post # 173 — Monday, August 28, 2006 — a General post

"Play Nice" - new free strategy seminar

“The One-Firm Firm”, last week’s free seminar in my Business Masterclass series, explored how businesses can achieve distinctive competitive advantage by achieving company-wide collaboration.

In this week’s seminar “Play Nice: Creating the Collaborative Firm” (downloadable at no cost), I follow up with a more fine-grained examination of tactics for achieving collaboration.

The seminar explores the questions:

How do you make company-wide collaboration happen in all types of companies? What are the specific tactics that get people in multiple disciplines, industries and offices to work for the good of the firm?

This seminar is based on a chapter of my 1993 book, “Managing the Professional Service Firm”, and explores:

• The Principles of collaboration
• The 16 Top-tier tactics to promote collaboration (in order of effectiveness)
• The incremental approach to increasing cooperation

You can listen to this week’s seminar with the player shown just above, or download this episode directly to your computer. You can also receive new seminars automatically every week by subscribing to my Business Masterclass series with iTunes (or other podcast players). (Click here for step-by-step instructions on how to subscribe.)

The ideas in this seminar were further explored in these previous conversations on my blog:

• Are Law Firms Manageable?
• Can the Good Guys Win?

Would you agree with the priorities I have given to the most effective tactics? Do you have an explanation as to why companies tend to use the least effective tactics first?

Order your copy of David Maister’s new book, Strategy and the Fat Smoker today!