The Right Fight: How Great Leaders Use Healthy Conflict to Drive Performance, Innovation, and Value »

Saj-Nicole Joni, Ph.D., is an internationally known business strategist and advisor to CEOs and top executives across the globe. Dr. Joni works with leaders to develop and execute their best strategic options, viewing all sides of a challenge and testing multiple possibilities, even those at the boundaries of convention. A frequent speaker with a regular Forbes.com column, Joni has appeared on NPR Marketplace, has been published in The Harvard Business Review and Fast Company, and is the author of The Third Opinion.

Dr. Joni has filled executive positions at Microsoft and CSC Index, and she has taught at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Wellesley College. She is the founder and CEO of Cambridge International Group Ltd. and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.

The Right Fight, the new management guide from noted business strategists Saj-nicole Joni and Damon Beyer, turns management thinking on its head and shows why, in the fast-moving, hyper-competitive marketplaces of the 21st century, leaders need to both foster alignment and orchestrate thoughtful controversy in their organizations to get the best out of them. The authors groundbreaking research including examples as diverse as Unilever, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Dell, the Clinton Administration, and the Houston Independent School System shows that happy workers can become bored or complacent and thus less productive than workers who are subjected to a little properly managed tension. Readers of Good to Great and Winning, as well as the Harvard Business Review and Strategy + Business, will find much to ponder in The Right Fight.

Organizational harmony and strategic alignment aren't enough to drive success.

Until now, management wisdom would have you believe that the single most important thing leaders have to get right is alignment. To accomplish anything, employees must agree about the mission, strategy, and goals of an organization. Aligned employees are happy employees, and happy employees are productive employees. Simple, right?

Well, in a word, no. Counter to conventional wisdom, the dirty little secret of leadership what they don't tell you in business school is that a leader's time is not always best spent trying to help his or her teams make nice and get along. In contrast, the authors' groundbreaking research shows that fostering productive dissent is essential for achieving peak efficiency what Joni and Beyer call "right fights."

Right fights need to be well designed and subject to certain rules to be effective. Alignment cannot be ignored; without it, organizations can be plagued with bitter, energy-draining wrong fights. But a certain amount of healthy struggle is good for organizations. Right fights unleash the creative, productive potential of teams, organizations, and communities.

The Right Fight turns management thinking on its head and shows why leaders in the fast-moving, hyper-competitive marketplaces of the twenty-first century need to foster alignment and orchestrate thoughtful controversy in their organizations to get the best results. Drawing from examples as diverse as Unilever, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Dell, the Clinton administration, and the Katy Independent School System, here is your playbook for picking the right battles and fighting the right fights well.

Publishers Weekly

Business strategists and consultants Joni and Beyer argue that carefully created and managed tensions in the workplace can be a propulsive aid in driving performance. The authors state that alignment—agreement on mission, strategy, and company goals—gets a business only so far; strategically steered conflict can create breakthrough performance, deliver lasting innovation, and groom the next generation of leaders. The authors offer six guiding principles: make sure the fight matters; focus on the future; pursue a noble purpose; keep conflict sport, not war; structure formally, but work informally; and turn pain into gain. Elucidating key points are numerous case studies of successful creative tension (Julie Taymor's production team for the Broadway play The Lion King, Doug Conant's management of Campbell Soup) and failures (Larry Summers's overly aggressive leadership style at Harvard University). The authors also provide a series of questions for managers to determine if the fight is worth pursuing. Joni and Beyer make a convincing and counterintuitive argument that instigating dissent, if done selectively, can produce big results. (Feb.)