“Getting good players is easy,” legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel once said. “Getting ‘em to play together is the hard part.”

The New York Yankees skipper was talking about baseball, but his observation is just as true for the corporate world, where words such as “teamwork,” “networking” and “synergy” are often used to describe how goals will be achieved. Today’s organizations rely on teams to create breakthrough ideas at breakneck speed, but most people working in teams haven’t been taught the collaboration skills needed to succeed.

DePaul University Management Professor Lisa Gundry and corporate consultant Laurie LaMantia have encountered this problem often among various organizations enrolled in team creativity workshops at DePaul’s Ryan Center for Creativity and Innovation in Chicago. Based on their experience working with teams and research on innovative collaboration, Gundry, director of the Ryan Center, and LaMantia, co-founder of the award-winning IdeaVerse center at Lucent Technologies, have written a new book, “Breakthrough Teams for Breakneck Times, Unlocking the Genius of Creative Collaboration” ($25 Dearborn).

The book offers guidelines, success stories and exercises designed to help organizations build creative and innovative teams. Business teams challenged with developing new products and improving time-to-market will find the book’s ideas and exercises valuable, but so will nonprofits, community organizations and other groups that depend on teamwork to get things done. “Now, more than ever before, teams inside organizations, or people working together in external alliances and networks, need to know how to generate divergent ideas and to make change happen,” said Gundry, who teaches in the highly ranked entrepreneurship program at DePaul’s College of Commerce.

“Many people are trying to work at breakneck speeds, but becoming breakthrough in what you do relies on collaborative skills that can lead to making a real difference in the workplace,” Gundry said.

The authors have found that most teams do not have a common vision, language, and process to follow, and this keeps them from reaching breakthrough ideas and solutions and from being effective. To assist teams in overcoming these obstacles, the book provides detailed descriptions of 10 “power principles” for creative collaboration. The principles offer a framework for teams to define meaningful work and vision, cultivate a productive group culture, share responsibility and accountability, express ideas courageously, embrace risk and change, and, above all, have fun working together creatively.

The principles are illuminated through real-life profiles of successful “dream teams” and team leaders. Some of the profiles focus on corporate innovators, including Diggi Thomas, Salon Selectives’ marketing manager, Tony Watson, a former Navy rear admiral who is CEO of the consulting company US Alliance, and the founders of the creativity center at Enesco, Inc., the Itasca-based gift and collectible company that produces “Precious Moments” figurines. Other teamwork examples are from unconventional sources, such as Olympic bronze medal swimmer Lea Mauer and the theatrical Blue Man Group.

To help teams build collaborative and creative muscle, the authors provide exercises called “Tools You Can Use” for teams to try. In one exercise called “Mind Dump” team members begin meetings by writing down anything that is distracting them from the group’s work and then put the lists in their pockets to clear their minds for the team’s effort. Another exercise challenges team members to solve a problem by assuming the persona of someone else, such as their mother, Bill Gates, Madonna or Forrest Gump.

“One of the key benefits of this book is that the 10 principles, along with the exercises, creative team tools and real team scenarios presented, will engage all of the team members, stimulating greater creativity and productivity,” LaMantia said. “We don’t provide a formula for innovative teamwork, but we do give some guidelines and ideas that teams can experiment with to jump start creativity.”

Editor’s Note: For a copy of the book, call Elizabeth Bacher of Dearborn (publisher): 1-800-621-9621, ext. 4525.