Good Team, Bad Team by Sarah Thurber and Blair Miller, PhD

Good Team, Bad Team

Lead Your People to Go After Big Challenges, Not Each Other

Sarah Thurber and Blair Miller, PhD

Know yourself, know your team, solve your challenge.

When team leaders meet a challenge, they often spend more time dealing with their people than dealing with the challenge. They can’t get their team to row in the same direction—or row at all. In Good Team, Bad Team, a ground-breaking primer for leaders, Sarah Thurber and Blair Miller share their decades of experience building, facilitating, and leading thriving teams alongside pioneering research from the fields of cognitive diversity and creative problem-solving. Effective team leadership isn’t mind-reading—it’s good science.

Built on research from their popular FourSight System—used by Disney, Nike, and NASA—Good Team, Bad Team examines over 6 million data points on problem-solving styles that impact collaboration, innovation, and leadership. By integrating these scientific insights with creative strategies, Good Team, Bad Team presents a transformative model that empowers leaders to harness the diverse energies of their teams and generate powerful results.

A good team isn’t perfect, but its people know their purpose and trust each other. You might think bad teams are led by bad people. Actually, bad teams are often led by good people, who simply don’t have what they need to lead. With practical exercises, relatable stories, and contrasting examples, Thurber and Miller clarify the complexities of how good and bad teams approach challenges and why they succeed or struggle to solve them. Good Team, Bad Team is the must-read leadership toolkit to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of collaboration and achieve extraordinary results—together.

Reviews

“We take good teams for granted, when we should be building them with intent. Here’s a powerful blueprint to get you started.”

SETH GODIN author, The Song of Significance

“This is a fabulous book for leaders and team members to better understand themselves and each other. I use this approach in my ‘Creativity and Innovation’ class at Harvard to teach students that it’s our differences, not our similarities, that help in problem solving.”

MARGARET ANDREWS Harvard University instructor

“We’ve engrained this approach into our culture. We use it within teams and across team to increase empathy, cooperation, and innovation.”

INGRID DE CLERCQ Chief People Officer at Deliverect

SARAH THURBER is an author, speaker, entrepreneur, and team leader. As managing partner at FourSight, she has led a diverse team of experts to develop ways to empower teams to embrace their diverse strengths and enhance performance. Thurber works directly with academic researchers, professional facilitators, technical leaders, and designers to spearhead the development of online and print-based tools that support cognitive diversity and creative problem solving. She is coauthor of The Secret of the Highly Creative Thinker: How to Make Connections Others Don’t as well as many popular FourSight training manuals and resources.

BLAIR MILLER, PhD, is cofounder and partner at FourSight and president of Blair Miller Innovation. For three decades, he has combined team-building and problem-solving facilitation to help teams create new products, patents, and strategic plans. He codeveloped a business simplification process that led to more than $1.8 billion in savings for Fortune 500 clients like Mars and Kraft. Miller has coauthored influential training manuals, published academic articles, and received the Distinguished Leadership Award from the Creative Education Foundation. He is an adjunct professor at the Center for Applied Imagination at SUNY Buffalo State University.

$24.95 CAD • $19.95 USD
Published June 4, 2024

6 × 9 • 224 Pages
paperback, ebook, audiobook