SPECIAL OFFERS
Keep up with new releases and promotions. Sign up to hear from us.
Register your product to gain access to bonus material or receive a coupon.
This PDF will be accessible from your Account page after purchase and requires PDF reading software, such as Acrobat® Reader®.
The eBook requires no passwords or activation to read. We customize your eBook by discreetly watermarking it with your name, making it uniquely yours.
Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer, Second Edition offers a powerful framework every leader can use to promote honest, constructive dissent and skepticism; test their assumptions; more thoroughly consider "best alternatives"; make better choices, and align organizations to act on their decisions. In this new edition, Roberto presents new cases from Google, Ford, Intuit, and others, plus expands coverage to more deeply illuminate his decision-making approach. Offering both positive and negative examples, he presents a well rounded view of how to determine when "yes" means "yes," when it doesn't, and what to do when it doesn't. Roberto explains why "good process entails the astute management of the social, political, and emotional aspects of decision making" -- in other words, why effective leaders are well served by carefully "deciding how to decide."
Know What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen lays out the key skills and capabilities required to ensure that problems do not remain hidden in your organization. It explains how leaders can become effective problem finders, unearthing problems before they destroy an organization. The book explains how leaders can become an anthropologist, going out and observing how employees, customers, and suppliers actually behave. It then goes on to present how they can circumvent the gatekeepers, so they can go directly to the source to see and hear the raw data; hunt for patterns, including refining your individual and collective pattern recognition capability; "connect the dots" among issues that may initially seem unrelated, but in fact, have a great deal in common; give front-line employees training in a communication technique; encourage useful mistakes, including creating a "Red Pencil Award"; and watch the game film, where leaders reflect systematically on their own organization's conduct and performance, as well as on the behavior and performance of competitors.
Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes For An Answer
Chapter 1: The Leadership Challenge 1
Chapter 2: Deciding How to Decide 39
Chapter 3: An Absence of Candor 75
Chapter 4: Stimulating the Clash of Ideas 109
Chapter 5: Keeping Conflict Constructive 143
Chapter 6: A Better Devil’s Advocate 179
Chapter 7: The Dynamics of Indecision 203
Chapter 8: Fair and Legitimate Process 233
Chapter 9: Reaching Closure 271
Chapter 10: Leading with Restraint 301
Know What You Don’t Know
Acknowledgments xii
About the Author xv
Preface xvi
Chapter 1 From Problem-Solving to Problem-Finding 1
Chapter 2 Circumvent the Gatekeepers 27
Chapter 3 Become an Ethnographer 53
Chapter 4 Hunt for Patterns 73
Chapter 5 Connect the Dots 95
Chapter 6 Encourage Useful Failures 119
Chapter 7 Teach How to Talk and Listen 139
Chapter 8 Watch the Game Film 161
Chapter 9 The Mindset of a Problem-Finder 185
Index 195