Bob Frisch, managing partner of The Strategic Offsites Group, has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to German mittelstand family businesses to the U.S. Department of State. Bob's work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Fortune.

• Introduction: Who’s in the Room? 1Part One: From Problem to Portfolio 51 Most Companies Are Run by Teams with No Names 7The Myth of the Top TeamIllusion and RealityThe Problem That Isn’t There, But Won’t Go Away2 Team Building Won’t Solve the Problem 21When the Shrinks Go Marching InAfter the Shrinks Have Gone3 Don’t Blame the Boss 29In Search of the Ideal LeaderInside the BoxDo the ‘‘Rights’’ Thing4 Four Fundamental Conflicts at the Heart of Senior Management Teams 41Mission Control Versus Knights of the Round Table: Functional Specialists or Reflections of the CEO?The Team Versus the Legislature: The Representative from Finance, the Senator from OperationsThe House Versus the Senate: Are Some More Equal Than Others?The Majority Versus the Majority: The Impossibility of DecidingMaybe the Problem Is That There Is No Problem5 Case Study: How One CEO Transformed His Top Team 57The Past as PrologueMoving from a Single Top Team to Multiple TeamsThe Team That Sits Together Works TogetherTailoring the Structure to Suit Your Needs as a Leader6 Best Practices: Design an Organization That Delivers the Outcomes You Need 73The Three Centers of GravityFlexing in Five DimensionsThe Portfolio and the PayoffPart Two: The Senior Management Team Unbound 917 Engage the Senior Management Team in Three Critical Conversations No Other Team Can Have 938 Align the Senior Management Team Around a Common View of the World 99The Starting Point: Aligning Around TrendsClustering Trends into Drivers of ChangeUnderstanding Capabilities and AssetsWalking the Boundaries of the Company: Testing Walls and FencesDefining and Selecting Opportunities9 Prioritize and Integrate Initiatives to Hit the Strategic Bull’s-Eye 119Asking the Nearly Impossible: Prioritizing InitiativesThe Real Source of the DifficultyChanging the ConversationIt’s All RelativeHitting the Bull’s-Eye: Making Initiatives Work Together10 Move from ‘‘Should We Do This?’’ to ‘‘How Do We Do This?’’ 145It All Depends: Why Initiatives FailPutting on the Brakes: The Value of ParochialismThe American Red Cross: Managing Dependencies at the Speed of DisasterGoing from ‘‘Should’’ to ‘‘How’’Fixing What’s Actually Broken11 Tailor Your Portfolio of Teams for Top Performance Now 167Thinking It ThroughPutting the New Approach into MotionRepurposing the SMTWho’s in the Room?Acknowledgments 179The Author 183Index 185

“Great guide for any leader to use in mapping out his or her advisory teams”—800 CEO Read“Authoritative and pragmatic look at how to make the right calls”—Julian Birkinshaw, Management Today“Offers real-world strategies for making the best of how organizations seem to work”—The Leader Lab“How to structure organizational teams in a way that is both more realistic and more productive is at the heart of Frisch’s book”—CIO Magazine“What you really want from a book on organizational decision making and leadership”—New York Journal of Books“You’ll know his advice is working when you see a dramatic drop-off in people coming into your office and asking, "Why wasn’t I in the room?"—Matthew May, Amex OPEN Forum“Who’s in the Room? falls in the great category…due to the book's ability to jar your perspective of how teams do and should operate.”—Michael Wade, Execupundit