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

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.

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.

Damon Beyer is a senior executive advisor with Booz and Company and a founding member of the Katzenbach Center for organizational innovation, where he consults to senior executives in both the public and private sectors. He is a former partner with McKinsey and company and his work has been published in the Harvard Business Review, the McKinsey Quarterly, and the Oil and Gas Journal. He lives in Houston, Texas, and on Deer Isle, Maine.