Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity

The examples, real time stories demonstrating the scientific idea the author is delivering is pure perfection, science through your head through storytelling, interesting real-life examples, and not the boring scientific jargon The book covers: Motivation, Teams, Focus, Goal Setting, Managing Others, Decision Making, Innovation and Absorbing Data. This Chapter was exceptionally helpful on a personal level; I used it to update and adapt flow charts to my yearly and monthly plans. On Teams, I was so happy to see it in writing, that is how managing people should be. And it is the ONLY way for success and CONTINUITY “The way business treats workers, was critical to success. No matter how great the product or loyal the customers, things would eventually fall apart unless employees trusted one another.” The studies given are important and interesting, especially the discovery of the importance of norms on the functioning of successful and coherent teams. On Focus, The goal setting chapter was what I needed, I used the additional knowledge, provided though real-life examples and charts. I adapted my yearly and monthly plans to the flow chart sample. On Decision Making, there are certain characteristics you can find about yourself and use for your own personal development and what came to me as number one was the part about probabilistic thinking, it is easily explained with the Good Judgment Project and poker story, really impressive. The innovation process lights a spark in the reader’s head. The notion of creativity and creative people are described as middlemen; they have learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. Many examples from industries are given to emphasize the idea. On Absorbing Data, finally is the ability of our brain to analyze data in modesty and not in abundance, when we surround ourselves by too much data to analyze, we go into a state of information blindness. The example given is an inspiring story of the South Avondale Elementary School. An inspiring story of how data turned into knowledge led to changing the lives of children in a hopeless environment.

I’ve tracked my own personal productivity by one means or another since I was in my teens. I’m now 70. So, I’ve learned a lot along the way. But there’s always more to learn. I picked up Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business to learn more. I read Charles Duhigg’s book on habits when it came out, so I was prepared for something good. This book was better than Habits for me. The introduction includes this quote, which will tell you everything you need to know about the purpose of the book: “Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. It’s a process of learning how to succeed with less stress and struggle. It’s about getting things done without sacrificing everything we care about along the way.” I think the basic definition of productivity is good, but I also like the fact that Duhigg calls it “a process of learning.” That’s how it’s been in my life. Here’s what I liked and didn’t like about the book. What’s in the book After the introduction that sets out the basic purpose, Duhigg moves to eight chapters on key subjects. Let’s look at them one at a time. Chapter one is titled “Motivation.” That’s probably not the most accurate title. I suggest you think of this chapter as about control. For the last couple of decades, we’ve been learning about how important it is for people to feel like they control their surroundings. This chapter will give you some ideas about how to feel more like you’re in control. Chapter two is all about teams. There are two key examples here. One is the example of Saturday Night Live. The other, and the one that’s probably more meaningful for business people, is the results of Google’s research into what makes a successful team. The most important thing here for me is the discussion of psychological safety. Another thing which seems obvious once it’s stated, but which has not been at the forefront for most of my working life. Duhigg titles chapter three “Focus.” He talks about cognitive tunneling and airline disasters. For me, the most interesting part was the discussion of mental models. Mental models have been a feature of a lot of thinking about productivity. You’ll find an excellent discussion of them in Anders Ericsson’s book Peak. Chapter four is all about goal setting. I thought this was the weakest chapter of the book. There’s a lot about GE’s experience with goals and a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of SMART goals. The chapter missed the mark for me, I didn’t identify a takeaway that I could use. Duhigg’s appendix about how he learned to set goals helped, but not enough. “Managing Others” is the title for chapter five. There’s a lot here about some changes in FBI culture that made it more possible for a team to solve a particular kidnapping. It was interesting and helpful. I’d use this chapter as a starting point to apply lean and agile thinking to managing a team. But I suggest that you go to Jeff Sutherland’s book, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time for more details that you can use in your own life and work. Chapter six is about decision-making, specifically about forecasting the future. The primary story is about learning to play poker at a professional level. It’s a good story, but the big learning point here is about what Duhigg calls Bayesian psychology. I learned it back in my college days as Bayesian inference. It’s a way to improve your forecast as you go. There are some great insights here about why so many of us are so bad at forecasting. Duhigg says that chapter seven is about innovation. I guess it is, but for me it was more about how the entire creative process plays out and interacts with the way that individuals get a job done. The core story here is about creating Disney’s “Frozen. This chapter is mostly about the way we structure our human activities to create something new. If that’s innovation, so be it. Now we come to chapter eight. Duhigg titled it “Absorbing Data: Turning Information into Knowledge in Cincinnati’s Public Schools.” That’s true as far as it goes. There’s a belief that if we give people more data and information they can make their lives or their work better. That’s true, but as this chapter points out, that’s only true if people know how to use what they get. That becomes a matter of perception and process. There are two important bits of information in this chapter. The first is about how to structure data so that it’s most likely that people will be able to understand it and use it to make a difference. The second important idea is that process is important. The chapter describes what Duhigg calls the engineering design process, but which I learned in college as simply the engineering process. It describes a structure for analyzing data and prototyping so that you come up with a good result. It’s as effective for analyzing new products as it is for figuring out how to fix a problem with the brakes on a car. It’s also the essence of what is now popularly called “design thinking.” Bottom Line There’s a lot of good stuff in this book. Your best strategy might be to read the introduction then pick a chapter or two that you want to dig into. Later, you can come back and cover the stuff that you missed. Most of the content is five-star-worthy, but there are pockets that are only OK, so I'm giving the book four stars. Even so, it's one of the best I've read this year.

