Nilofer Merchant - The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy

The New How: Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy

Nilofer Merchant

Beijing Cambridge Farnham Kln Sebastopol Tokyo

Praise for The New How

How are you going to get rid of your Air Sandwich if you dont even know what it is? Provocative and practical at the same time.

Seth Godin Author, Linchpin

Collaboration is a powerful, competitive weapon: this book shows you how to use it to win markets.

" The New How is a timely, thoughtful, and practical blueprint for corporate executives and group leaders to create highly effective and sustainably successful organizations. Innovatively and refreshingly, Nilofer Merchant points the way for achieving truly productive relationships among all levels in a company. We can all learn from this book; its also a great read.

Want to transform your organization into a collaborative enterprise? Nilofer Merchant provides insightful and practical strategies in The New How .

Whether youre in middle management trying to connect your team to the strategy coming out of the C-suite, or youre the exec tasked with coming up with a new vision, read Nilofers book first!

In a world in which the pace of change is ever quickening, collaboration, not control, is the route to a successful organization. This book tells you how to make your organization collaborative. And Nilofer Merchants writing is a model of clarity.

" The New How is filled with insight, good sense, and wisdom that will be very helpful for a professional manager undertaking strategic planning. Nilofer has always made a difference with her presence. Now that presence has a new life in the written word that will transcend different boundaries.

" The New How is informative and provides exciting insights because the suggestions are practical and doable. Merchant gets the new realityleadership fails not so much from flawed strategy as it does from failed processes of engagement from those responsible for implementing the strategy. In high-performing organizations, everyone acts like a leader, and they own the strategy and take actions to ensure its success. If you care about making a difference, read this book.

Merchants book is a practical guide for the journey from strategy to implementation. The collaborative tools described here can help companies reach strategic successand avoid pitfalls along the way.

Rubicon has always stood apart from other consulting firms because they engender true engagement across an organization. Adobes first of many engagements with Rubicon was to develop the Education segment go-to-market plan. Adobes Education market growth over the past decade is testimony to the value of a collaborative implementation of strategy, Merchants signature, and the foundation of The New How .

" The New How puts into prose, and backs up with insight, the key thoughts to successful leadershipits all about people.

Nilofer Merchant reveals how to develop and deliver winning strategies by leveraging the creative power of your entire organization. You will learn how to transform strategy from a word to a way of being.

Most business books describe what leaders should do. Many explain why. The New How is unique in setting out a clear end-to-end process and framework for co-creating innovation and change in 21st-century organisations. Its also well written, fun to read, and provides practical guidance on how to succeed.

To all who have taught me to believe that business can be noble

If you purchased this ebook directly from oreilly.com, you have the following benefits:

If you purchased this ebook from another retailer, you can upgrade your ebook to take advantage of all these benefits for just $4.99. to access your ebook upgrade.

Please note that upgrade offers are not available from sample content.

During my nearly 20 years in business, both as an employee and as a trusted advisor to companies, Ive seen what youve seen: strategies designed to win are commonly announced with fanfare, but they rarely live up to the ambitions and predictions of their advocates.

Sometimes theyre modestly successful, and any gap between reality and expected results is easy enough to explain away as bad luck or poor timing. Other times, particularly for the really bold moves, the outcomes are borderline disasters. Scapegoats are required, blame is apportioned, and one or two executives, often talented, get reassigned, or leave the company to pursue other opportunities.

Of course, all around us today, too many businesses are unsuccessful in meeting the challenges placed before them. They fail to defend themselves against the competition, miss new markets, do not innovate effectively, cant reach/retain their customers, and are unable to keep their best people.

Viewed from the outside, these corporate trainwrecks are troubling. Having been on the inside, I can tell you its worse than troubling; its excruciating. Thats because when youre part of one of these failing efforts, it is personal: its your product that didnt sell, its that new market opportunity you predicted but didnt seize, its your missed results, your effort that was wasted. The executive team often complains that their teams arent executing well. The rest of the organization grumbles that the execs just dont get it.

In the end, what we often have is lost opportunity, lost human potential, squandered corporate capabilities, and lost market value. Doesnt that make you mad? It made me madmad enough to want to fix it. I was fed up with my own behavior and that of my colleagues. We were wasting our time, rather than focusing on the fundamental problem: what is going to help us to win in the market. We needed to know how to set direction to win, and win repeatedly.

What is the real issue we need to solve? The real issue is the systematic way we go about setting direction and making tough trade-offs. For too long, the business world has insisted that major decisions be owned by only one part of an organization, the executive suite. Execution and tactics are delegated to another part of the organization, those who actually get things done. If youre within one of these companies, you know what this leads to: an enormous gap between the vision at the top and the understanding and alignment of those in the organization that must turn that vision into a ground-level reality.