Michael Beer - Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Companys Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy

In Fit to Compete, Michael Beer provides leaders with an elegant framework for having unvarnished conversations about their organizations strengths, limitations, and needs. This is required reading for anyone looking to implement new strategic directions.

ROBERT I. GROSSMAN, MD, Dean, NYU School of Medicine; CEO, NYU Langone Health

Michael Beer shows you how to develop shared ownership for your organizations success. From courageous leadership at the top to speaking truth to power in the lower echelons, Fit to Compete will help you create trust, a higher-ambition culture, and sustainable performance.

KENNETH W. FREEMAN, Dean Emeritus, Boston University Questrom School of Business; founder and former Chairman and CEO, Quest Diagnostics

Michael Beers strategic fitness process will help unlock the hidden wisdom and energy inside your company. I know this because Ive had the privilege of leading an organization of twenty thousand people and seeing it work firsthand. The effort translated into a substantial increase in retention, revenue, and profit growth.

PETER DUNN, cofounder and Principal, Activate Healthcare

In Fit to Compete, Michael Beer provides incredible insights and proven tools for leaders to create a safe and encouraging environment to hear the truth from employeeswhat they like about the culture, what they dislike, what concerns them about the companys current direction, and how they believe they can help you win. If you want to improve the culture and purpose of your organization, this book should be your foundational text.

FRED LYNCH, former President and CEO, Masonite

Speed and adaptability are required in the digital age, and organizational trust is a crucial ingredient for both. In this very practical and timely guide, Michael Beer vividly shows how honest, collective, and public conversations are the best way to build those necessary levels of trust.

RAVI VENKATESAN, Special Representative for Young People & Innovation, UNICEF; former Chairman, Microsoft India; and former Chairman, Bank of Baroda

In Fit to Compete, Michael Beer provides leaders with a detailed and instructive approach to conducting honest conversations inside companies. Filled with practical insights, case studies, and great research, this book belongs in every leaders library.

LOUIS CARTER, founder and CEO, Best Practice Institute; author, In Great Company

Fit to Compete

Fit to Compete

Why Honest Conversations about Your Companys Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy

MICHAEL BEER

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Beer, Michael, author.

Title: Fit to compete : why honest conversations about your companys capabilities are the key to a winning strategy / by Michael Beer.

Description: [Boston, Massachusetts] : Harvard Business Review Press, [2019] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019024079 | ISBN 9781633692305 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Communication in management. | Organizational behavior. | Honesty. | Trust. | Organizational effectiveness.

Classification: LCC HD30.3 .B437 2019 | DDC 658.4/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024079

ISBN: 978-1-63369-230-5

eISBN: 978-1-63369-231-2

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives Z39.48-1992.

In memory of Cynthia,
the love of my life

Contents

PART ONE
The Power of Honest Conversations

PART TWO
Honest Conversations in Action

Fit to Compete
Becoming a Corporate Olympian

Fit to Perform
Overcoming the Silent Killers

Fit to Trust
Overcoming Hierarchy

Fitness to Adapt
Overcoming Complacency

PART THREE
What If Honest Conversations Were the Norm?

Authors Note

This book is a product of a deep collaboration with Russell Eisenstat, my colleague at the Harvard Business School in the 1990s and in several professional endeavors that have followed. While I wrote this book alone and am responsible for the ideas in it, Russ was a full partner in the development of the strategic fitness process (SFP), the method for enabling honest, collective, and public conversations in organizations and the subject of this book. Our collaboration gave rise to the insights I present here. We collaborated on the early applications of SFP and on several studies to evaluate its effectiveness. We also had many discussions to make sense of our research findings and observations as we helped managers lead honest conversations. In short, I am deeply grateful to Russ for the many contributions he made to the ideas in this book.

Preface

Every organization faces challenges in executing its strategy. Great companies know how to work through them.

Organizational agility is on everybodys mind these days. But you are much more likely to read about it than to see it. An astonishing number of businesses that try to respond to new circumstances with a new strategy find themselves stuck in neutral. If that sounds familiar, you are the audience I have in mind.

Cornings Electronic Products Division (EPD) was one of those stuck organizations. I was working for the company years ago, following my doctoral studies, as an internal management researcher and consultant and had founded Cornings Organizational Research and Development Department, itself an innovation at the time. Tom MacAvoy, vice president and general manager of EPD, came to me with his frustration and a request for help.

When he had been put in charge of the division two years earlier, it was already underperforming because of dramatic changes in the market and in the competitive landscape. He was expected to turn the division around and had done a good job cutting costs, but that wasnt enough. The market was becoming more competitive, morale was low, and he could not seem to resolve conflict between functional departments. The lack of coordination and mutual confidence was undermining EPDs ability to develop the new products it needed if it were to pull ahead.

MacAvoy knew perfectly well what EPD needed to do to succeed. In my experience, most CEOs and business-unit leaders do. But what they dont knowand often dont realize they dont know until they are stalled in neutralis how to get the organization and its people to change and adapt to a new strategic vision.