In this book the author takes a detailed look at the habits and practices that improve personal and team performance. What makes this book stand out are the case studies and the scientific research that is explored. He explores motivation, team work, focus, goal setting, managing others, decision making, innovation and absorbing data in new and insightful ways. This book is not a rehash of the valid but often repeated principles of success. It is an investigation into what has been scientifically demonstrated to enhance success. He explores the rebelliousness of a retirement home resident, a successful businessman who suffered a rare form of brain damage that changed his brain’s ability to be motivated teaching us how motivation works in the brain. He looks at what motivation lessons come from the military. What kinds of people make up the ideal team? Should they be alike or diverse? How does diversity in personality types strengthen a team? What have hospitals and airlines learned about team work that can save lives? How does focus, too much or too little, affect performance? What have we learned from aircraft crashes about how focus and cognitive tunneling can cripple decision making in a crisis? What are mental models and how can they be used by anyone to improve focus and analysis of a difficult situation? How did a young woman win the National Poker Championship and what did she know about Bayesian psychology that anyone can take advantage of? What has the business world learned about effective goal setting? How are SMART goals effective and in what ways are they ineffective? What do you have to add to SMART goals to make them more effective? Duhigg provides insight into all these questions and many more. This book will provide you with a unique and provocative analysis into how we can perform smarter, faster and better. What I found useful about this book: Careful analysis of how people perform both on an individual level and as teams has provided us with considerable insight into what works best. While the traditional principles of success remain valid there is more to the story than that. Readability/Writing Quality: The book is very well written and engrossing. It is written as a series of stories that hold attention and teach at the same time. Notes on Author: Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist with the New York Times. He is an author who digs deeply into his subjects. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College. Other Books by This Author: The Power of Habit Related Website: Charlesduhigg.com Three Great Ideas You Can Use: 1. Teams function most effectively when made up of diverse people with different approaches, attitudes and personalities. 2. Goal setting must be a combination of measurable and achievable goals with stretch goals to prevent limited performance. 3. By developing a mental model of what we want to achieve we can avoid cognitive tunneling and achieve more. Get the book here: Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

I am really impressed with Duhigg's book. I thought his Power of Habit was fantastic when I first read it but I'm convinced that this is his masterpiece. It was a quick read. If you're interested in understanding why some peoplehave it all, and others just can't seem to get their acts together, then this book is a must read. I particularly liked his chapter on SMART Goals and setting lofty goals. Oftentimes we either select goals that are one or the other, but not both. Duhigg states you need to have both types. Your SMART goals need to be shorter term goals that can be attained regularly. It's not a matter of putting something on your to-do list then checking it off. It's a matter of challenging yourself to do things that are difficult but possible. The other category of goals are your reach goals0--go ahead... dream a little. He uses the example of the Japanese Bullet trains and how back when they were first created the Japanese elite wanted trains that could go 60 mph and turn a six-hour trip into a three-hour trip. Well, lo-and-behold, they now have trains that go above 120 mph and they have seemingly made travel much more convenient turning that three-hour trip into a 1.5 hour trip. How did this happen? Set really lofty goals. I found him echoing similar words of Jim Collins' "Good to Great" and the B.H.A.Gs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). I'm not going to say more because I do think it's important that everyone get their hands on this book. What Duhigg has put together is another way of bettering the human race by giving us eight simple rules to squeeze the most out of our days.

