A useful reminder of what we probably all already know - and a useful check in for our own work habits. The concise summaries at the end of the chapter were good and I'd recommend starting there, then reading the chapter if you want to explore in more depth.

Well researched! Great fundamental tips to integrate into your life. I would highly recommend this to anyone looking to increase their performance habits. A great way to see how to be at your best in both home life and work life.

This book asks some important questions, why do some people perform better than others with comparable skills, why do some deliver higher quality work and use less time.? These important questions and it makes for an interesting book with a number of surprising and interesting findings. Overall, I found a lot of the conclusions could be used directly to improve my work output, both in terms of quality and speed and also how I can improve upon my habits outside of work.
The only detractor for me was the fact that the book is very scientific in its approach and the roughly last 20% was used for references, bibliography and such.

After reviewing a similar style book (The Power of Moments), I was approached to review a digital copy of Great at Work. Right from the start, I found Great at Work easy to understand and highly relatable. Though I work in a service role in higher education, and the examples are more product oriented, I still found the ideas and stories presented in the book relevant. After only reading a few chapters, I could tell there were many ideas applicable to my approach to work, so I went out and bought the hard cover. The one concept that impacted me the most is the idea to do less and obsess. I have a tendency at times, to take on too much and spread myself too thin, which can lead to a result I didn’t want or isn’t good enough. The methodology in the book reminded me to get back to basics, become an expert, and produce high quality content. I keep the book at my office for quick reference and am excited about using the principles Hansen suggests.

This book, while densely-packed with information and not a quick read, has lots of terrific advice for both those starting out in the work world and those who have years of experience. With actionable tips and advice on applying the recommendations in the book, this is a practical manual derived from research into the habits and strategies that actually help you become "great at work". Highly recommended!

The objective of this book is to guide the reader in achieving more by doing less. This guidance is based on 5 years of research and has resulted in seven work smarter practices. There is a lot of common sense material for the reader to absorb and put into practice. Ultimately it is likely that he or she will focus on one or two favourites that may prove to be most beneficial. After all, who wouldn't want to adopt the principle of "do less then obsess".
The content of the book is well structured and easy to read. There are sufficient practical examples of how the principles will improve the reader's opportunity to achieve their goals. As with all books in this genre, actions will determine the real value of the author's advice.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better and Achieve More by Morten Hansen

This is an unusual read for me as I generally stick to fiction and when I do branch out to nonfiction it tends to be memoir not business/self-help. That said, I enjoyed this book immensely and gained a lot of insight into peak performance.

Thank you to Net Galley and to Simon and Schuster for providing me with an advance copy of this title and my apologies for the delay in providing my honest review … this one came out at the end of January.

Hansen is a management professor at UC Berkeley and was coauthor of the bestseller Great by Choice. Working with Jim Collins, Hansen studied companies, specifically what makes certain companies great. But he then became interested in individual performance and “launched one of the most comprehensive research projects ever undertaken on individual performance at work”, in other words what accounts for individual greatness?

Hansen came up with seven “work smart” practices that his research shows accounts for a substantial portion of individual performance, i.e. performing at our highest level at work and achieving satisfaction. The first four relate to mastering one’s own work and the other three concern mastering how one works with others.

The most interesting to me, and the one Hansen says affects performance the most, basically clarifies that old axiom “work smarter, not harder”. He describes it as “do less then obsess”. He starts with the obvious, we need to choose our priorities carefully and then focus on those things and avoid distraction. But he takes it a step further.

“Once they had focused on a few priorities, they obsessed over those tasks to produce quality work. That extreme dedication to their priorities created extraordinary results. … Choice is only half of the equation— you also need to obsess.”

The book is very well researched, well written and easy to follow. The principles are sound and definitely tweak some of the common place productivity tips we've heard over the years. If you’re interested in performing better at work or leading people to better performance this would be a great read.

Its not everyday that someone accepts others work better than theirs. If your author does that, you are in good hands. Its probably this radical self-candor that hooks and connects the reader with Morten T Hansen, author of 'Great at Work'.

