Learning To Herd Cats

Do teams really work? One reader wrote to me:
I keep having doubts about the perfect working world you describe, where nobody ever has ambitions that override consideration of other people, where nobody plays internal politics, where nobody has been wrongly hired and where everyone has the authority they need which arises through consensus and team..
He continued:
Teams worked for a period in my firm while I had a supportive boss. But then he left and his successor quickly closed things down and it all went back to the old way of controlling individuals.
Still another wrote:
In my experience, putting people in teams leads to lots of well meaning and motivated people rush off and do similar things differently, in an uncoordinated way, burning resources as they go, forgetting to reflect and learn from each other delivering expensive, inefficient, inconsistent organizations and services. What we need is a way of herding cats.
Getting work done in teams often feels like it is akin herding cats: i.e. mission impossible. In effect, do teams actually work with the imperfect human beings that people organizations with all their doubts, fears, ambitions, jealousies, and personal problems?
The long, sad history of teams in organizations
Ever since Mary Parker Follett was talking about teams and the human factor at Harvard and Oxford in the 1920s, leaders have kept “discovering” teams and the human factor with great fanfare. This includes Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard in 1930s, Abraham Maslow in the 1940s, Douglas McGregor in the 1960s, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in the 1980s, and Smith and Katzenbach in the 1990s. “Teams and the human factor” are often presented as “the big new thing”, when the idea has been around for close to a century.

http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/2011/06/07/learning-to-herd-cats/