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Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better,

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“Follow your passion,” we found, can be dangerous advice. Our top performers took a different approach: they
strove to find roles that contributed value to the organization and society, and then matched passion with that
sense of purpose. The matching of passion and purpose, and not passion alone, produced the best results.

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Whenever they could, top performers carefully selected which priorities, tasks, collaborations, team meetings,
committees, analyses, customers, new ideas, steps in a process, and interactions to undertake, and which to
neglect or reject. Yet this more nuanced way of working smart wasn’t just about being selective. The very best
redesigned their work so that they would create the most value (a term we will define in chapter three) and then
they applied intense, targeted efforts in their selected work activities.

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To work smart means to maximize the value of your work by selecting a few activities and applying intense
targeted effort.

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The term “focus” consists of two activities: choosing a few priorities, and then dedicating your efforts toward
excelling at them. Many people prioritize a few items at work, but they don’t obsess—they simply do less.
That’s a mistake.

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We often disparage obsessions in our daily lives, viewing them as dangerous or debilitating. But obsession can
be a productive force.

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The conventional wisdom states that people who work harder and take on more responsibilities accomplish more
and perform better. Countering this view, management experts recommend that people focus by choosing just a
few areas of work.
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Say “no” to your boss: Explain to your boss that adding more to your to-do list will hurt your performance. The
path to greatness isn’t pleasing your boss all the time. It’s saying “no” so that you can apply intense effort to
excel in a few chosen areas.

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As our study suggested, we should evaluate the value of our work by measuring how much others benefit from
it. That’s an outside-in view, because it directs attention to the benefits our work brings to others. The typical
inside-out view, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have completed our tasks and goals,
regardless of whether they produce any benefits.

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The advice “start with goals” when planning an effort, is wrong. We need to start with value, then proceed to
goals. Ask yourself: what benefits do your various work activities produce, really?

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Five Ways to Create Value Main Question Way to Improve Value Example Are You Working on the Right
Things? 1. Less Fluff: Eliminate or reduce existing activities of little value. HP Manager’s report that no one
read; APM Terminals’ “stripping” and weighing trucks. 2. More Right Stuff: Spend more time on existing
activities of high value. Hartmut Goeritz focusing on container throughput. 3. More “Gee, Whiz”: Create new
activities of high value. Goeritz’s “routing service” for shipping companies and freight operators. Are You
Doing the Things Right? 4. Five Star Rating: Find new ways to improve the quality of your chosen activities.
Greg Green changing the quality of teaching and learning by flipping the classroom; Goeritz’s routing service.
5. Faster, Cheaper: Find new ways to do your chosen activities more efficiently. Goeritz’s “Never drive empty”
solution.

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When people redesign, the key is not the degree of change they’re undertaking. Instead, it’s the magnitude of the
value they can create.

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Hunting for pain points is counterintuitive. When we hear people complain, we tend to dismiss them as whiners.
Carmen might have grown to resent all those angry insurance agents. Instead, she went beyond her job
specification and worked with software coders to create a better setup. As annoying as complainers might
sometimes seem, they do us all a service: they identify the pain, for free!
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Effective redesign requires that we loosen the shackles of the familiar and ask why things are the way they are,
and whether there’s a better way. To make these discoveries, I recommend that you start asking some “stupid”
why questions: Why do hotels have a reception desk for check-in? Why do we make presentations filled with
slides? Why do we call Monday morning staff meetings? Why do kids have two months of summer vacation
from school? Why do we have to submit expense reports? Why do patients have to spend two days in a hospital
bed after surgery? Why do we conduct annual performance reviews?

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The “Work Harder” Convention The more hours people work, the better they perform. Great performance is
about delivering on existing goals, tasks, and metrics as defined in one’s job description.

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The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. —William
Pollard

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As our parents and teachers have drilled into us, mastering a skill means repeating it endlessly. Practice makes
perfect, right? Wrong. The secret isn’t repetition. The idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill
is misleading. One year of practice repeated in the same way for ten years doesn’t make perfect. Rather, a
certain kind of practice makes perfect. Professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and his
colleagues have studied how people achieve mastery in music, science, and sports. As Ericsson and Robert Pool
discuss in their book Peak, two factors contribute to mastery: hours of repetition, yes, but more important, what
Ericsson coined deliberate practice. Individuals who progress the most meticulously assess outcomes, solicit
feedback based on known standards of excellence, and strive to correct tiny flaws that the feedback has
uncovered.6 This purposeful and informed way of practicing explains why some learn at a much faster rate than
others.