We put a lot of effort into our work. Is there a better way to make that effort go further like the Google's Larry Page gospel of 10x
Hansen has chosen job design characteristics, skill development, motivation and relational dimensions (with whom and how a person interacts) as  'work smart' factors for his survey. Skill development and motivation is something that we talked a lot about in the Managerial Leadership & productivity course in MBA.  Work scope practice, value creation, quality learning, inner motivation, advocacy, rigorous teamwork and disciplined collaboration were found to be the magical words for increased performance.

Amundsen's success and Scott's failure. The refinement of this study highlights the obsess of the 'do less and then obsess' in how Amundsen chose the 'very best'. To understand the obsession of doing something well, you have to watch Jiro dreams of sushi
10000 hours has been challenged many times. For the general public, it is good to know that you can reach perfection faster by incorporating feedback into the loop.
P-squared of Matching passion and purpose can be taken further to Ikigai
or Climb the Purpose Pyramid as shown in the book.

Achievement passion, creative passion, People passion, Learning passion and Competence passion are good buckets when you are trying to resolve what you enjoy most about a work.

Hansen is a collaboration expert as the author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results. Understanding of Neuroscience can be a great tool for managers in decision making as evidenced in courses offered by many top  universities. Using Forceful Champion tactics and high-arousal emotions can make you an effective leader.
To make meetings more effective, Hansen's Fight & Unite is a great way of fostering collaboration. The 2x2 matrix of Good fight Vs Unity can show if you fall into Group think, Anarchy or Fight & Undermine.

As a semi-conductor professional, I was excited to learn about the collaboration process at Agilent technologies.

Epilogue

"Join a training workshop to fuel your passion for personal growth" - Morten T Hansen.

Lorenza Pasetti's and Padman's grit is inspiring.

Once you use the smart practices mentioned in the book, you carve time which you can use for achieving work-life balance.

You must have hear of and heeded to find an alternative route to work. While that involved changing your commute, why not find an alternative route of working?

Easy to read and informative, Hansen breaks down the myth that to be great you have to overwork yourself and sacrifice parts of your life. I call this book a guide to the "strategic hussle". While targeted for corporate environments there's nothing that doesn't equally apply to entrepreneurs.
My favorite chapter was "Don't Just Learn, Loop". Deliberate practice is helpful but very hard to do in an environment devoid of daily feedback so Hansen suggests using what he calls "the learning loop". Spending a few minutes each day just learning, seeing meetings and presentations as learning opportunities, and getting feedback daily are some of the key concepts. Hansen outlines 6 tactics to help workers implement this method which resulted in a 15 points higher in a performance ranking.
All in all, this is a very easy to understand and put to practical use book. While some of the concepts may be familiar, I enjoyed this author's approach and examples.
Thanks to NetGalley for a reviewer copy!

GREAT AT WORK

Extracting exceptional performance from people, let alone oneself, is a tough nut to crack. In his book Great at Work: How Top Performers Work Less and Achieve More , management professor Morten Hansen shares insights from his research on the subject, in the process developing a framework with wide-reaching application.

As can be gleaned from the title, it may be said that Hansen’s point of departure is the issue of efficiency. As recounted in the book, his interest was to find out why certain people could accomplish more than others given the same amount of time. This led him to design and launch what he describes as “one of the most comprehensive research projects ever undertaken on individual performance at work:” a statistical analysis of the work practices of 5,000 managers and employees from fifteen industry sectors and across twenty-two job functions.

From the study, Hansen identifies seven “work smarter” practices that appear to be common among top performers. “To work smart,” he explains, “means to maximize the value of your work by selecting a few activities and applying intense targeted effort.”

The first four work smarter practices involve mastering your own work:

-Choosing to concentrate on a few areas, then obsessing on those areas.
-Redesigning your work, and occasionally breaking from convention, to deliver exceptional value.
-Ensuring that there is an iterative learning process in place.
-Matching passion with a sense of purpose.

The final three involve mastering working with others:

-Being forceful champions capable of inspiring others to join their cause while at the same time being flexible to adjust in the face of new circumstances.
-Encouraging individual diversity without compromising team unity.
-Encouraging disciplined collaboration rather than collaboration for collaboration’s sake.

From the outside looking in these might seem obvious, and indeed there are management books aplenty that speak of the value such practices have in and of themselves. Yet it’s important to bear in mind that Hansen identified these seven work smarter practices after crunching the data generated from his study. Hence, there’s something to be said about the empirical evidence supporting them, which is why Great at Work should appeal to management professionals of all stripes.

