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Business Briefing: Cheetah Teams

Picture of Jim Krider By   ·  2 minute read

Keywords: Project Management, Problem Solving, Organizational Agility, Crisis Management, Team Dynamics
Source: Harvard Business Review
Link: Read the full article on HBR.org
Authors: Mats Engwall and Charlotta Svensson
Published: March 2001
Est. Read Time (Original): ~15 minutes

A Note on Access: To read the full article, a Harvard Business Review subscription is required. We believe an HBR subscription is an invaluable asset. We particularly recommend utilizing the downloadable PDF version of their articles—they are a fantastic, high-value resource for sharing and discussion within your team.

The Core Idea

Engwall and Svensson introduce the concept of a "cheetah team": a small, elite, ad hoc unit that is rapidly mobilized to solve a single, complex problem threatening to delay a major project. By delegating the crisis to this separate, full-time team, the main product development group is buffered from distraction and can maintain its focus and momentum. The key success factors for a cheetah team are that it has a specific mission, is sponsored by top management, is comprised of fully dedicated experts, and is immediately dissolved once the problem is solved.

Why It Matters for Business Today

In an environment where speed-to-market is a critical competitive advantage, the cheetah team is a powerful tool for maintaining project velocity in the face of inevitable, unexpected roadblocks.

  • A Strategy for Protecting Momentum: The primary value of a cheetah team is not just solving a problem, but protecting the focus and productivity of the larger project team. It prevents a single, complex issue from derailing an entire strategic initiative, allowing the main body of work to proceed in parallel.

  • Surgical Application of Expertise: A cheetah team allows an organization to apply its best talent with surgical precision. By freeing elite experts from their day-to-day responsibilities and giving them a single, high-priority mission, it creates an environment of intense, undistracted focus that can solve complex problems in a fraction of the time.

  • A Model for Organizational Agility: The cheetah team is a mechanism for creating a temporary, empowered hierarchy. With top-management sponsorship, this ad hoc group can cut through bureaucracy and normal procedures to get a fast result, then disappear just as quickly, providing a powerful model for agile crisis management without a permanent re-org.

The Strategic Question for Leaders

When an unexpected, complex problem threatens a critical project, does your organization have a mechanism to shield the main team from distraction by deploying a dedicated, empowered "cheetah team" to solve the crisis in parallel?

Share your perspective in the comments below.

Remember, by sharing your insights, you contribute to a unique "Enriched Briefing." {Jim Krider} will follow up to provide you with a powerful "Business Cold Start" document, combining our analysis with expert perspectives to equip your internal AI models with a more nuanced understanding of this topic.