to know Living PlanIT’s leaders and follow them and their partners through cycles of hope, exhaustion, disillusionment, pragmatism, and renewal. There are powerful lessons here for anyone, in any industry, seeking to transform the world.

Building the Future explores the idea that innovation should be far more audacious than a new way to find a restaurant or a smart phone you can wear on your wrist.

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. She is the author of Teaming to Innovate, Teaming, and A Fuller Explanation, along with over seventy articles on leadership, teams, innovation, and organizational learning. She has received many awards, including the Accenture Award for significant contribution to improving the practice of management.

Susan Salter Reynolds is a former Los Angeles Times features writer and columnist. For twenty-three years, she covered thought leaders, cultural trends, and controversial issues and continues to write for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including the Daily Beast, Newsday, Los Angeles Magazine, and others.