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    Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More
    Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More
    Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More
    Audiobook7 hours

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

    Written by Morten T. Hansen

    Narrated by Robert Petkoff

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller
    A Financial Times Business Book of the Month
    Named by The Washington Post as One of the 11 Leadership Books to Read in 2018

    From the New York Times bestselling coauthor of Great by Choice comes an authoritative, practical guide to individual performance—based on analysis from an exhaustive, groundbreaking study.

    Why do some people perform better at work than others? This deceptively simple question continues to confound professionals in all sectors of the workforce. Now, after a unique, five-year study of more than 5,000 managers and employees, Morten Hansen reveals the answers in his “Seven Work Smarter Practices” that can be applied by anyone looking to maximize their time and performance.

    Each of Hansen’s seven practices is highlighted by inspiring stories from individuals in his comprehensive study. You’ll meet a high school principal who engineered a dramatic turnaround of his failing high school; a rural Indian farmer determined to establish a better way of life for women in his village; and a sushi chef, whose simple preparation has led to his restaurant (tucked away under a Tokyo subway station underpass) being awarded the maximum of three Michelin stars. Hansen also explains how the way Alfred Hitchcock filmed Psycho and the 1911 race to become the first explorer to reach the South Pole both illustrate the use of his seven practices (even before they were identified).

    Each chapter contains questions and key insights to allow you to assess your own performance and figure out your work strengths, as well as your weaknesses. Once you understand your individual style, there are mini-quizzes, questionnaires, and clear tips to assist you focus on a strategy to become a more productive worker. Extensive, accessible, and friendly, Great at Work will help you achieve more by working less, backed by unprecedented statistical analysis.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJan 30, 2018
    ISBN9781508239246
    Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More
    Author

    Morten T. Hansen

    Morten T. Hansen is a management professor at University of California, Berkeley. He is the coauthor (with Jim Collins) of the New York Times bestseller Great by Choice and the author of the highly acclaimed Collaboration and Great at Work. Formerly a professor at Harvard Business School and INSEAD (France), professor Hansen holds a PhD from Stanford Business School, where he was a Fulbright scholar. His academic research has won several prestigious awards, and he is ranked one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. Morten Hansen was also a manager at the Boston Consulting Group, where he advised corporate clients worldwide. Born and raised in Norway, he lives in San Francisco with his wife and two daughters, and he travels the world to give keynotes and help companies and people become great at work.

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    Reviews for Great at Work

    4.5/5

    85 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed the snapshot audio book and I am eagerly looking forward to the full audio book. Great listen!
    • 5/5
      Well written. Great practical tips to boost (work/ personal) productivity.
    • 4/5
      Some good tips for sure, some of it was quite obvious but still helpful to hear it again. I know this book has already made an impact on how I approach my work

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I thought it was a worthwhile listen. Analytically based best practices and advice.
    • 3/5
      Nice advices, but if you usually read the books about innovating work, business and success, you will find it just kind of summary and a set of nice tips
    • 4/5
      Interesting points and well narrated. May need the book to reference.
    • 4/5
      Hansen shares research on 5,000 individuals' performances at work and uses regression analysis on the results to make the case for seven behaviors of top performers.While I have little to nitpick over in terms of the seven principles - which include such behaviors as doing less but focusing on the things you do intensely, creating value in your work, and finding purpose and passion in what you do, to name a few - the execution of the book leaves a little to be desired. Instead of giving me a short list of seven words I could commit to memory, they each sound like a slogan: "Do less, then obsess," "Don't just learn, loop" and "P-Squared" (Passion and Purpose). Each chapter ends with a short outline reiterating the main points that I had just read, making it very repetitive. Hansen tells us in the introduction that these approaches are new, and "working smarter" rather than "harder" (more hours in the work week). This may be true, but in my personal experience a lot of the information was not new, and I thought his constant references to "work harder" mode of thinking worked as a bit of a straw man argument. For example, one study he mentions in particular was the one where 10,000 hours of practice is enough to make you an expert. He argues that you need to learn in a particular way and get a feedback "loop" going, rather than repetition. I've heard the 10,000 hour rule before, and it never would've occurred to me to interpret it in such a stringent way. If I wanted to be an expert concert pianist, I surely wouldn't practice scales for 10,000 hours or I would only get good at scales. Isn't in a given that as I become good at the basics, I would find ways to improve technique and introduce greater complexity as I went along? I would have liked to see less numbers of correlation or percentiles from the study and more concrete ways in which I could put the principles into practice. He also mentions very briefly some differences between men and women in a couple of these practices, and I would have liked to see that developed more. Perhaps because it was mostly based on this one study, that would have been outside of the scope of this book.