Fit to Compete

Acknowledgments

The findings in this book can be credited to the collaboration between leaders who employed SFP, their people, and scholar-consultants. The leaders pioneered by employing SFP, a counterconventional method. The scholar-consultants brought knowledge and principles for solving the problem and facilitated implementation of SFP. The conclusions in this book about the role of honest conversations in changing an organizational system came from this collaboration. This book is therefore the product of a collaboration of many people in a variety of organizations. I am deeply grateful to all of them; I could not have written it without their help.

The collaborative inquiry began in 1988, when Ray Gilmartin, CEO of Becton Dickinson (BD), ...