Shop

By the winners of the Association for Talent Development’s 2022 Thought Leader award!

Prove your effectiveness to anyone—and achieve professional success—by adopting the same ROI methods and metrics that leading companies use.

In an era of evidence-based inquiry, people need to be able to demonstrate the value of their projects credibly. But how do you do that when there isn’t an obvious measure connected to the project, like increased sales?

In their new book Patti and Jack Phillips, the cofounders of ROI Institute, show how you can adopt the same methodology used by more than 6,000 organizations in seventy countries to evaluate large institutional initiatives. By following their six-step process, you can build a case for any project, process, or intervention, even so-called soft programs. For example, the first case study in the book involves successfully demonstrating the effectiveness of chaplaincy in an intensive care unit.

The authors explain how to link your project to a meaningful business outcome, make sure your project will actually influence that outcome, identify metrics that will show if you’re making progress, collect and analyze data, and use the results to build support.

This book includes extensive examples from a wide range of organizations: businesses, nonprofits, schools, law enforcement, and more. It provides diagnostic tools and supportive practices and even offers advice on how to find a positive interpretation for results that don’t conform to your anticipated outcome.

Answering the question “Is it worth it?” defines the ultimate value of any project. Using the methodology this book presents will keep your work relevant, your career on track, and your organization healthy.

When former New York deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff landed in Toronto, promising a revolution in better living through technology, the locals were starstruck. In 2017 a small parcel of land on the city’s woefully underdeveloped lakeshore was available for development, and with Google co-founder Larry Page and his trusted chairman Eric Schmidt leaning into Sidewalk Labs’ pitch for the long-forsaken property—with Doctoroff as the urban-planning company’s CEO—Sidewalk’s bid crushed the competition.

But as soon as the bid was won, cracks appeared in the partnership between Doctoroff’s team and Waterfront Toronto, the government-sponsored organization behind the contest. There were hundreds more acres of undeveloped former port lands nearby that kept creeping into conversation with Sidewalk, and more questions were emerging than answers about how much the public would actually benefit from the Alphabet-owned company’s vision for the high-tech neighbourhood—and the data it could harvest from the people living there. Alarm bells began ringing in the city’s corridors of power and activism.

To Torontonians accustomed to big promises with little follow-through, the fiasco that unfolded seemed at first like just another city-building sideshow. But the pained battle to reel in the power of Sidewalk Labs became a crucible moment in the worldwide battle for privacy rights and against the extension of Big Tech’s digital might into the physical world around us.

With extensive contacts on all sides of the debacle, O’Kane tells a story of global consequence fought over a small, forgotten parcel of mud and pavement, taking readers from California to New York to Toronto to Berlin and back again. In the tradition of extraordinary boardroom dramas like Bad Blood and Super Pumped, Sideways vividly recreates the corporate drama and epic personalities in this David-and-Goliath battle that signalled to the world that all may not be lost in the effort to contain the rapidly growing power of Big Tech.