Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos

Not all collaboration is smart. Make sure you do it right.Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems—everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinaryexperts can tackle.Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, andcollaborating across these silos is often messy, risky and expensive. Unless you know why you’re collaborating andhow to do it effectively, it may not be smart at all. That’s especially true for partners who have built their reputationsand client rosters independently, not by working with peers.In Smart Collaboration, Heidi K. Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, attractand retain the best talent and gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries.Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor now lecturing at Harvard Law School,has spent over a decade conducting in-depth studies of numerous global professional service firms. Her researchwith clients and the empirical results of her studies demonstrate clearly and convincingly that collaboration pays, forboth professionals and their firms.But Gardner also offers powerful prescriptions for how leaders can foster collaboration, move to higher-margin work,increase client satisfaction, improve lateral hiring, decrease enterprise risk, engage workers to contribute theirutmost, break down silos and boost their bottom line.With case studies and real-world insights, Smart Collaboration delivers an authoritative case for the value ofcollaboration to today’s professionals, their firms and their clients and shows you exactly how to achieve it.

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