Download Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos AudioBook Free
Not all cooperation is smart. Be sure you still do it. Professional service firms face a serious problem. Their clients ever more need them to solve complex problems - from regulatory conformity to cybersecurity, the sorts of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can handle. Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly identified practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, high-risk, and expensive. If you don't know why you're collaborating as well as how to get it done effectively, it may well not be smart by any means. That's particularly true for partners who have built their reputations and customer rosters independently, not by dealing with peers. In Smart Cooperation, Heidi K. Gardner demonstrates firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client commitment, attract and wthhold the best skill, and gain a competitive advantage when specialists collaborate across useful boundaries. Gardner, a past McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business College teacher now lecturing at Harvard Regulation School, has spent over a decade executing in-depth studies of several global professional service firms. Her research with clients and the empirical results of her studies illustrate plainly and convincingly that cooperation will pay, for both specialists and their firms. But Gardner offers powerful prescriptions for how market leaders can foster cooperation, move to higher-margin work, increase client satisfaction, improve lateral hiring, reduce enterprise risk, participate workers to contribute their utmost, break down silos, and boost their bottom line. With circumstance studies and real-world insights, Smart Cooperation gives an authoritative circumstance for the value of cooperation to today's specialists, their firms, and their clients and shows you exactly how to attain it.
