How do you unlock the power of a community to come together to face important challenges and produce big results?
In this 30-minute live conversation, Mickey Connolly was joined by Michael Beer, the Harvard professor whose 11 books have paved the way for organizational leaders to develop high commitment, high-performance organizations that do well by doing good. Throughout the conversation, Michael shares how he came to care for the creation of workplaces that are “worthy of the human spirit,” why becoming human-focused is good for strategic success, and how to fight organizational silence and inspire open and honest communities that speak truth to power.
Michael’s latest book is Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company’s Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy. We have been inspired by his approach to honest, collective, and public conversations that achieve three key outcomes required for sustained success: effective execution of strategy, trust and community, and capacity to change and adapt. Given the challenges facing most organizations in the world, we think Michael Beer’s guidance on unleashing the power of a community is timely and important.
MICHAEL BEER is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. He is a cofounder and Director of TruePoint, a management consultancy, as well as cofounder and Chairman of the Center for Higher Ambition Leadership, a nonprofit whose mission is to help companies and their leaders do well by doing good. He is a well-known authority in the areas of organizational effectiveness, organizational change, leadership, and human resource management. Beer is the author of eleven books, including the award-winning The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal (1990), High Commitment, High Performance (2009) and Higher Ambition (2011). He is the recipient of numerous professional and academic honors, among them the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award and the Society for Human Resource Management’s Michael R. Losey Excellence in Human Resource Research Award.
About Fit to Compete
Sustained success requires adaptation to the ever more rapid changes in the competitive and social environment. Leaders must continuously adapt their company’s system of organizing, managing, and leading to perform. But organizational silence – the inability of those below the top to speak truth to power – prevents leaders from learning about hidden barriers to change. In Fit to Compete, Beer presents an antidote to silence—an innovative and highly effective process for holding honest conversations with everyone in your organization. Used by over 150 companies across the globe, the Strategic Fitness Process has helped leaders in industries as diverse as medical and high technology, restaurant chains, and pharmaceuticals hear the raw and necessary truth about the sources of misalignment between their strategies and their organization.
You can learn more about the book on Beer’s website or find it on Amazon.
Find information about all our upcoming and past webinars on our Community Gatherings page.
What’s important for you and the people you serve right now? We would love to hear from you.
We will continue to explore this question and many others related to how we stay connected and keep creating value in challenging circumstances. To stay up-to-date, sign up for our newsletter where we will share more resources and reflections over the coming weeks.