The book goes over eight highlight traits that make people or organizations the most productive.The word productive is a weird name for me. I always feel it has a connotation of producing output better through innovation, marginal gains through doing smarter, and faster by removing any bottlenecks on the development cycle. The same principles the author describes can also be attributed to progressing our ideas into reality. If anything, the act of advancing ourselves may be the whole grand explanation of why we live in this world. I prefer that term better. As looking into depth on the chapters the author demonstrates, they talk about a general view of different parts of the brain doing some specific stuff. The book may be repetitive to other readers as they are sources they may have read somewhere else. However, it is not about the familiarity but how regularly those concepts emerge within successful individuals and organizations. If they show a pattern, we should pay attention to it. It is a great start for those ideas to be organized with the best stories for someone else later to look those topics in more depth later on. All the chapters interchange hands. There are connections in between. I have a hypothesis after reading and analyzing a lot of similar self-help books and independent research from others. I have a lot of chances that I may have missed something and have the wrong interpretation, but here goes: The first chapter talks about Motivation. Motivation requires not only action but also the synergy of a mental map to address complicated topics. Motivation is hitting the rubber to the road. The chapter indeed does talk about having a grand explanation when doing things. However, formulating a grand explanation is as much motivating as the bias to act. Eventually, the author discusses them within the third chapter as mental maps. Bayesian Thinking of chapter eight is the one that aids in creating those mental maps. Nonetheless, motivation alone is very sketchy. A bias towards action will not do the best Bayesian thinking. It will not focus much on marginal gains. It will instead be motivated to do something else that is more exciting. For simple problems, that works well. For complicated problems, discipline is required. That is what Chapter 4 is all about: the ability to set plans to have an extended focus on mastering a particular set of skills or mental map. Capacity to set closure helps not to be distracted by his motivation on other exciting stuff. We can see all those mental models intertwine and influence together on how we manipulate the content in what we are and believe in which represent the habits that we possess. The rest of the chapters talk mainly challenging obstacles every organization faces. Some examples. Psychological safety is primarily a mix of my analysis of the book Feedback Revolution by Peter Mclaughlin and Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed. However, I think Black Box Thinking discusses better which organizations progress better. It is true psychological safety may make employees happy, but there is no guarantee if they stray away from the original mission statement of the company to fit their needs. Chapter 5 on managing others demonstrates the ability to trust your employees not adding technical debt. If you don't trust them, it adds business debt to the overall business. Missing those target points (business and technical debt) reduces the quality output. This chapter overemphasizes business obligations over technical debts. What matters is to have a balance between the two. Not to be too commanding to the point of accumulating business debt and not too meek that we ignore on maintaining the tasks from accumulating technical debt. Those concepts are described well in the diagram of Executive Paradox by Dabid G Jensen. Great book in overall. I totally recommend it. Another great reference book with strong supporting statements to point out to people.

How can we work in a way that is “smarter, faster and better”? Mr. Duhigg points to the following elements to consider: motivation, teams, focus, goal setting, managing others, decision making, innovation, and absorbing data. He presents his point of view on this in a selection of targeted anecdotes for each topic. He obviously attempts to make these anecdotes as striking as possible so as to make his points memorable. One can, of course, critique the use of anecdotes to communicate conceptual points. The approach has its pros and cons. On the positive side, one often gets exposed as a reader to absorbing and interesting stories, and if the stories are told in such a way as to emphasize the desired point, it can be a very effective device. I felt that Mr. Duhigg’s approach was entertaining. On the educational side, the overall effect was somewhat of lesser value. He tells interesting stories, but the conceptual point he is trying to get across is often lost. However, he is careful to name each of these conceptual elements. For motivation, we have “locus of control”; for teams, it is “psychological safety”; for focus, it is “cognitive tunneling”; for goal setting, it is not just “smart goals”, but also “stretch goals”; for managing others, it is “lean and agile thinking” and a “culture of trust”; for decision making, it is “Bayesian psychology”; for innovation, it is “idea brokers” and “creative desperation”; and for absorbing data, it is “turning information into knowledge”. There are two points about this. First, each concept requires some elaboration and depth of discussion. This can be strained in relying on anecdotes, and I personally felt that Mr. Duhigg did not succeed very well: His anecdotes were not usually focused well enough to provide such depth, and there were side distractions. Second, there are the limitations of these conceptual approaches. Often, circumstances and complexities make these approaches he discusses much less effective than he claims, even with his wisely placed occasional disclaimers. Thus, overall, while I thought the book was entertaining, it proved to be less educational than I would have preferred. It is an extremely easy read, and his points are worth paying some attention to, so I think the book may be worth spending one’s time with because it makes a few interesting points, while not costing a lot of time. On the downside, one must expect more entertainment than depth from this book.

