Smart Collaboration

Heavy credentials

Heavy-hitting consultant, Harvard Business School professor and Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession lecturer Heidi K. Gardner presents her impressive credentials on the first page. She wants the reader to understand the multiple perspectives she brings to the issue of collaboration – that of a practicing, peripatetic McKinsey consultant working with clients and colleagues in London, Johannesburg and New York. Plus, she’s a professional who’s gaining a PhD in the study of collaboration and a business professor accustomed to explaining this complex field to students.

Collaboration is a driver of both financial and people-related benefits for firms.Heidi K. Gardner

Her credentials match her writing style: no-nonsense, straightforward, intelligent and knowledgeable. Gardner writes like an expert lecturer, building her argument sentence by sentence in each paragraph and summing up what she just said. This makes her ideas easy to understand and retain. It’s not quite clear whether she intends this book as an ancillary to her lectures, a text for business students, a guide to consulting or a personal brand builder, but whatever her ambitions are, they don’t lessen her credibility or the usefulness of her text.