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.

Mike Beer is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School and author Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company’s Capabilities are the Key to a Winning Strategy (2020) The book provides a road map for developing an effectiver hight commitment, high performance organization capable of executing its stratregy and living to its values

Mike is an internationally recognized expert in strategic change, founder of TruePoint Partners, a management consultancy, and the Center for Higher Ambition Leadership a not-for-profit CEO membership organization whose mission is to help leaders build companies that create economic and social value.  You can learn more about Mike and his recent the book on his website.

Professor Beer has written widely about organization effectiveness and change as well as human resource management and has had extensive consulting and teaching experience in those fields.   At HBS, where he was on the faculty for thirty years he taught in Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program, the School’s pinnacle program for senior executives and its MBA program.  Professor Beer also led the development of HBS’ groundbreaking human resource management course, the first in the world to frame human resource as a strategic responsibility of leaders, and the senior author of the foundational human resource book, Managing Human Assets, the first book to frame human resources as a strategic Asset.

Mike is author or co-author of twelve books, numerous book chapters and articles in academic and business journals. Among his books are: Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value that describes how leading edge CEOs manage companies that do well by doing good; High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage provides a roadmap for leaders who aspire to build a high commitment, high performance organization; The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal  provides insights into what it takes to transform a corporation in response to completive challenges and won the Johnson, Smith & Knisely Award for the best book on executive leadership in 1990 and was a finalist for The Academy of Management’s Terry Book Award in 1992.

Mike has consulted to senior management in several industries--manufacturing, services (hospitality, professional and financial), consumer packaging, high tech., pharmaceutical and medical technology.  Among others he has worked with Becton Dickinson, Hewlett Packard, Ernst & Young, Agilent Technologies, Merck, and Whitbread PLC. He has served on several professional, not-for-profit, and corporate boards.

The recipient of professional honors and awards, Dr. Beer is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the recipient of its Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award, a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resource, the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology and recipient of its Distinguished Professional Contributions Award, and recipient of the Harry and Miriam Levinson Award for outstanding contributions to organizational consulting psychology from the American Psychological Foundation.  He and Russ Eisenstat received the 1998 Organizational Development Institute Award for the most outstanding contribution to the field for the development of the Strategic Fitness Process at Becton Dickinson and its application there and in numerous other corporations around the world.  He is the 2007 recipient of the Society for Human Resource Management’s Michael R. Losey Research Award.

Prior to joining the Faculty of the Harvard Business School Mike was Director of Organizational Research & Development at Corning Inc., a department he founded and led for eleven years.  The work of the department led to several innovations in organizing managing and leading the company’s businesses and people. 

Source: Harvard Business School