Gretchen Anderson

Collaboration is a key skill for businesses in the 21st century, and yet many business people aren't trained to teach collaboration skills. How do you evolve ideas in a collaborative fashion and communicate them widely to create a shared understanding? This practical book shows people in your company how to generate ideas with others and gain buy-in for ideas from all levels of your organization. Many books talk about the value of practices such as Design Thinking, but few of them actually spell out how collaboration works, especially in complex decision-making environments. With this book, product managers, designers, marketers, technical leaders, and executives will understand how team members work together to make decisions. Through tangible exercises and techniques, you'll discover how to turn promising ideas into products, services, and solutions that make a real difference in the market. Learn a framework for developing ideas into hypotheses to be tested and refined Understand how to avoid common pitfalls in the collaboration process Align communication approaches to ensure that collaboration is effective and inclusive Structure events or meetings for different types of collaboration depending on the people and tools involved Practice giving and getting critiques to allow inclusion while avoiding consensus-based decisions

Building Effective Product Teams

Mastering Collaboration

"Design thinking (DT) is a highly productive and practical methodology successful design leaders, product managers, and technical leaders use to generate innovative product ideas and facilitate strategic road-mapping efforts. Led by design pro Gretchen Anderson, this video covers the basics of DT. She takes you through a series of exercises that illustrate DT's techniques and benefits, providing you with a recipe you can use to get your team quickly started with the DT approach."--Resource description page.

Getting to Great Ideas that Work

Design Thinking 101

James Thomas

Jon Katzenbach

In a global survey by the Katzenbach Center, 80 percent of respondents believed that their organization must evolve to succeed. But a full quarter of them reported that a change effort at their organization had resulted in no visible results. Why? The fate of any change effort depends on whether and how leaders engage their culture: the self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing that determine how things are done in an organization. Culture is implicit rather than explicit, emotional rather than rational—that's what makes it so hard to work with, but that's also what makes it so powerful. For the first time, this book lays out the Katzenbach Center's proven methodology for identifying your culture's three most critical elements: traits, characteristics that are at the heart of people's emotional connection to what they do; keystone behaviors, actions that would lead your company to succeed if they were replicated at a greater scale; and authentic informal leaders, people who have a high degree of “emotional intuition” or social connectedness. By leveraging these critical few elements, you can tap into a source of catalytic change within your organization. People will make an emotional, not just a rational, commitment to new initiatives. You will elicit enthusiasm and creativity and build the kind of powerful company that people recognize for its innate value and effectiveness.

Gretchen Anderson

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