The Team Doctor

Christopher Walken fans know that part of the real charm in a Walken performance is his off-kilter delivery: sentences built of halting, weirdly accented words spoken at a decidedly different rhythm. The actor reading the cue cards here uses a similar atonal sing-song approach, and--in all fairness--it drove me up the proverbial Bayeux tapestry. Advising teams (the latest management flavor of the month) to "be clear, be direct, be precise," The Team Doctor fairly quickly breaks its own rules with its verbose, subject-hopping approach. The format uses Q&A (question from the host, answers from the host and select interviewees), posing queries such as "Are teams the answer?" and the Jerry Maguire-like "What's in it for me?" Although the format and host are less than optimum, some of the issues touched on caught my flagging attention: meetings ("the word makes your skin crawl"), the interesting fact that groups tend to score higher on an I.Q. test than any of their individual members; and the dangers of company e-mail (I can easily imagine one member of a team cc: ing the others with a message like, "how can you even see my proposal when you're staring at your transverse colon?"). The 5 volumes are: Team Performance Issues, Team Conflict, Where Teams Go Wrong, Leadership, and Organizational Support. An optional purchase for larger business collections. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)