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  • 2020
  • Book

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

By: Michael Beer
  • Format:Print
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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

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.
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About The Author

Michael Beer

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More from the Author

    • 2022
    • Faculty Research

    Developing a Sustainable High Commitment, High Performance System of Organizing, Managing, and Leading: An Actionable Systems Theory of Change and Development

    By: Michael Beer
    • March 2022
    • Human Resource Management Review

    Developing Strategic Human Resource Theory and Making a Difference: An Action Science Perspective

    By: Michael Beer
    • Journal of Change Management

    Reflections: Toward a Normative and Actionable Theory of Planned Organizational Change and Development

    By: Michael Beer
More from the Author
  • Developing a Sustainable High Commitment, High Performance System of Organizing, Managing, and Leading: An Actionable Systems Theory of Change and Development By: Michael Beer
  • Developing Strategic Human Resource Theory and Making a Difference: An Action Science Perspective By: Michael Beer
  • Reflections: Toward a Normative and Actionable Theory of Planned Organizational Change and Development By: Michael Beer
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