A Washington Post Bestseller Not all collaboration is smart. Make sure you do it right. Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems—everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive. Unless you know why you’re collaborating and how to do it effectively, it may not be smart at all. That’s especially true for partners who have built their reputations and client rosters independently, not by working with peers. In Smart Collaboration, Heidi K. Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, attract and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor now lecturing at Harvard Law School, has spent over a decade conducting in-depth studies of numerous global professional service firms. Her research with clients and the empirical results of her studies demonstrate clearly and convincingly that collaboration pays, for both professionals and their firms. But Gardner also offers powerful prescriptions for how leaders can foster collaboration, move to higher-margin work, increase client satisfaction, improve lateral hiring, decrease enterprise risk, engage workers to contribute their utmost, break down silos, and boost their bottom line. With case studies and real-world insights, Smart Collaboration delivers an authoritative case for the value of collaboration to today’s professionals, their firms, and their clients and shows you exactly how to achieve it.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart are "category killers." Why? One key to their astounding success is that they have mastered the art of creating highly attractive partner and customer value propositions. They have all built their business on the principles and practices of Partnership Marketing to offer superior products, create long-term distribution opportunities, new revenue streams for their businesses, and increased brand awareness on a world-wide level. Developing an affiliation with the right partner allows both parties to realize successes that they could not have otherwise achieved on their own by transforming their individual strengths into mutual performance. Whether you're an entrepreneur working to expand your customer base and increase value or a corporation looking for cost-effective ways to stimulate growth and brand-presence on a tight budget, Partnership Marketing is a practical in-depth guide to this core business concept. A powerful strategy in good times, partnership marketing is an excellent way to gain competitive advantage and grow your business even in tough, recessionary economic conditions. As marketing resources are being slashed everywhere, coupled with employee lay-offs and cutbacks to existing programs, partnership marketing is a creative way to do more with less. Partnership Marketing provides the complete how-to of collaborating successfully with other organizations, including: how to align PM objectives to your resources; how to assess what you have to offer a partner-brand and how to leverage your core strengths; how to search for the right partner-brand; how to assess the pros and cons of partnering with other brands; and much more.

From Susan M. Hentz, noted educational speaker and author of Teach Smart, and Phyllis M. Jones, a teacher administrator and educator; Collaborate Smart: Practical Strategies and Tools for Educators is a masterful tool for improving co-teaching and collaborative communication among members of teaching teams. The evolving process of collaboration in the classroom involves negotiation, re-negotiation, respect, trust, and the creation of a level of comfort in the partnership that allows for risk taking in thinking and practice, which yields cohesive instruction that best impacts a student’s learning experience. A “how-to” guide for every educator, Collaborate Smart enhances your resources for instruction through its fully developed, comprehensive yet practical information.

This first-of-its-kind legal guide showcases how to use the latest Web-based and software technologies, such as Web 2.0, Google tools, Microsoft Office, and Acrobat, to work collaboratively and more efficiently on projects with colleagues, clients, co-counsel and even opposing counsel. The book provides a wealth of information useful to lawyers who are just beginning to try collaboration tools, as well as tips and techniques for those lawyers with intermediate and advanced collaboration experience.

Prepare your students for the future while juggling the expectations of multiple stakeholders! A fresh take on the classic first edition, this guide defines and advocates SMART goals—goals that are Strategic and specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results oriented, and Time bound. Gain a schoolwide understanding of how to cultivate a productive collaborative culture, and engage every member of your team in the process.

Named the Best Management Book of 2021 by strategy+business Named one of "this month's top titles" in the Financial Times in September 2021 Named to the longlist for the 2021 Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award in the Management & Culture category A plan for conquering collaborative overload to drive performance and innovation, reduce burnout, and enhance well-being. Most organizations have created always-on work contexts that are burning people out and hurting performance rather than delivering productivity, innovation and engagement. Collaborative work consumes 85% of employees' time and is drifting earlier into the morning, later into the night, and deeper into the weekend. The dilemma is that we all need to collaborate more to create effective organizations and vibrant careers for ourselves. But conventional wisdom on teamwork and collaboration has created too much of the wrong kind of collaboration, which hurts our performance, health and overall well-being. In Beyond Collaboration Overload, Babson professor Rob Cross solves this paradox by showing how top performers who thrive at work collaborate in a more purposeful way that makes them 18-24% more efficient than their peers. Good collaborators are distinguished by the efficiency and intentionality of their collaboration—not the size of their network or the length of their workday. Through landmark research with more than 300 organizations, in-depth stories, and tools, Beyond Collaboration Overload will coach you to reclaim close to a day a week when you: Identify and challenge beliefs that lead you to collaborate too quickly Impose structure in your work to prevent unproductive collaboration Alter behaviors to create more efficient collaboration It then outlines how successful people invest this reclaimed time to: Cultivate a broad network—not a big one—for innovation and scale Energize others—a strong predictor of high performance Connect with others to reduce micro-stressors and enhance physical and mental well-being Cross' framework provides relief from the definitive problem of our age—dysfunctional collaboration at the expense of our performance, health and overall well-being.

In his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking approach for tackling the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here he turns his focus to the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team player. In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess, and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players. Whether you’re a leader trying to create a culture around teamwork, a staffing professional looking to hire real team players, or a team player wanting to improve yourself, this book will prove to be as useful as it is compelling.

"Deciding when to collaborate - and when not to - is the first critical step in disciplined collaboration. To master collaboration is to know when not to do it. ... Highlights common collaboration traps that managers must avoid. ... Also identifies four major barriers to successful collaboration - the "not-invented-here" syndrome, hoarding, search problems, and transfer issues - and show leaders how to spot them." - cover.

In this important book, education expert Kim Marshall shows how to break away from the typical and often ineffective evaluation approaches in which principals use infrequent classroom visits or rely on standardized test scores to assess a teacher's performance. Marshall proposes a broader framework for supervision and evaluation that enlists teachers in improving the performance of all students. Emphasizing trust-building and teamwork, Marshall's innovative, four-part framework shifts the focus from periodically evaluating teaching to continuously analyzing learning. This book offers school principals a guide for implementing Marshall's framework and shows how to make frequent, informal classroom visits followed by candid feedback to each teacher; work with teacher teams to plan thoughtful curriculum units rather than focusing on individual lessons; get teachers as teams involved in low-stakes analysis of interim assessment results to fine-tune their teaching and help struggling students; and use compact rubrics for summative teacher evaluation. This vital resource also includes extensive tools and advice for managing time as well as ideas for using supervision and evaluation practices to foster teacher professional development.