9/13/2023 0 Comments 2016 success story books![]() Yet they mainly reiterate common sense.ĭoes anybody think it’s unwise to be lean, nimble, and innovative? Who needs a book to know that rote behavior and fear of uncertainty are not going to take us very far? It’s not startling to learn that organizations that nurture a “culture of commitment” are more productive than organizations that don’t, or that setting ambitious objectives can jump-start innovation. Not dozens or hundreds but thousands of titles like “Smarter Faster Better” are published every year, and they account for a disproportionate percentage of total book sales. There is not much to disagree with here, and that is one of the intriguing things about the genre this book belongs to. Other tweaks on offer in “Smarter Faster Better” include “creating disfluency,” “a bias toward action,” “ SMART goals” versus “stretch goals,” and the concept of “psychological safety.” There are a few mind-sets to avoid as well (side effects may include crashed aircraft and the Yom Kippur War): “cognitive tunneling,” “reactive thinking,” and an exaggerated disposition for “cognitive closure.” Basically, the good stuff boils down to organizational buzzwords like “lean,” “nimble,” “flexible,” “innovative,” and “disruptive.” Negative stuff has to do with mindless routines, mechanical thinking, and the need for certainty. An “innovation broker” brought “West Side Story” together, and “Frozen” became the highest-grossing animation film of all time because of a principle known as “intermediate disturbance.” “Bayesian thinking” transformed the basket case into a winner at cards. “Mental models” helped the pilot land the plane. What enabled the pilot to land the badly damaged plane? How did the academic dropout with anxiety disorder become a champion poker player? What made “West Side Story” and Disney’s “Frozen” into mega-hits? All that was necessary, it turns out, was one key tweak to normal mental functioning or group dynamics. The purpose of the tales is to create entertaining human-interest narratives the purpose of the science is to help the author pick out a replicable feature of those narratives for readers to emulate. The new book, like its predecessor, has a format that’s familiar in contemporary nonfiction: exemplary tales interpolated with a little social and cognitive science. “Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business” (Random House) is Charles Duhigg’s follow-up to his best-selling “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,” which was published in 2012. (There are other ways to measure personality: A psychologist might ask people, for example, whether they engage in specific behaviors such as making lists or showing up early for meetings.Does becoming a more productive worker make you a better human being? Illustration by Richard McGuire Under this new system, grit and all its near and distant cousins-willpower, superego strength, industriousness, and so on-would fall under an umbrella factor known as “conscientiousness.” (The remaining four of the Big Five supertraits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.) Like grit, conscientiousness could be measured with a survey: a set of statements, maybe several hundred, for a person to read and then assign himself a score. By the 1980s and the 1990s, lumpers in psychology had embraced a grand unified theory of personality, which collapsed all the nuances that came before into a set of supertraits-the Big Five. They didn’t always know how their measures related to their colleagues’ or if they might be duplicating one another’s work. But this rampant sowing of new ideas made it hard even for the specialists to find their way within the field.
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