Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos | Business Strategy Book for Teamwork & Organizational Success | Perfect for Corporate Training & Leadership Development
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Product Description
A Washington Post BestsellerNot all collaboration is smart. Make sure you do it right.Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems―everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle.Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive. Unless you know why you’re collaborating and how to do it effectively, it may not be smart at all. That’s especially true for partners who have built their reputations and client rosters independently, not by working with peers.In Smart Collaboration, Heidi K. Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, attract and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor now lecturing at Harvard Law School, has spent over a decade conducting in-depth studies of numerous global professional service firms. Her research with clients and the empirical results of her studies demonstrate clearly and convincingly that collaboration pays, for both professionals and their firms.But Gardner also offers powerful prescriptions for how leaders can foster collaboration, move to higher-margin work, increase client satisfaction, improve lateral hiring, decrease enterprise risk, engage workers to contribute their utmost, break down silos, and boost their bottom line.With case studies and real-world insights, Smart Collaboration delivers an authoritative case for the value of collaboration to today’s professionals, their firms, and their clients and shows you exactly how to achieve it.
Customer Reviews
With Smart Collaboration, Heidi Gardner has done the impossible...she has saved us from our own instincts as experts! This book enables groups of professionals to work together more effectively, not as a goal, but in order to produce better client outcomes and better business results for our own organizations.Like any company, knowledge-based firms tend to organize their business in silos. And these silos can be limiting for clients and the experts who serve them. Gardner, who is ex-McKinsey and teaches at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, focuses her research on professional services firms. The principles she discusses in Smart Collaboration, which goes beyond the articles she has published in Harvard Business Review, apply equally well to any B2B organization.This book is well organized, very readable and practical. She does a great job incorporating the voice of the client, and bringing in real examples from her research about what experts believe, do and think. She also includes several chapters that appeal to different audiences within the professional services firm. So regardless of your level, there are valuable comments in here for you. Gardner has a talent for making heavy content approachable for any reader. And the tips she offers are grounded in research and can be immediately put to work.I highly recommend Smart Collaboration. You'll enjoy reading it and, if you're ready, will gain a return from applying it to your interactions with colleagues and clients.
