Why did I choose this book?
This book has been praised by many members of the Prague Team Academy community; therefore, I’ve decided to find out more about this certain book and the Team Academy concept overall. Also, I can’t leave out the fact that even though this book isn’t that long page-wise, it is very well evaluated in terms of book points.
Content of the book
This book is written by the head coach and two Team Academy graduates. The authors are Johannes Partanen, Niina Leinonen and Petri Palviainen. The book itself unveils the deeper ideas and principles of Team Academy and explains why it has been so successful in Finland. Further it enlightens the process of how teams are formed, companies started, and projects are being executed in real life business environment. This whole style of learning is call learning by doing and one could call it the main idea of Team Academy as a whole. Applying theory to practise is another big chapter within this book as it is crucial not to only experiment with projects but to have a solid base of required knowledge about a certain area before launching a project.
This process is supervised by our team coach who is responsible for guiding the team in the right direction in a very subtle way. The head coach is the person who has the responsibility of the whole Team Academy on his shoulders. Another very important idea of Team Academy is the idea of forming a community with a work-friendly environment – meaning that every single person in that community has different knowledge and experiences and therefore can represent a huge asset in the community in the terms of learning from each other.
The main Team Academy goal is not to create students or workers – but to produce truly creative people with an open mindset and deep knowledge of who they are and who they want to be including a plan of how they are going to achieve it.
Overall, there are many principles and values named in this book however it would be a lot of pure facts in regards of our team discussing said book at one of our training sessions. Secondly, I strongly believe that most of the community have already read, heard or is just aware about the principles, guidelines, and values of TA. Therefore, I’ve decided to just do a quick summary of what this book gave me.
Conclusion
In conclusion I found this book very useful, unfortunately due to the fact that I’ve been studying in a Team Academy unit for the past year I too am aware about the concept and main thoughts of this way of learning, therefore I’ve known many many facts before even reading this book. This does not mean I perceive myself as someone whose knowledge about this topic is complete or even near completion however the new knowledge I gained from reading this book is negligible. Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to new TA members.
