Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations about Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning (Hardbound-2020)

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.

With 40 years of experience helping senior executives transform their companies into high performing, people-centric businesses, Michael Beeris a true leadership guru. Today, some of the world’s most innovative companies and their leaders turn to Beer and his colleagues to address the increasingly complex challenges they face and drive long term business performance. Under Beer’s guidance, executives are able to develop and implement strategies and initiatives that transform their organizations through a proven set of simple leadership and organizational processes.

Beer is the Cahners-Rabb Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; co-author of the 2008 Harvard Business Review article, “The Uncompromising Leader;” author or co-author of eleven books; and the chairman of TruePoint, a management consulting firm he co-founded. In his latest book, “Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value,” (2011) Beer and his co-authors take readers into the corner office of companies like Campbell’s Soup, Cummins, IKEA, Infosys, Standard Chartered Bank, the Tata Group and Volvo. With powerful stories and timely advice “Higher Ambition” reveals how today’s most successful business leaders are harnessing the energy and potential within their organizations to deliver economic and social value. In his previous book, “High Commitment, High Performance” (2009), Beer provided a roadmap to much needed change in how senior management leads and organizes the enterprise and its people.

A prized management expert, he has received several professional awards including the Academy of Management’s Scholar-Practitioner Award. He is a fellow of the Academy of Management, the National Academy of Human Resources and the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology. An accomplished speaker and professor, Beer taught in Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management program, and has spoken and taught at numerous corporate management meetings, programs and professional meetings.