A very good exploration of how to work smarter. https://t.co/Qo89EAp8tY

GREAT AT WORK by Morten T. Hansen came to my attention a couple of weeks ago due to a feature article in The Wall Street Journal. There, Hansen had written "The Key to Success? Doing Less" and I was intrigued by his simple premise: that most top performers accept fewer tasks and then obsess over them. A professor of management at the University of California, Berkeley, Hansen has developed the idea based on a five year study involving more than 5000 managers and employees. In fact, he lists "Seven Work Smarter Practices" in his new book and another excerpt appeared recently in Time magazine where he discusses happiness, work-life balance and quality of life. GREAT AT WORK is very readable and will be of interest to both our Business and Psych classes, given its discussion of creating value, learning loops, tying passion with purpose, grit, teamwork and collaboration. In fact, it seems that this intriguing text could be a candidate for a one school-one book type read – certainly it's of interest to teachers and administrators, with possible application to students' time management practices, too.

Links included in live post:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-succeed-in-business-do-less-1515770816
http://time.com/money/5107956/i-asked-5000-people-how-they-stay-passionate-at-work-heres-what-i-found/

The author studied 5,000 workers to create the "seven smart practices". These seven practices will help guide you to become a great worker, if you put them into practice

There are certainly a few good nuggets in here (Do less, then Obsess). However, I did not find this volume as insightful as Good to Great. The anecdotes were lengthy and some did not seem to directly illustrate the points at hand. The first third of the book felt the most valuable. I think there was a lot of ground being covered.

You can perform exceptionally well and still have plenty of time to do things you love other than work, like being with your family and friends; being great at work means performing in your job, infusing your work with passion and a strong sense of purpose, and living well, too, according to Morten Hansen in his book Great at Work: How Top Performers Work Less and Achieve More. The book offers conclusions on what it means to “work smart”, drawn from a study of 5,000 managers and employees.
Out of the seven “work smart” practices identified in the study, the one which had the highest correlation with high work performance was “do less then obsess”. There is plenty of conventional wisdom about the importance of focusing on a few important things, but that in itself is not sufficient; it is necessary, having selected a few important things to prioritise, that you obsess over your chosen area of focus to excel.
The book goes on to describe the other six key practices associated with high performance at work. The topic is an important one, and the study appears to have been conducted in a carefully controlled and well-validated manner. I found the author’s advice to be fairly persuasive, although many of the recommended practices seem to be a re-mix of advice given by others and common sense, rather than completely new ideas.

In GREAT AT WORK, Professor Morten Hansen reveals the results of his extensive research study, which began in 2011, and examined the activity of 5,000 workers. The author was trying to figure out exactly which factors contributed to one being an especially superior worker. The researchers whittled down the factors to just seven "Smart Practices." These seven factors, as a whole explained about 2/3 of what makes someone really effective.

The biggest factor leading to superior performance is called "Do Less, then Obsess." Great performers figure out what to NOT do. This means "Shaving away unnecessary tasks" like meetings, procedures, and useless metrics.

Perhaps my favorite section is the large chapter on the "Learning Loop." Here's the key: Spend a little time each day improving your skills. To not be overwhelmed, just "pick one and only one skill at a time to develop it." The author mentions the "10,000 hour" rule (popularized in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell), but cautions the reader that it's not just practice of any time--it must be deliberative, focused practice.

Along with the research findings, the book includes lots of anecdotes of people who (mostly) exemplified the desired traits--but not all the stories are good ones. There is one especially sad account of one man who wanted to live his dream, but ended up losing all his money.

So all in all, I found GREAT AT WORK to be a valuable book, with lots of practical findings. I was especially interested to find that the current management fad of "collaboration" tends to reduce the effectiveness of superior employees.

The author does something really smart in this book--he includes the key points at the end of each chapter. This makes it really easy for the reader to review the main points. Professor Hansen labels the dumb idea the "Work Harder Convention," and his good ideas the "Work Smarter Perspective."


Advance Review Copy courtesy of the publisher.

