Leading Through Collaboration: Guiding Groups to Productive Solutions Book

Richard H. Axelrod, MBA'73
Coauthor

From the coauthor: "Everyone needs to involve other people in order to accomplish their tasks and achieve their goals. It doesn't matter if you're a CEO leading a major restructuring or a PTA volunteer raising money for after-school programs, you can't do it all yourself-you and the work will suffer if you try. But the hit-and-miss way most people go about involving others often takes too much time and seems like more trouble than it's worth.

"You Don't Have to Do It Alone takes a systematic approach to involvement. It lays out a simple, straightforward plan of action for finding the right people and keeping them energized, enthusiastic, and committed until the work is completed. The book is organized around a series of five questions corresponding to steps in the involvement process-in fact, these questions are the titles of the first five chapters. Each chapter begins with a short anecdote that introduces one of the questions and offers helpful tools and techniques for resolving it, as well as providing examples from corporations, government, and the nonprofit sector that make the book interesting, fun, memorable-and, above all, useful.

"You Don't Have to Do It Alone is the Swiss Army Knife of involvement-a set of tools that can be used in any setting to get you the help you need. You will learn to involve others in a way that will actually make your work easier, resulting in less stress, better ideas, and more successful outcomes. This book's lessons apply whether you are working at a multinational corporation, an inner-city hospital, or at the community bake sale."