Fit to Compete
Why Honest Conversations About Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy
Published on 14. January 2020
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-1-63369-230-5 (ISBN)
Description
Is Silence Killing Your Strategy?
In his thirty years of working in corporations, Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer has witnessed firsthand how organizational silence derails strategic objectives. When employees can't speak truth to power, senior leaders don't hear what they need to hear about their company's fitness to compete, and employees lose trust in those leaders and become less committed to change.
In Fit to Compete, Beer presents an antidote to silence--principles and a time-tested innovative process for holding honest conversations with everyone in your organization. Used by over eight hundred organizations across the globe, the strategic fitness process has helped leaders in a diverse range of industries--including medical technology, information technology, banking, restaurant chains, and pharmaceuticals--hear the raw but necessary truth about the sources of misalignment between their strategies and their organizations.
In addition to step-by-step instructions, Beer offers detailed and illustrative case studies of companies that have conducted honest conversations to great effect. He also shows how to apply the process more broadly to a variety of strategic challenges and at multiple levels throughout the organization.
Practical, enlightening, and comprehensive, Fit to Compete is the book you should turn to if you to want create winning strategies that your entire company will rally behind.
In his thirty years of working in corporations, Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer has witnessed firsthand how organizational silence derails strategic objectives. When employees can't speak truth to power, senior leaders don't hear what they need to hear about their company's fitness to compete, and employees lose trust in those leaders and become less committed to change.
In Fit to Compete, Beer presents an antidote to silence--principles and a time-tested innovative process for holding honest conversations with everyone in your organization. Used by over eight hundred organizations across the globe, the strategic fitness process has helped leaders in a diverse range of industries--including medical technology, information technology, banking, restaurant chains, and pharmaceuticals--hear the raw but necessary truth about the sources of misalignment between their strategies and their organizations.
In addition to step-by-step instructions, Beer offers detailed and illustrative case studies of companies that have conducted honest conversations to great effect. He also shows how to apply the process more broadly to a variety of strategic challenges and at multiple levels throughout the organization.
Practical, enlightening, and comprehensive, Fit to Compete is the book you should turn to if you to want create winning strategies that your entire company will rally behind.
Reviews / Votes
Advance Praise for Fit to Compete:"Fit to Compete is a survival manual for every leader who has struggled to create real change in an organization. Michael Beer offers a powerful tool--the strategic fitness process--that enables leaders to successfully implement their strategies and, in the process, transform their organization's culture and their own ability to lead." -- Teresa Amabile, Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School; coauthor, The Progress Principle
"Michael Beer has crafted a brilliantly simple process to help organizations honestly cut through the challenges of the day and advance their strategies in enlightened and impactful ways." -- Douglas R. Conant, founder, ConantLeadership; former President and CEO, Campbell Soup Company; and former Chairman, Avon Products
"Many firms are stuck--strategically and organizationally--because no one will speak truth to power. In this hugely important book, Professor Michael Beer lays out how to structure a process to make these conversations happen and details the often-astounding results that flow from putting them in place." -- Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor, Harvard University
"Before becoming CEO, I spent four months asking questions and listening to workers, middle-level managers, customers, and suppliers to try to learn the truth about the company. Few CEOs have this luxury. But Michael Beer's strategic fitness process shows you how to find truth in a way that not only works but also builds trust and institutional knowledge. It would have been hugely valuable if I had the method and wisdom in this book at the time I took over as CEO." -- Richard Gochnauer, former President and CEO, United Stationers
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 241 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 32 mm
Weight
518 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-63369-230-5 (9781633692305)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Michael Beer
Fit to Compete
Why Honest Conversations About Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy
E-Book
01/2020
1st Edition
Harvard Business Review Press
€30.99
Available for download
Person
Michael Beer is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School. He is a cofounder and Chairman of TruePoint Partners, an international consulting firm, and chairman of the board at the Center for Higher Ambition Leadership, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the number of companies and leaders committed to creating economic and social value. He is the author of eleven books, including Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
You can find the author at: truepoint.com/who-we-are/our-people/michael-beer/
You can find the author at: truepoint.com/who-we-are/our-people/michael-beer/