Getting It Done: How to Lead When You're Not in Charge

Let's face it. In this chaotic world of teams, matrix management, and horizontal organizations, it's tougher than ever to get things done. How do you lead when you're not the one in charge? How can you be effective when joint action is needed? You need an edge in order to reach solutions and effectively work with others.

Getting It DONE is your edge.

Cowritten by Roger Fisher, an acknowledged authority on negotiation, Getting It DONE is the book to help you make things happen when you're not the boss. Fisher is the man who redefined the way the world negotiates with his megabestseller Getting to YES. Now he has teamed up with management consultant Alan Sharp to move beyond negotiation and give us the definitive book on collaboration.

Introducing the technique of lateral leadership, Fisher and Sharp take collaboration to the next level and offer surefire ways to help anyone get better results from coworkers. Gleaned from their decades of experience as negotiators, mediators, and consultants to organizations, Getting It DONE gives you the practical tools you need to influence your peers and bosses and get the results you seek.

Getting It DONE explains how you can best help a group formulate a clear vision of the results they want, suggest a course of action that you can all implement, and learn from past experiences. It describes how to ask questions effectively, offer ideas that will be heard, and influence the actions of others through your own behavior. The invaluable skills of lateral leadership enable you to achieve the ultimate goal--successful collaboration:

• Diagnose: identify the causes of a problem in order to solve it

• Prescribe: create an approach that deals effectively with differences

• Lead: engage others to implement the plan

A simple guide with profound impact, Getting It DONE will help people effectively manage themselves and others well into the twenty-first century.

Alan Sharp has been a senior manager in the eletronics and chemical industries. He is now a management consultant based in England and a director of Coverdale Scanas, a Danish consultancy firm. He has trained many top executives in business and governmental agencies in building effective teams.