Fit to Compete

Michael   Beer

Book | 2020

Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy

Abstract

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 800 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 want to create winning strategies that your entire company will rally behind.

Keywords: honesty; Communication; Organizational Culture; Trust; Strategy; Performance Effectiveness;

Format: Print

Find at Harvard Purchase

Citation:

Beer, Michael. Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020.

When CEOs engage a cross section of their key people in an honest conversation about organizational strengths and barriers to the execution of strategic changes required by the changing competitive landscape, transformations are accelerated. The honest conversation provides a valuable wide-angle lens for examining and changing the company’s system of organizing, managing, and leading. This article describes how an honest conversation led by Becton Dickinson’s CEO Vince Forlenza improved the company’s capability to innovate rapidly and simultaneously increased trust and commitment to change.

Much admired companies like Boeing and Wells Fargo sacrifice their competitive advantage. Some make huge ethical blunders. As a result, shareholders suffer huge losses in value while employees, customers, and society lose trust and confidence in the institution. Based on action research that investigated the effectiveness and content of honest conversations that were facilitated by the author, a method and principles were developed by which senior management can lead honest conversations. These conversations revealed six barriers that consistently undermine effectiveness.

The Micro-Electronic Products Division of SMA has financial and organizational problems. Conflict and lack of coordination exist between functional groups. Employees do not have a sense of direction and morale is low. The cause of these problems is found in a change in business environment followed by change in organization and management. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

Faculty & Research

Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author