Beyond Collaboration Overload
How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being

We all need to collaborate more to create effective organizations and vibrant careers for ourselves. But conventional wisdom on teamwork and collaboration has created too much of the wrong kind of collaboration, which hurts our performance, health, and overall well-being. In Beyond Collaboration Overload, Babson professor Rob Cross solves this paradox by showing how top performers who thrive at work collaborate in a more purposeful way that makes them 18-24% more efficient than their peers. Good collaborators are distinguished by the efficiency and intentionality of their collaboration-not the size of their network or the length of their workday. Through landmark research with more than 300 organizations, in-depth stories, and tools, Beyond Collaboration Overload will coach you to reclaim close to a day a week when you: identify and challenge beliefs that lead you to collaborate too quickly; impose structure in your work to prevent unproductive collaboration; and alter behaviors to create more efficient collaboration. It then outlines how successful people invest this reclaimed time to: cultivate a broad network-not a big one-for innovation and scale; energize others-a strong predictor of high performance; and connect with others to reduce micro-stressors and enhance physical and mental well-being.