The true value of this book will come out once one follow through all the advice given by the authors. The insights on this book on how to be great at work are helpful to me as an individual.

I would recommend this to every one who is considering to become excellent every day at work and in life as well.

This is an entertaining read that can help define a framework and execution tactics geared towards improved performance (primary setting is corporate, and perhaps even Western corporates). The core concepts are not new – and oftentimes, it seems like a generous repackaging of concepts. Books such as High Performance Habits, Work Smarter not Harder, and the Talent Code have taken a similar approach in arguing (in their own unique ways) that passion alone is insufficient, quantity of practice does not guarantee success, etc. The underlying tactics, on the other hand, are discussed in greater detail in the pop-psych genre in books such as Contagious, Grit, etc. A reader shouldn’t expect anything dramatically new in terms of insights, but sometimes the same concepts presented differently may better resonate with readers.

The primary value of the book is not in the core concepts or tactics but in its repurposing them to explain performance. Leveraging their extensive (US-based) survey that helped delineate key features of high performers, the authors provide an interesting framework to think through how to improve performance. A reader may appreciate that approach since it may be more relatable to the primary target audience of corporate America careerists.
One has to take cherrypicked examples in stride, For example, in a section debating the role of passion in performance, the authors manage to cite many examples where passion led people to failure (but not any counter-examples to their hypothesis – there is no statistically feasible way to assume that those two groups are equal in size or that the reasons for their failures can be attributed to just that one thing the authors are focused on. This is a significant drawback in the narrative. Added to that, the authors are sometimes generous with their adjectives (“profound”) when they state their conclusion and follow-up with statements that are more common-sensical.

The breezy narrative style, references to other non-academic work, and well thought out chapter summaries make this a good read, though it may not offer a reader familiar with this genre anything new. 3.5*

Many people assume that a company’s top performers are often those who are working all-possible hours, working their metaphorical tail off and achieving a lot in the process. The reality can be different, and often those who have achieved ‘greatness’ at work are working less, but better. This book shows you how this can be achieved.

The core of this book and its message is built on extensive research and observation of over 5,000 managers and front-line employees, conducted over five years. You might argue that it is based around, or confirms, existing preconceptions that focussed, quality work can achieve more in less time than the opposite that is often seen as the norm, viewed often as a ‘badge of honour’ or ‘badge of war’. This may be obvious and true, but the ‘how’ (is it achieved) part is the possibly unanswered bit. The author brings this research to light and makes it actionable through his so-called seven ‘work smarter’ practices that are said to be applicable to any business sector and can be utilised by anyone.  Application, rather than special knowledge, is the key.

Accompanying information about the individual practices are mini case-studies, taken from the research to highlight matters through a real-world lens, such as a Japanese sushi chef, whose simple preparation has led to his restaurant (hidden away under a subway station underpass) being awarded three Michelin stars. It was enjoyable and informative, with each chapter concerning one specific ‘work smarter’ practice that is concluded with the means to self-evaluate your own performance, strengths and weaknesses. Once you know yourself better, the packaged advice can help you find a personal route to this effective, credible success.

It seemed to be a good package, even if you don’t consider you are so ineffective or otherwise in need of change. We can all do with a bit of polishing to what we do, and if we are as-perfect as we believe, what’s the harm in checking out an otherwise credible book to get confirmation that we cannot improve on perfection (no matter how delusional we may, in fact, be). The book’s price is more than reasonable for what you get. It is something you may consult on many occasions and even after any analysis and ‘remedial work’ that may be necessarily, there is a good chance that you will dip back into it and find a different interpretation or nugget to extract for future use.

It is definitely worthy of closer inspection, whether you are a boss/manager looking to inspire your staff better, or a ‘humble worker’ wanting to maximise your work effect whilst minimising your presence at work!

Great at Work, written by Morten Hansen and published by Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781476765624. YYYYY

Written by the same co-author of Good to Great, this book is good but not as good as Good to Great. While it's conclusions seem to be backed up by solid research, that research centers around only a single large study, and the stories used to illustrate the study's conclusions, seem a little too convenient in terms of their alignment with the conclusions. Nevertheless, the conclusions seem fairly insightful and somewhat counter-intuitive, The stories do provide insight into why the counter-intuitive conclusions make sense.