Blow Up the Playbooks. Ignite Change.
Why—and how—corporations must blow up best practices to survive
It’s time to reinvent best practices that have become bad habits within organizations. In Detonate, authors Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach explain how organizations build up bad habits, identify which habits masquerade as "best practices," and suggest alternatives that can help win in the marketplace.
With optimism and empowerment, Detonate is a business book that focuses on an approach and mindset critical to successfully competing in an era characterized by profound technological advances and uncertainty.
- Core themes challenge how to think about and approach problems
- Case studies illustrate common challenges and how to overcome them
- Pragmatic recommendations steer clear of a brand-new, complicated wiring diagram
- Actionable advice provides the first steps down an evolutionary path to success
How will Detonate change corporate practices?
To borrow a line from the book: "Change the question,
change the outcome."
- In discovering Detonate, readers will learn how to:
- Core themes challenge how to think about and approach problems
- Case studies illustrate common challenges and how to overcome them
- Pragmatic recommendations steer clear of a brand-new, complicated wiring diagram
- Actionable advice provides the first steps down an evolutionary path to success
Detonate arrives at a time when the rapidly changing marketplace leaves no room for the wasteful habits that may have served companies with the best of intentions in the past. Core themes, case studies, recommendations, and actionable advice make this book a powerful tool for competing differently. The authors dig into seven specific “normal operating procedures” in business that should be discontinued and replaced with new practices.
At a headline level, the arguments can be summarized in a sentence each:
-Financial Forecasting and Budgeting too often optimizes for a spreadsheet outcome rather than a desired business outcome.
-The underlying purpose of Strategic Planning gets lost as the process becomes templatized and routinized around an annual calendar.
-Syndicated Data gives us insights that are readily available to our competitors and fools us into thinking we have an advantage.
-Traditional Insight Generation relies too much on information that is prone to self-reporting bias.
-Most Risk Management Systems — and in particular Stage-Gate systems — have lost sight of their purpose in favor of process adherence.
Somehow along the way some notions about not just risk tolerance but Celebrating Failure have taken root.
-Org Charts and Career Paths have created the perception of permanence — one of the critical enablers of best-practice orthodoxy
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Praise for Detonate
"Detonate will open your eyes to see the processes, policies, and organizational practices that have outlived their usefulness to customers, employees, and investors. Steve and Geoff give us new ways of operating logically that better align with the fast-changing requirements of our future “everything is digital” world."
Lowell McAdam
Chairman and CEO,
Verizon Communications
"Tuff and Goldbach build a compelling case for why conventional wisdom and “best practices” are the surest way to get average results. If you truly aspire for outstanding, leadership results, the words you never want to hear are “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” The authors of this book explain how to “blow up” practices that companies adopt to reduce risk and, in doing so, renew your business and your organization. A must-read for any business leader!"
Chip Bergh
President and CEO, Levi Strauss & Co
"In a fast-changing, disruptive world, Detonate provides great insight to how you need to transform the behavior of your organization to innovate and stay competitive. Most organizations are trapped in the pursuit of best practices and risk avoidance. This is a book for leaders."
Mark Costa
Chairman and CEO, Eastman Chemical Company