The New How: Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy

by Nilofer Merchant

Book Overview

What people are saying about The New How "How are you going to get rid of your Air Sandwich if you don't even know what it is? Provocative and practical at the same time." --Seth Godin, author of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596156251
• ISBN13: 9780596156251
• Release Date: December 2009
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 266 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Right on time!

New How is my first "must-read" book for 2010. It seems that there is growing evidence our organizations, institutions and our way of leadership are poorly equipped for the 21st century. This timely work from Nilofer Merchant lays out a framework for focusing relentlessly on what truly matters so that organizations can be successful today and tomorrow. We all know that there has always been a significant gap between what organizations and "leaders" say and what organizations and "leaders" actually do...this book tackles that gap head-on and provides a framework for closing it. This is about delivering on promises and about understanding how value is really created today. "Having a great strategic direction or idea without a prepared set of people who "get it" is effectively the same as having a bad idea." ...sounds like common sense but this happens over and over and over again in companies big and small. Nilofer provides sound guidance for really tapping into the unique potential of your organization. This is one of those books that everyone will be talking about at the end of the year...don't wait until everyone else has already read it.

Incorporating collaboration into the company's dynamic

Nilofer Merchant addresses a difficult topic: the common discrepancy between what is called "strategy" in the one hand, and what is labeled "execution," on the other. In between, you have what she calls the "air sandwich." The gap is not new whatsoever. Most companies reproduce a multi-millenarian dichotomy between the people who think in the stratosphere and the rest of the humans, bound to deal with the day-to-day weather in the troposphere. Too bad, because that's what is killing them from the inside! This book offers an extensive description of a devastating disease - but even better, a solid methodology to stop it. Most strategies are doomed to fail from the start because of how they were formed. They are positioned as visions disconnected from implementation considerations - and therefore foster ad hoc measures and improvisation. The book shows how to rebuild and realign the connective pieces and synergies that drive successful businesses, i.e.: * How people can engage with one another and create value together. * How collaborative planning must rely on an efficient framework. * How small acts rather than big announcements transform company cultures for the best. "Incorporating collaboration into the company's dynamic" is not a pompous motto that comes from the top and fades away as you get lower into the hierarchy, but each employee's personal responsibility: "Think about your work not in terms of what you do, but in terms of the role you play. Your role is not just your title, but includes sets of behaviors, tools, and approaches to create value for and with your organization." By becoming aware of their roles, people are able to create strategies collaboratively and move faster towards creating meaningful business solutions and improving business performance. Each page has a show and tell feel that will prod you to want to enact the "new how" and evolve. You may be inclined to brag about your innumerable "personal accomplishments." But are you really a leader, able to "facilitate as much as you decide, catalyze as much as you act, and coach as much as you direct?" Maybe not... Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy" relies upon the ability of individuals to rethink their personal development: this book gives the practical recommendations that enable employees to reinvent themselves and find purpose at work. A must read. A very serious book with a lot of humor. Abundant and excellent illustrations by business cartoonist Hugh MacLeod!

Must-read for leaders/managers/coaches, business and non-profit

I rarely say "must read", but this is a rare book. Nilofer Merchant has accomplished what few business writers have: - Implementing the ideas in this book will substantially transform organizations. - These transformations will make the organizations simultaneously more competitive AND better places to work. - Leaders at all levels can apply these learnings, although I most want this book to get into the hands of C-levels (the world hasn't changed yet!) and those that advise them. - The book is so well-written that there's a good chance that readers will actually stay with it, remember it, refer back, and work toward the changes recommended. Nilofer, former star performer at Apple and Autodesk, now strategy consultant to high-tech CEOs, has one foot grounded in the top-down reality of today's large organizations and another stepping forward into the more networked, collaborative, far more agile world of tomorrow's successful companies. As an executive coach with roots in corporate strategy, I applaud Nilofer's theme that people at all levels in your organization have knowledge, insight, and solution-finding smarts that go largely untapped as companies currently set strategy and navigate fast-moving markets to deliver. For all the talk of "talent management" people at mid and front-line levels are seldom engaged in the decisions that matter most. This has to change, and here is your roadmap. I rate this book, along with Heifetz & Lansky's "Practice of Adaptive Leadership", as highest-value reading that give me, at the opening of this perilous decade, the most optimism that people in big organizations can get their acts together and thrive.

Creating Small-s Strategy

The New How is a user's guide for anybody who works in an organization who wants to make a difference. The New How translates the essential elements of Nilofer's recipe into a consumable set of principles, techniques, and methodology for people who want to learn what Nilofer tells executives and individual contributors alike at companies such as Adobe, Symantec, and VMWare about strategy creation; that is, setting a direction to win. The obvious challenge for most companies is how to create "Big-S" strategies between the company and the market place. The deeper, hidden challenge involves creating "small-s" strategies inside the company itself; for example, a strategy for a corporate function such as Consumer Marketing. Fundamentally, the New How is about getting the reader to understand what Nilofer believes about creating these small-s strategies: what's required for people to step up and engage as if they were playing on the same team to win: by sharing what they know, attending to what's most important, and getting on the same page. As companies like Apple have proven, top-down approach strategy development has its place in the world. And, coupled with flawless execution, a good top-down approach is tough to beat. However, most companies don't have a visionary leader like Steve Jobs on whom they can rely. So this book aims to provide the elusive "how" of the strategy creation process. It is written to help operational leaders understand how to create strategies by engaging people throughout the organization, and by collecting the information and ideas necessary to connect the dots between the strategy and what's necessary for the people who are responsible for executing it to do so.

Don't just talk about transparency, do it!

Transparency has always been an important management topic (how much, with whom, about what). But I think we're entering an era where transparency may have a chance of going mainstream. Nilofer Merchant relays vivid examples (often personal ones based on her rich career) of the flaws of top-down thinking and how this approach threatens strategy development and implementation. Her "Air Sandwich" is a clear and memorable way to describe the problem (p. 13): "An Air Sandwich is, in effect, a strategy that has clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle -- no meaty key decisions that connect the two layers, no rich chewy center filling to align the new direction with new actions within the company." I've assigned the introduction of The New How to my MBA class on Organizational Analysis and Design. I expect they will appreciate the clear voice and examples. (Longer review available at: [....]