Two different trends characterize work in the 21st century: the increased use of teams as the primary way to get things done, and the amount of interpersonal change in the workplace. Let’s examine each.

Think about a time when you were working on something and were so productive, so creative, so into the task that you lost all track of time. That perfect state of absorption was namedflowby the noted psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (also famous for his difficultto-pronounce name, which sounds likeMe-high-e Chick-sent-me-high-e). Athletes call it being “in the zone” and musicians might say “in the groove.”...

Have you seen the30 Rockepisode where Jack Donaghy (brilliantly played by Alec Baldwin) presents Liz Lemon (equally brilliantly played by Tina Fey) with a Followship Award? If you haven’t seen the show, it’s a popular workplace comedy with Jack as the suave, egotistical, condescending, conservative network boss and Liz as his awkward, nerdy, feminist head writer.

The scene has Jack barging into Liz’s team meeting, smiling, and announcing that she has been awarded the prestigious G. E. Followship Award. Liz is indignant, exclaiming that she isn’t a follower. One of Liz’s staff, Pete, pipes up that Liz doesn’t...

A TV show we watch regularly isSo You Think You Can Dance. In the show, young dancers are brought together to work on a variety of styles, and then the public votes on their favorite dancers after each episode. The audition process for the show always includes one team dance number. A group of four to six dancers who don’t know each other are given a song and asked to choreograph a dance to be presented the next morning for the judges. Each team is self-organized. It’s easy to imagine these highly motivated youngsters staying up all night choreographing...

Jennifer Harcourt and her colleagues (2009) at Cambridge University published a study on stickleback fish in the academic journalCurrent Biologya few years back.

“Why would I care about fish?,” you might be wondering. “Isn’t this a book on partnerships?” Yes, but humans are really complicated. Sometimes it's easier to start with a simpler example, one that doesn’t have all the extra baggage to muddy the interpretation. Something like fish.

Stickleback fish are relatives of seahorses and pipefish, measuring two to four inches in length, with gray or blue-green backs and silvery flanks. Unusually, they have no scales but...

Marc and I started taking salsa dancing lessons. We wanted to learn to dance together better. Moreover, we wanted to learn about partnership development and what tips, if any, could be transferable to our work. We were surprised when we met the instructor recommended to us. Instead of a Latino with a bold personality, Jeff was a quiet, unassuming fellow in a hockey jersey. However, after telling us how he taught dance at university while studying kinesiology (the science of human movement) and how he’d developed a methodological approach that worked for everyone regardless of natural talent, we were intrigued...

We lived for many years in the city of Waterloo, Ontario. You might not have heard of Waterloo, but it boasts one of the best universities for engineering, computer programming, and mathematics in the world. Google and Microsoft are just two of the many high-tech companies located in the Waterloo region to take advantage of the talent coming from the University of Waterloo. It also happens to be where Mike Lazaridis, the engineer who built the first smartphone, the BlackBerry, went to school.

Eight years after Lazaridis founded BlackBerry, the other pillar in the BlackBerry story joined the company, Jim...

We participated in a fun workshop with Jennifer Spear, a “recovering corporate executive” and graduate of the Improv Program at Second City. Now in her own practice, Clean Slate Strategies, she uses improv to help organizations learn to solve problems more creatively. During her workshop we whet our chops at various theater games while Jennifer taught us some of the basics of improvisational acting.

And here are the rules we took away:

1. Accept what you are given . For example, if someone throws a line at you such as, “Look at that briefcase lying on the ground over there,”...

Most of us in organizations already understand the importance of goals and of goal setting. We would like to build on this and emphasize a critical feature of goals that lies at the root of any high-functioning partnership. Specifically, goals must be shared.Deeply shared.

Think back to the beginning of this book when we mentioned the enormous successes of The Beatles during their heyday: many hit songs, many lauded albums, many rules broken, many boundaries scrambled. Quite the revolution! Then what happened? Why did they drift apart and ultimately disband? The answer is that their goals were no longer...

One night we met friends at a restaurant to celebrate a birthday. During pre-dinner drinks we posed this scenario and question:

Imagine you are on the USS Enterprise. You’ve lost 90% of your power, deflector shields are down, and an attack by a Klingon Bird of Prey warship is imminent. The situation looks dire. Your options are limited. Whom would you entrust with the life and death decision of what to do next, Captain Kirk or Science Officer Spock?

It turned into a fun party game as each of us made a choice, explained our rationale, and tried to guess...

At the turn of the 20th century – long before computers existed let alone vied for supremacy at the board – chess was one of the great battlefields of the human intellect. It was a time of rapid advancement in the theory and practice of the game with great players such as Lasker, Janowski, and Capablanca dominating the field. At one tournament, a game was organized between two teams of three grandmasters on each side. The grandmasters were supposed to collaborate on each move. Given the level of talent, it was expected to be a game for the ages: something future generations...

Sea squirts are the great transformers of the sea. A sea squirt –Urochordata, to give its scientific name – starts life looking like a tadpole with gills. It has a primitive nervous system, a whip-like appendage that helps it move called a notochord, and a small brain – really just a cluster of neurons. When the juvenile sea squirt finds a cozy place to settle, it attaches to the rock or other surface with the adhesive papillae on its chin and then proceeds to eat its eye, its notochord, and its brain! There it happily stays, one of the most beautiful undersea...

There was quite the brouhaha at a British university: a year into her job the provost abruptly resigned.¹ She left very soon after meeting considerable resistance to the changes that she had initiated; not surprisingly, there was chaos in her wake.

The vice-chancellor of the college called a town hall meeting. Attendance was high as everyone was dying to know what to make of the resignation, what to do with initiatives that had been started and others she had canceled, and what to expect next.

Instead, the vice-chancellor talked about the successes that the college was having, the changing higher...

Perhaps you are familiar with this story, recounted by an 88-year-old grandmother:

Dear Granddaughter,

The other day I went to our local bookstore and saw a ‘Honk if you like my driving’ bumper sticker. I bought the sticker and put it on my car. Boy, am I glad I did: what an uplifting experience followed!

I was stopped at a red light at a busy intersection, lost in thought about life, when the light changed. That was when I found out that lots of people saw my sticker. As I sat there, the fellow behind me started honking like crazy....

The book has introduced a lot of tools, tips, and ideas along with some suggested uses and implications of each. This chapter takes the alternate perspective: instead of starting with the Generative Partnership^®model (GP model), with its five principles and skills for leadership and followership, and considering how each piece can be applied separately, we start with the problem or opportunity and ask, “What are all the ways to think about and solve it using the ideas in this book?” We have used the GP model and tools to tackle a wide variety of challenges from personal to team...