It is with pleasure that we announce the placement of Mal O'Connor’s debut book, Your Culture is Your Future, with editor John Mahaney at Perseus's prestigious imprint, Public Affairs. Your Culture is Your Future explores how an organization’s culture can be tapped to turn strategy into action, ultimately increasing opportunities and growth. Mal O'Connor is a principal at CFAR (Center for Applied Research), a management consulting firm focusing on strategy and organizational development. He is a folklorist by training.

Idea Platforms collaborated on the development and creation of the book proposal. Todd Shuster and Jacob Moore of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency placed the book, selling world English rights.

The digital edition of Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas (Harvard Business Review Press) is now available for download! You can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or through Harvard Business Review Press.

Keep an eye out for the print edition, too, which will officially be launched on May 21, 2013!

In advance of the publication of Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas (Harvard Business Review Press 2013), John Butman spoke to the Harvard Business School Association of Boston. Nearly 100 attendees packed the lecture hall at HBS to hear how idea entrepreneurs who have a big, deeply-felt idea successfully create change, build movements, and affect the way people think and behave. A lively question and answer session followed the presentation, enriched by the diverse, multi-disciplinary audience.

A special thanks to Nat Welch, HBS ’79, and Sally Millwood for organizing the event.

For the past four years, John Butman and his IPI team, most notably Anna Weiss, have been developing the book originally titled The Idea Entrepreneurs, which Harvard Business Review Press acquired in the winter of 2010, with Melinda Merino as editor. After much consideration by all involved, along with input gathered through a crowdsourcing tool called All Our Ideas, we have settled on a new title: Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas.

While we continue to use the term “idea entrepreneurs” in the manuscript, the new title sharpens the focus on the people who seek to bring a new idea to a wide audience and the process they use to gain influence for the idea and themselves.

The manuscript received positive reviews from the anonymous peer review panel and has been accepted by the HBRP editorial review board, so we are now working on the final edit, to be delivered to Harvard in early September for publication in spring 2013.