Dimensions
152 x 229 x 23mm
Until now, management wisdom would have you believe that the single most important thing leaders have to get right is alignment. To accomplish anything, employees must agree about the mission, strategy, and goals of an organization. Aligned employees are happy employees, and happy employees are productive employees. Simple, right?
Well, in a word, no. Counter to conventional wisdom, the dirty little secret of leadership-what they don't tell you in business school-is that a leader's time is not always best spent trying to help his or her teams make nice and get along. In contrast, the authors' groundbreaking research shows that happy workers can become bored or complacent and thus less productive than workers who are subjected to a little properly managed tension.
The battle needs to be well-designed and subject to certain rules to be effective. Alignment cannot be ignored; without it, organizations can be plagued with bitter, energy-draining wrong fights. But a certain amount of healthy struggle is good for organizations. Indeed, organizations perform optimally when they are under the right kinds and amounts of stress, and a key aspect of a leader's job is to create these right battles and to make sure they are well fought. Right fights unleash the creative, productive potential of teams, organizations, and communities. Right fights make for better possibilities.
THE RIGHT FIGHT turns management thinking on its head and shows why leaders-in the fast-moving, hyper-competitive marketplaces of the 21st century-need to both foster alignment and orchestrate thoughtful controversy in their organizations to get the best out of them. THE RIGHT FIGHT-drawing from examples as diverse as Unilever, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Dell, the Clinton Administration, and the Houston Independent School System-shows you how to introduce tension at certain points and in certain ways, and it is sure to attract considerable attention as the playbook for fostering "right fights."
