Book Review:

Great At Work

The idea of a time dividend: what to do with the time you’ll save by applying these 7 principles.

Tie yourself to the mast (like Odysseus): stay focused, don’t allow yourself to be distracted

Doing more tasks increases complexity and the number of inter-relationships; doing one thing brilliantly may be better than several things poorly

The idea of producing excellence through 10,000 hours is wrong: it’s not the repetition, but the learning, that’s crucial

Maximise the use of meetings: use them as a launchpad for ideas, debate and participation from everyone; don’t promote silent consensus, but active debate.  

To be focused, you need to be able to say no more often, and to a wide range of people – including your own manager. What’s crucial is not hierarchy, but performance. So it can help if you are clear with your key stakeholders where your performance boundaries lie. It’s also important to make professional decisions, rather than personal ones, on issues to do with work. For example, any decision about what is on your side of the boundary should be professionally based, rather than ‘what you enjoy’ or ‘what you find interesting’…

A work priority should never be determined by who, but why: it’s not ‘what someone prefers’ but ‘what adds to the bottom line’. So to be really great at your role, you need always to prioritise according to business impact. That might mean over-turning ways of working that are well established, but unhelpful. What’s been a priority in the past might not be one now; prioritising by urgent may need to shift to prioritising by important; and priorities that seem to be down to custom and practice should always be examined. One very clear example in the book is that of meetings. It’s amazing how many people find the meeting to be a real waste of time, and yet they automatically prioritise in in their daily schedule…why? It would be bad enough if one person deliberately chose to prioritise – say – 2 hours of work that was wasteful. But if 20 people attend a 2 hour meeting that is pointless, how on earth should that be a priority? Hansen calls this an extreme form of over-collaboration

This really follows on from the previous point. There is a huge opportunity cost to any wasteful meeting: 20 people wasting time for 2 hours is a total of 40 wasted hours – a week’s worth of waste in one 2 hour period! So the opportunity cost of those 2 hours is 40 hours lost production, the chance to add 40 hour’s worth of work to the bottom line. When Hansen talks as he does in Chapter 3 about ‘Redesign Your Work’ he emphasises the need to add tasks that add value, and remove those that don’t. For many organisations, meetings might be a good place to start.

“The goal of collaboration is not collaboration”. Too often, in Hansen’s research, people were invited to work together ‘because it was a good thing to do’. Ideas such as ‘none of us is as good as all of us’, and more people – more ideas, have a lot of traction. And they CAN be helpful IF appropriately channelled. Bu simply inviting people to collaborate as an end in itself will usually end in failure – because there is no common passion or purpose. The best collaborations are those that are sought by people wanting to or needing to collaborate – and not just because it’s a worthwhile thing to do…