Competing in the New World of Work - Live with Harvard Business Review Press

AmCham is association with Harvard Business Review Press is bringing you top writers of management books. At this on-line event Keith Ferrazzi, Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight and The Greenlight Research Institute introduced the key insights from his new book Competing in the New World of Work.

How Radical Adaptability Separates the Best from the Rest

Instead of going back to work, shouldn’t we go forward to work?

The pandemic forced organizations and teams to adapt to new, often better, ways of operating. So why not skip “returning to normal” and redesign work based on what we learned in crisis?

Now we can. Based on 2,000 interviews with leaders working through the pandemic, the book Competing in the New World of Work, documents exactly what we’ve learned during the pandemic, and lays out the blueprint we need to use to stay competitive into the future.

To futureproof leaders, teams and organizations against tomorrow’s inevitable shocks, Ferrazzi and co-authors Kian Gohar and Noel Weyrich provide a name for the mindset most needed now: “radical adaptability”, an essential set of skills that includes collaboration, agility and foresight.

Anyone can develop it by following the book’s overarching framework and actionable advice including how to:

• Evaluate all work with 6 Decision Dials to determine if it should be done remotely or in person, and by whom,
• Promote interdependent accountability among team members so everyone is committed to each other's success (co-elevation),
• “Team out” by reaching beyond team boundaries to co-create solutions with outsiders,
• Banish inertia and get work done with bi-weekly sprints toward manageable outcomes,
• Share accountability for team well-being and diagnose stressors with surveys, energy-level check-ins and “candor breaks”,
• Spread responsibility for risk intelligence across your team including detecting gathering and evaluating,
• Make all strategic decisions inclusive so everyone feels a part of them.

“The coming years of recovery and renewal offer a historic opportunity to remake our organizations and our futures, but only if we accept this as an inflection point for true re-invention,” write the authors.

Competing in the New World of Work offers a bold new vision for the future of organizations and their leaders, inspiring them to be digital, distributed, inclusive, resilient, empathetic and winning.