David B. Savage’s Break Through To Yes provides the key for real success— collaboration!
—Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers 50 #1 Leadership Thinker in the World and Top 5 Management Thinker 2015.
KIRKUS REVIEW Break Through To Yes: Unlocking the Possible within a Culture of Collaboration
A book thoroughly examines the power of successful collaborations.
Canadian collaboration expert Savage (a contributor to Ready, Aim, Excel, 2012) offers a work that couldn’t be more timely. While it addresses organizational collaboration, this book could be interpreted more broadly as a treatise on building a cooperative culture within families, groups, businesses, and government. In a collection of concise chapters, Savage leads the reader through a discussion of the meaning and value of collaboration. The author supplements his own experiences over more than four decades with extensive quotes from experts and results from surveys that he conducted; in effect, he collaborated far and wide to garner input for this volume. Part One lays the groundwork by first exploring reasons for collaboration, why it fails, and what is required for effective collaboration. Part Two explores “The Discipline of Collaboration,” addressing such issues as why collaboration is misunderstood, how to involve stakeholders, and why the practice demands “opening the mind…opening the heart…and opening the will.” This section also delivers a useful assessment tool to determine the state of an organization’s “collaborative ecosystem.” In Part Three, Savage provides a comprehensive road map via 10 specific steps for implementing organizational collaboration. Beginning with “Step 1: Set Intention and Declare Your Purpose,” and concluding with “Step 10: Make It So: Positively Change the Energy and the Future Together,” the book systematically details each step and then summarizes to facilitate implementation. Part Four (“Break Through”) offers a discussion of circles and teams and explains the rise of the “Chief Collaboration Officer” as a senior position, which, Savage writes, is “the greatest advance in organizational productivity in the knowledge economy.” This engaging volume’s Appendices contain additional worthy information, including quotes from experts (from Bryce Medd/Wealthy Tortoise Financial, British Columbia: “In the financial services realm, if the intention is to create one plan, a roadmap for a client, then only by collaboration can all of the various disciplines come together for the best interest of the client”). The Appendices also include an itemized list of “roadblocks to collaboration,” and vital lessons the author has learned from some less-than-successful collaborative engagement startups. Highly readable, informative, and well-organized, this insightful work acts as a short-form textbook on the best practices in collaboration.
A valuable volume for the senior leader of any group, business, or organization who wants to build a collaborative culture.
A book on Collaborative Leadership must be collaborative. That is why Savage includes the wisdom of over 100 advisors from around the world in Break Through To Yes.
Part One: PART ONE: Why I Believe in the Urgency of Collaboration
PART TWO: The Discipline of Collaboration
PART THREE: The 10 Essential Steps to Collaboration
PART FOUR: Break Through
Appendix A: Wisdom from My Advisers on Why Collaborate
Appendix B: Roadblocks to Collaboration
Appendix C: Wisdom From My Advisors
Appendix D: Collaboration, The Rainforest, and Disruptive Technology
Industry Reviews
David B. Savage’s Break Through To Yes provides the key for real success—collaboration!
—Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers 50 #1 Leadership Thinker in the World
and Top 5 Management Thinker 2015.
Break Through To Yes is an important book for our times. Dave Savage’s powerful tools
will offer all readers renewed relationships and peaceful solutions to perplexing conflicts.
I strongly recommend reading this book and applying Savage’s advice for collaborative
alternatives and “yes” agreements.
—Dr. Joan Goldsmith, co-author of Resolving Conflicts at Work, Ten Strategies for Everyone on the Job, 3rd Edition
If we are to evolve and survive as a species, we need to learn how to collaborate and
resolve conflicts with each other, both personally and globally. Doing so will require us
to build skills in conflict resolution, strengthen our capacity for empathy and compassion,
and recognize that, in the end, there is no “them” and “us,” there is just us. Dave
Savage has written a powerful and insightful book that offers useful techniques in collaboration
and helps us see what we can do to make the world a better place. Read it,
practice it, integrate it into who you are and what you do, and you will begin to bring
that world into existence, from the inside out and the outside in.
—Kenneth Cloke, author of The Dance of Opposites and Conflict Revolution
