Shop

It’s one thing to have a great idea—but it’s an entirely different thing to actually bring that idea to life. Consultant Adrienne Bellehumeur’s purposeful practices are your key to capturing our collective brains’ bounty—and to pull the most power from even the simplest of actions.

In The 24-Hour Rule and Other Secrets for Smarter Organizations, Bellehumeur draws on the fields of productivity, knowledge management, and design thinking to form what will soon become your and your team’s greatest work superpower. At the heart of Bellehumeur’s six-steps of Dynamic Documentation is the “24-Hour Rule,” a reminder that actionable items—like to-dos, deadlines, feedback, and observations—need to be written down and shared with others. Without embracing documentation—and other memorable secrets like “The Skill Stack Solution” and “The Groundhog Trap,”—our greatest plans and hoped-for solutions will easily slide into oblivion.

How smart companies are opening up strategic initiatives to involve front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors.

Why are some of the world’s most successful companies able to stay ahead of disruption, adopting and implementing innovative strategies, while others struggle? It’s not because they hire a new CEO or expensive consultants but rather because these pioneering companies have adopted a new way of strategizing. Instead of keeping strategic deliberations within the C-Suite, they open up strategic initiatives to a diverse group of stakeholders—front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Open Strategy presents a new philosophy, key tools, step-by-step advice, and fascinating case studies—from companies that range from Barclays to Adidas—to guide business leaders in this groundbreaking approach to strategy.

The authors—business-strategy experts from both academia and management consulting—introduce tools for each of the three stages of strategy-making: idea generation, plan formulation, and implementation. These are digital tools (including strategy contests), which allow the widest participation; hybrid digital/in-person tools (including a “nightmare competitor challenge”); a workshop tool that gamifies the business model development process; and tools that help companies implement and sustain open strategy efforts.

Open strategy has an astonishing track record: a survey of 200 business leaders shows that although open-strategy techniques were deployed for only 30 percent of their initiatives, those same initiatives generated 50 percent of their revenues and profits. This book offers a roadmap for this kind of success.