The way we work is broken. It takes forever to get anything done. Meetings and emails are incessant.
Bureaucracy stifles talent and creativity. After decades of management theory and multiple waves of technological and societal change, is this really the best we can do?Aaron Dignan teaches companies how to eliminate red tape, tap into collective intelligence, and rethink long-held traditions that no longer make sense. In Brave New Work, he shows you how to revolutionize the way your company works forever.
Aaron Dignan is the driver behind some of today’s most agile, fastest-scaling companies. In this book, he reveals his tested strategies for eliminating red tape, dissolving bureaucracy, and doing the best work of your life.
He’s found that nearly everyone, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, points to the same frustrations: lack of trust, bottlenecks in decision making, siloed functions and teams, meeting and email overload, tiresome budgeting, short-term thinking, and more.
Is there any hope for a solution? Haven’t countless business gurus promised the answer, yet changed almost nothing about the way we work?
That’s because we fail to recognize that organizations aren’t machines to be predicted and controlled. They’re complex human systems full of potential waiting to be released.
Dignan says you can’t fix a team, department, or organization by tinkering around the edges. Over the years, he has helped his clients completely reinvent their operating systems—the fundamental principles and practices that shape their culture—with extraordinary success.
Imagine a bank that abandoned traditional budgeting, only to outperform its competition for decades. An appliance manufacturer that divided itself into 2,000 autonomous teams, resulting not in chaos but rapid growth. A healthcare provider with an HQ of just 50 people supporting over 14,000 people in the field—that is named the “best place to work” year after year.. And even a team that saved $3 million per year by cancelling one monthly meeting.
Their stories may sound improbable, but in Brave New Work you’ll learn exactly how they and other organizations are inventing a smarter, healthier, and more effective way to work. Not through top down mandates, but through a groundswell of autonomy, trust, and transparency.
Whether you lead a team of ten or ten thousand, improving your operating system is the single most powerful thing you can do. The only question is, are you ready?
Using stories from companies at the cutting edge of organizational transformation, Brave New Work will show you how to transform your team, department and business from the inside out, making work more adaptable, abundant and human. It is packed with new tactics and tips for updating your company's operating system: the simple rules and assumptions so deeply embedded that you don't even think to question them. Learn how to reignite passion and energy throughout your organization and to build a company that runs itself.