Author, Charles Duhigg, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the New York Times. He has pulled together some very compelling ideas about how to work smarter, faster and better. To improve productivity at both the individual and the corporate level, Duhigg cites 8 critical issues: motivation, teams, focus, goal-setting, managing others, decision-making, innovation and absorbing data. What follows are central ideas from four of these topics. Motivation “Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed,” Duhigg explains. Central to this skill is the belief that we have control over our actions and even our situations. When people take the position that they are in control, they work significantly harder. It is the feeling of having no control that, among other things, saps motivation. General Charles Krulak the commandant of the Marines, introduced this concept as a key to teaching recruits self-motivation. His task was to get trainees to take control of their own choices: “Today we call it teaching ‘a bias toward action,’” he told Duhigg. The final challenge at the end of a Marine boot camp is the gruelling 3-day ‘Crucible’, ending with the ‘Reaper’, the most difficult part of an inconceivably hard challenge. Recruits are advised by their drill instructors to ask each other why they are doing this task, when they feel they cannot go on. If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier. The ‘why’ could be answered - “To become a Marine and build a better life for my family.” Making a chore into a meaningful decision, leads to self-motivation. TEAMS Studies of teams by Amy Edmondson, found that good team norms seemed to be consistently associated with higher productivity. If, for example, making a mistake is held against you, team-members are reluctant to report mistakes. People feel more willing to admit to errors if the manager goes to bat for her people. “We call it ‘psychological safety,’” Edmondson explains. Psychological safety is a “shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.” Psychological safety is the confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up. “It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect, in which people are comfortable being themselves,” she explains. The challenge is to get the benefits of teams by creating psychological safety without losing the capacity for dissent and debate. It requires that the leader models listening and social sensitivity, and insists that each person in the group is given a voice. Leaders should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. No meeting should end until all team members have spoken at least once. People who are upset should be encouraged to express their frustrations, and teammates encouraged to respond in non-judgmental ways. Intergroup conflicts should be resolved by the leader through open discussion. FOCUS How do people and organizations manage their focus? With the plethora of stimuli there is so much to distract one. To illustrate how one key aspect of focus works, Duhigg describes how one nurse can glance at a baby in a crib and see the need to call the emergency team, while another does not see the danger signs. High-level professionals, he explains, hold a picture in their minds of what they expect to see - a healthy baby. A glance alone could indicate that the image isn’t being matched. In the world of work the most productive workers, similarly, hold a picture of their expectations. They can be as small as trying to envision a coming meeting while driving to work, or how a task is to be done. “If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk,” Duhigg explains. To increase focus and avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. Experiments indicate that anyone can learn to habitually construct these mental models. ABSORB DATA The ability to absorb data better is becoming an ever bigger challenge, while at the same time being ever more necessary. Many techniques have been proven to facilitate this learning. One is to force yourself to do something with it. “Write yourself a note explaining what you just learned, or figure out a small way to test an idea, or graph a series of data points onto a piece of paper, or force yourself to explain an idea to a friend,” Duhigg explains. It is the activity that aids learning - listening or reading is not sufficient. In essence, you have to make sense of the information, or you are, metaphorically, putting it in some drawer in your mind, and then ignoring it. If you have been following this column you will recognize many of the concepts Duhigg describes, which are the subject of whole books. The value Duhigg adds is to compile an insightful summary of important ideas, illustrated by engaging narrative drawn from case studies and events. If you haven’t read a book on general management this year, (something every professional manager should do,) I can wholeheartedly recommend ‘Smarter Better Faster’. It is solid, thought-provoking, and has immediately useable insights. Readability Light --+-- Serious Insights High -+--- Low Practical High -+--- Low Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy

