A book about how to be more effective as an individual at work (mostly in larger, commercial companies). This is in the tradition of "The effective Executive", just based on a big benchmarking survey.
The real meat of this book is in the Research Appendix. The main part of the book is just fluffing up, or, if you like to think more positively about it, interpreting what the numbers mean and turning them into stories with the help of case-study interviews. So, what were the contributing factors, and their relative impact on productivity and maintaining work-life balance?
The first insight is that doing more hours is not the way to go. Productive output increases steeply up to about 50 hours, then flattens off, and beyond 65 hours it declines. The numbers may be slightly inflated due to self-reporting of higher numbers. This is fully in line with the earlier findings in productivity for software engineers, where net work output also flattened after 50 and declined after 60 hours. That means, added benefit to the work is questionable in exchange for your lifetime after about 50 hours, and negative after about 60 to 65 hours. An insight to live by.
Unfortunately, the study did not evaluate hours worked as one of the factors next to the other practices it promoted, so a direct comparison of impact is not possible. He graded both inputs and productivity output on a scale of 1 to 7. When ignoring the practices, correlation between hours and output was extremely high, with beta coefficient of 0.91 (The beta coefficient is the degree of change in the outcome variable for every 1-unit of change in the predictor variable.). The study was controlled for age, gender, tenure and education. Of those education had the largest impact when seen without the practices, about 0.13, tenure hat about 0.05.
He lumped together various practices into 7 buckets, sometimes mixing two pretty different elements, so it is not always clear which of the elements contributes how much to each.
He also categorized the practices into what (Job Design, Do less, and Disciplined Collaborations), how (Learning Loop), why (Motivation in Passion and Purpose, Do Less then Obsess) and who (social interactions - in Forceful Champion, Fight and Unite).
Here are the buckets in order of impact (once you control for all above including hours):
Do less, then obsess. Focusing on only few goals, and then putting a lot of effort in to get them perfect. (If you just did less, you would not get great results). 0.28
Passion and Purpose. Being passionate about your work allows you to put in the effort and stick with it. While it also meant typically putting in a bit more hours, it foremost meant, putting yourself fully into the hours you work. However, one can be passionate about work that does not create much value, and in spite of all the great effort one does move little (think of most card magicians, or people working on well-meaning but misguided charitable projects). He thus adds another requirement, which is again about focusing on the kinds of work who have the biggest impact and pay off. One could have moved that part in with "Redesign work", which is also about selecting to work on what matters, but unfortunately, it's baked in with passion here, at a combined 0.19. I suspect if you pulled it apart, the passion part by itself would rank lower than the next one:
Disciplined collaboration. Essentially the same thing, as Do Less, with a focus on external partners (from other parts of the business or outside of it) - do few collaborations, and put in the effort on them. 0.13. I would lump both of those together. Focusing on being great in just a few areas of excellence, by yourself or with partners, would overall yield 0.41 in lift.
Taking the do less and obsess spirit to heart here, we can stop. Lets just focus on focusing and experimenting in the area of focus, and we are good. However, for completeness' sake, the list continues:
Forceful Champions. Again this combines two ideas, influencing others (by smart tactics, understanding how they think and what they want, by politics, getting yet others to influence them, by emotional appeal via stories; not by being charming), and grit, not giving up in face of resistance, just keeping at it, until people give in because it is less work then resisting. 0.11
Redesign Work. Reinventing your work or job to enable you to work on the most meaningful thing, instead of just willing a role in an outdated org chart. I think this could be higher if you pull out the purpose part from Passion and Purpose. 0.6
Fight and Unite. This is a charming section about decision making in group settings, where you want to have robust disagreement and diversity to get to the best overall thinking, and then follow with commitment by all to implement the chosen plan. Includes a little gem about meeting culture at Reckitt Benkieser, where they did not leave a meeting until a decision was reached, instead of scheduling another meeting. And a wonderful quote attributed to Cyrus the Great "Diversity in counsel, Unity in command". Unfortunately, contributes only 0.6 to individual greatness.
Do Less (0.22) and Disciplined Collaboration (0.08) were also the best contributors to work-life balance, followed weakly by Redesign, while all the others had slight negative impact here.
The situation looks similar for low burnout, although there Fight was stronger negative, and Passion a pretty strong positive (0.1). The biggest factor for job satisfaction was Redesign, at nearly 0.2 -- clearly when you can define your own job, you tend to like it. Do Less did nothing here, while the social dimensions of Collab and Champion had a positive correlation.
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