Get Them on Your Side: Win Support, Covert Skeptics, Get Results

Politics is an inevitable, legitimate, and potentially beneficial aspect of corporate and organizational life. Hard work and good ideas are not enough to ensure success-your ability to win allies and head off resistance is what really matters in today’s corporate environment. If you don’t garner support for your ideas, you could become an organizational casualty.

Get Them on Your Side outlines how to:

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Robert McKee

There are two ways to persuade people. The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in. It’s an intellectual process, and in the business world it usually consists of a PowerPoint presentation… The other way to persuade people – and ultimately a much more powerful way – is by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to … [ Read more ]

Michael Raynor

Adaptation has limits. A highly adaptive organization will survive better than one that cannot adapt at all; but it won’t create as much wealth as one that has simply guessed right. And since there is a large number of companies out there and all of whom are attempting to guess right, somebody who focuses on adaptation as a source of coping with the uncertainty of … [ Read more ]

John S. McCallum

Listing all the options for solving a problem benefits decision making in a number of ways beyond merely encouraging proper problem definition. It focuses the decision making process on rigorous analysis and away from ideology, assertion and who can yell the loudest. In the face of a comprehensive list of options, even the most passionate advocate has trouble with the simple question “What is good … [ Read more ]

Mary Barlow, Vaishali Rastogi, Michael Shanahan

Without a supporting infrastructure to guide, monitor, and measure skills, behavior, leadership, and collaboration, cultural change is nearly certain to fail, because it is not tethered to business goals.

Bolko von Oetinger

The center is an essential element of social interaction. There are no strong cultures without an organizing middle. Human beings are social creations. They develop and progress by means of collective actions–in other words, in proximity to other human beings. Centers establish order and organize coexistence, whether it be spiritual, religious, social, political, or cultural. Centers are the sites of thought and planning, where great … [ Read more ]

Management Teams

A classic in management research, first published in 1981, identifying team roles, outlining characteristics of successful and unsuccessful teams, and offering advice on team leadership, dealing with similar personalities within teams, ideal team size, and teams in public affairs. Includes a self-perception inventory and a glossary. – Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Philip Evans

On Enterprise 2.0…
Consider the domain of internal corporate organization. How many tasks can be rethought as the sum of small, loosely joined contribtuions? How much effort can be motivated and shaped by the collective approbation of a corporate community, even risking some dilution of accountability? How far can reputation be substituted for reciprocity as the primary basis of trust? Where can a community of individuals … [ Read more ]

The Change Leader’s Roadmap: How to Navigate Your Organization’s Transformation

In this companion volume to Beyond Change Management, the authors provide you with specific how-to guidance for putting their breakthrough change theory into practice, offering detailed tools, techniques, and step-by-step processes. The book provides the most comprehensive guidance available today for building transformational change strategy and designing and implementing successful transformation. The authors give you an extensive thinking discipline that helps you tailor the most … [ Read more ]

Making a Leadership Change: How Organizations and Leaders Can Handle Leadership Transitions Successfully

Offers sound advice for executives and managers taking over new positions and for organizations undergoing leadership changes. Provides practical guidance on all phases of the leadership transition process–from initial planning, through the executive search process, to the major areas that the new leader must address over time to be successful.

Stephen M. R. Covey

Trust always affects two measurable outcomes-speed and cost. When trust goes down, speed goes down and cost goes up. This creates a trust tax. When trust goes up, speed goes up and cost goes down. This creates a trust dividend. It’s that simple, that predictable.

Designing the Leveraged Organization

The easy days of the pure SBU are gone as the world continues to turn into a modular one of cross-unit synergies, outsourcing and strategic alliances. This rotation means more companies must perform a balancing act-breaking apart value chains while still making sure the new interfaces fit with the corporate strategy.

Dan Heath, Chip Heath

The Curse of Knowledge says that once we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine what it was like not to know it. And that, in turn, makes us communicate to others like speakers of a foreign language. We forget to translate.

Corporate Culture and Performance

An attention-grabbing audit by two Harvard Business School professors of the role that culture (broadly defined as the shared attitudes, behavioral patterns, and values that cohesive human groups pass on from one generation to the next) can play in the capacity of major corporations to succeed or fail in the marketplace. The accessible study compiled by Kotter and Heskett is noteworthy on several counts. For … [ Read more ]

James P. Hackett

No one needs to be sold on the benefits of practice, but few organizations ever create the conditions that allow for it.

The Manager’s Book of Decencies: How Small Gestures Build Great Companies

There is a philosophy of doing business that goes beyond the transfer of goods and services. It calls for a transfer of values known as of small decencies.

This book shows the way.

Steve Harrison, longtime management and corporate culture innovator, knows one simple truth: The long term success of any company, small or large, local or global, depends largely on its culture. Change a company’s internal … [ Read more ]

Konosuke Matsushita

The person who consistently seeks to do what is “right” – not just expedient – will invariably be inspired with new ideas and useful insights.

The Key to Managing Stars? Think Team

Stars don’t shine alone. As Harvard Business School’s Boris Groysberg and Linda-Eling Lee reveal in new research, it is imperative that top performers as well as their managers take into account the quality of colleagues. Groysberg and Lee explain the implications for star mobility and retention in this Q&A.

Getting a New Leader on Board the Right Way

Taking the time upfront to establish rapport and understanding on both sides can help maintain team effectiveness and remedy potential conflicts before misunderstandings ensue.