“Detonate will open your eyes to see the processes, policies, and organizational practices that have outlived their usefulness to customers, employees, and investors. Steve and Geoff give us new ways of operating logically that better align with the fast‐changing requirements of our future ‘everything is digital’ world.”
—Lowell McAdam,
Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
“Tuff and Goldbach build a compelling case for why conventional wisdom and ‘best practices’ are the surest way to get average results. If you truly aspire for outstanding leadership results, the words you never want to hear are ‘that's the way we've always done it.’ The authors of this book explain how to ‘blow up’ practices that companies adopt to reduce risk and, in doing so, renew your business and your organization. A must‐read for any business leader!”
—Chip Bergh,
President and CEO, Levi Strauss & Co.
“In a fast‐changing, disruptive world, Detonate provides great insight to how you need to transform the behavior of your organization to innovate and stay competitive. Most organizations are trapped in the pursuit of best practices and risk avoidance. This is a book for leaders.”
—Mark Costa,
Chairman and CEO, Eastman Chemical Company
“Detonate is rooted in the real world of human behavior, unlike so many of the practices that organizations adopt out of risk avoidance and maintain out of shear bureaucratic entropy. Tired of textbook thinking? This book challenges conventional wisdom and provides paradigm‐shifting solutions.”
—Tony Ciepiel,
CEO, Step2 Discovery
“The authors have been helping organizations ‘blow up’ some of their best practices for a long time. They know what they're talking about because they've seen it. They have been able to boil down successfully what they know into a readable and useful volume.”
—Ofra Strauss,
Chairperson of the Board, Strauss Group
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is Available
ISBN 9781119476153 (Hardcover)
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To our families,
Martha, Rider, Quinn, Mason, Hunter, Michelle, and Grayson: Thanks for your patience with us in ways that extend well beyond the project at hand.
Maybe you love your job.
Maybe you hate it.
Either way, at some point, you'll find yourself doing something and thinking, “Why on earth am I doing this; what value can it possibly bring?”
And if you happen to be employed by an established, large business that has proven success in its field with a tried and true model, you likely wonder this with some frequency.
Tens of thousands of people wake up every day to do exactly what the company's forebears did.
Most of the time, people assume that those are just the rules of business by which they must live. If this were just a case of wasted time and some degree of human misery, that would be one thing.
But we believe we have entered an era in which continuing to blindly follow business playbooks may cause an existential threat to the average business.
Detonate is our solution to this problem.