As One

Most of us live in a world where people cooperate about as often as they clash, and work together about as often as they compete. Even so, what we understand about how groups behave collectively remains surprisingly limited. Many leaders were raised on command-and-control management and are finding that it rarely wins real engagement. Management writers have answered by announcing a participatory alternative, but As One asks why collective behavior should be reduced to just two options. The book grows out of a two-year global research initiative at Deloitte, the As One project, which set out to examine what makes collaborations succeed. Its central finding is that there are many different modes of collective behavior, and each of them works well in the right circumstances. From this the authors identify eight archetypes of leaders and followers. Drawing on more than 60 cases of successful collective action, the authors describe the defining traits of each model and explain how to apply them in your own organization. The aim is to give leaders a fresh way to guide their teams and to help those teams reach every goal they have set. The book closes on a larger question: what might people achieve if the power of acting as one could be unlocked on a global scale?