Get Things Done With Smaller Teams

Frontiers |

Chris DeBrusk

To boost the bottom line, it’s important to increase productivity. This can be challenging for larger organizations, but by creating smaller, more agile teams, managers can facilitate collaboration and efficiency.

Breaking Logjams in Knowledge Work

Sheila Dodge et al.

Despite the well-documented costs of overload, many leaders still think organizations thrive under pressure. They have a lot to learn from manufacturing, where managers have adopted a “pull” system to manage task flow, improving productivity and performance. This concept can be used to prevent overload in knowledge work, too. And “visual management” techniques make it easier to apply pull thinking to a portfolio of projects by rendering nonphysical tasks tangible. Two recent changes at the Broad Institute, an MIT-affiliated biomedical and genomic research center, illustrate how.