Mastering what separates “the merely busy from the genuinely productive” In Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg sets the table: Various advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. “Instead, they often seem to fill o0ur days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity — the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists — rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us…This book is about how to recognize the choices that fuel true productivity…This is a book about how to become smarter, faster, and better at everything you do.” He focuses on — and devotes a separate chapter to — “a handful of key insights” shared by hundreds of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists who kept mentioning the same concepts again and again and again. In this book, he explores “the eight ideas that seem most important to expanding productivity.” Here they are, accompanied by my own annotations: 1. Motivation: Make choices that place you in control of a situation. If empowered, you will speak and act more decisively and accelerate gaining the respect and trust of others. 2. Teams: Manage the [begin italics] how [end italics], not the [begin italics] who [end italics] of teams. Send messages that empower others. Keep in mind this passage from Lao-tse’s Tao Te Ching: "Learn from the people Plan with the people Begin with what they have Build on what they know Of the best leaders When the task is accomplished The people will remark We have done it ourselves." 3. Focus: Envision what will probably happen. What will happen first? Obstacles? How to avoid, pre-empt, or overcome them? 4. Goal Setting: Choose a stretch goal (a BHAG), then break that into sub-goals and develop SMART objectives. 5. Managing Others: Employees work smarter and better when they feel they have the power (see #1) to help make the right decisions about what to be done and how best to do it. They will be more motivated if convinced that others recognize and appreciated what they think, feel, and do. 6. Decision Making: Envision multiple futures as well as their potential implications and possible consequences. Obtain a variety of different (and differing) perspectives from those closest to the situation. Although this 360º process is helpful, you must be prepared to make the given decision. 7. Innovation: Combine new ideas in old ways and old ideas in new ways. Constantly challenge assumptions and premises. If they are sound, they will survive. Incremental innovation makes disruptive innovation even better. 8. Absorbing Data: When encountering new information, do something with it. Write it down. Read it aloud. Formulate Qs that it evokes. Put it to a small test. Ask others “Did you know that…?” Most new information is really unfamiliar information. These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Duhigg’s coverage: o Motivation (Pages 13-21 and 33-47) o U.S. Marine Corps boot camp (22-31) o Teamwork at Google (41-46, 50-51, and 65-68) o Mental Models (88-93, 97-98, 101-102, and 277-279) o Qantas Airways flight 32 and mental models (93-101 and 277-278) o Prelude to Yom Kippur War (103-106 and 109-112) o Stretch goals (125-128) o Frank Janssen (134-139 and 161-165) o Rick Madrid (139-144, 150-151, and 154-155) o James Baron (145-150) o Categories of culture (146-148) o Productivity and control (153-155) o Bayesian psychology (192-193) o How Idea Brokers and Creative Desperation Saved Disney’s Frozen (205-215) o West Side Story (210-212, 216-220, and 223-224) o Information blindness (243-247) o Debt collection (247-252) o Stretch goals paired with SMART goals (274-279) In addition to his lively as well as eloquent narrative, I commend Duhigg on his provision of the most informative annotated notes that I have as yet encountered. I urge everyone who reads this brief commentary to check them out (Pages 293-368). They enliven and enrich his narrative in ways and got an extent that must be experienced to be believed. The best journalists as well as the best leaders are terrific storytellers and that is certainly true of Duhigg. He anchors his reader in hundreds of real-world situations to illustrate key points. Dozens of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists that he interviewed learned valuable lessons with regard to the dos and don’ts of being productive in life and business, especially when under severe duress. I highly recommend Smarter Faster Better as well as Charles Duhigg’s previously published book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, also published by Random House.

I am a fan of Charles Duhigg's „The Power of Habit“ and was really happy when I received „Smarter, Faster, Better“. On about 230 pages, covering eight chapters, the author helps the reader to develop the right habits to be „forced to think, to be forced to go new (and sometimes uncomfortable) ways to become more productive“, as he writes in his introduction. Starting with the development (discovery) of your own motivation, the book also covers how to handle teams, bring focus to your work by setting goals for yourself, but also others, how to make decisions right, supporting innovation and closing on how to absorb (work) with data in a productive way. I liked the layout, especially the subtitles of each chapter, the length of each (sub-)chapter as well as the stories which play always an important role in supporting the topic. Writing style is vivid and engaging, the book comes with an notes section. Language can be easily understood by non-native speakers like me. Definetly a book worth recommending and I am sure, that I will revisit those pages often.

Un superbe livre en anglais, essentiel pour tous les enseignants. Les secrets de la productivite, simplement expliques avec beaucoup des examples.

The main ideas of this book are well explained through examples that are narratively intriguing. This fact augment the penetration of these core concepts and determines that the book is more simple to read. The author is one of the best.

Kitap alisverislerimde saticinin amazon olmasina ozellikle dikkat ediyorum. Satici amazon oldugunda urun orijinal olutor ve iyi durumda teslim ediliyor. Ancak bu kitap kucu bir hasarla teslim edildi. Yinede iade etmedim cunku amazon saticisinda baska kalmamisti.

After reading Duhigg's "The Power of Habit" I went straight to the store and got " Smarter Faster Better". It is a great read, and got me to change 3 things to make myself productive and set my goals higher for what I want to achieve. Highly recommend this book.