Strategic Conversations Creating and Directing the Entrepreneurial Workforce

Most organizations fail to take full advantage of their employees' knowledge, initiative, and imagination. In this accessible and practical book, J.-C. Spender and Bruce Strong provide a guide for building entrepreneurial workforces through carefully designed conversations between management and employees. These 'strategic conversations' make employees partners in the strategy development process, engaging them to help shape the organization's future. The result is transformational: instead of strategy being a dry, periodic planning exercise for the few, it becomes a dynamic and continuous act of co-creation enriched by the many. Case studies illustrate how leading organizations have used strategic conversations to build sustained competitive advantage, create innovative business models, make better decisions under uncertainty, reduce the need for change management, and enhance employee engagement. The book will appeal to managers, entrepreneurs of all stripes, and teachers and students in schools of business and public administration.

Preface; 1. Introduction - what are strategic conversations?; 2. The strategic conversations imperative; 3. Strategic conversations in the wild; 4. Engaging employees in management's agenda; 5. Strategizing and the leaders' role; 6. Putting strategic conversations into practice - innovation communities; 7. Conversation trumps structure - new norms for dialog; 8. Strategic conversations across geographies, generations, and the multitude; 9. Engaging the world outside in the conversation; 10. Creating a self-reinforcing innovation platform - collateral benefits; 11. Measuring the future; 12. Epilogue - on managing; Further reading; Index.

J.-C. Spender is Research Professor at Kozminski University, Warsaw. Before entering academic life he worked for Rolls-Royce, IBM as a large account manager and special products planner, in merchant banking and was involved in several Silicon Valley start-ups. He was on the faculty at various universities including the University of California, Los Angeles, and Rutgers University. In 2003, he retired as Dean of the School of Technology and Business at SUNY/FIT, and between 2007 and 2008 he served as the Fulbright-Queen's Research Chair. His current research involves theorizing firms and markets under conditions of Knightian uncertainty, with additional interests and publications about the history of management and management education, strategy, and knowledge management.
Bruce A. Strong is founding partner of Cambridge Partners and Associates Inc., a multidiscipline consulting company serving the U.S. and international business communities. He is an entrepreneur (founding systems integration firm Context Integration that did more than $250 million in sales), a consultant to senior management of global organizations such as PwC, the World Bank, and State Street Financial, and a featured speaker and lecturer on knowledge and strategy. He has been written up in Fortune and Fast Company magazines for his knowledge management work, and has written both academic and business articles, including two for The Wall Street Journal.