Yep -- and lines right up w/ @dalecarnegie teachings too

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People in our 5,000-person study who adopted the learning loop performed much better than those who didn’t.9
We created a learning loop scorecard consisting of six items that included phrases such as: “makes changes in an
effort to improve”; “tries out new approaches”; “learns from failures”; “is curious;” “doesn’t believe he/she
knows best”; and “experiments a lot” (see the research appendix for the complete wording of each item). We
found a clear result: effective learners were likely to place 15 points higher in our performance ranking than the
less effective ones.10 Say a salesperson is currently performing in the top 20 percent among all the salespeople
in her company. By mastering the learning loop, she would climb to the top 5 percent, emerging as an
outstanding sales rep.
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Basic Steps in a Learning Loop

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Learning on the job is not about practicing for 10,000 hours; it’s about making sure you perform each loop with
high quality.

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The people in our study who dared to risk a short-term performance dip reaped performance benefits.
Statistically, we found a strong positive association between experimentation and excellent performance.

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As people develop expertise and skill in an activity, they can become very good, even excellent. But then
something happens. They plateau. A large-scale study in North Carolina, for example, showed that teachers
improved from zero to two years of teaching experience, but then stalled.18 Teachers with twenty-seven years of
experience (that’s more than 40,000 hours of practice19) were not much more effective than those with two
years in improving students’ achievement, as measured by their proficiency in English and Math. So much for
the 10,000-hour rule! People seek out new improvements, but only until they reach a certain level of satisfaction.
Then they stop, judging themselves “good enough.” The Nobel laureate in economics Herbert Simon termed this
“satisficing” (a play on words that combined “satisfying” and “sufficing”20). Push Beyond the Stall Point The
Learning Loop Leads to Better Outcomes Than Mindless Repetition, but You Must Push Through the Stall Point

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Top performers don’t rest. They keep learning. Remember Jiro, the sushi chef from chapter two? At age eighty-
five, he was still pushing himself. “All I want to do is make better sushi,” he said in the film. “I do the same
things over and over again, improving bit by bit. Even at my age, after decades of work, I don’t think I have
achieved perfection.”

Key point from @mortenthansen

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The New “Work Smarter” Perspective It isn’t how many hours you practice. It’s how you learn. And that “how”
differs in the workplace from the deliberate practice pursued by athletes and musicians. The best performers at
work implement the learning loop, in which the quality—and not the quantity—of each iteration matters most.

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You can deploy six tactics to implement the learning loop in your job: 1. Carve out just 15 2. Chunk it
3. Measure the “soft” 4. Get nimble feedback, fast 5. Dig the dip 6. Confront the stall point.
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Effective learners break an overarching skill into micro-behaviors: they are small, concrete actions you take on a
daily basis to improve a skill. The action shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to perform and review, and it
should have a clear impact on skill development.

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As the well-known venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted: “The problem is that we do NOT hear from
people who have failed to become successful by doing what they love.”6 It’s possible that passion played a role
in making Oprah successful. But it also may have played a role in preventing countless others from reaching
their full potential.

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Purpose and passion are not the same. Passion is “do what you love,” while purpose is “do what contributes.”
Purpose asks, “What can I give the world?” Passion asks, “What can the world give me?”

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Of the seven factors in this book that predict performance, high levels of both passion and purpose—“P-
squared,” as I call it—was the second most important one, predicting a boost in a person’s percentile rank of 18
points compared with a similar person who had neither passion nor purpose.12 People who had just one of the
two—passion but no purpose, or purpose but no passion—scored lower on performance. The key therefore is to
infuse your work with both passion and purpose, to aim for P-squared.

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Matching Passion and Purpose When People Achieve P-Squared, They Bring More Focused Energy to Their Job
and Perform Better

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Neither company size nor the number of years on the job had much bearing on how much people loved their
work. Our preconceptions about purposeful jobs are inaccurate, too. We think that more mundane or menial jobs
can’t contain purpose, and indeed some research has shown that many people don’t find low-paying service jobs
meaningful.18 But other research has revealed the opposite—that some people can and do derive a sense of
purpose from even the most menial, low-status tasks. As Yale School of Management professor Amy
Wrzesniewski discovered in her study of hospital janitors, some found their jobs highly meaningful. In their
eyes, they weren’t simply cleaning floors. They were caring for patients and helping their families during their
times of need.
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Many people either follow their passion, or they ignore their passion. But as our research shows, the issue of
achieving passion at work is not a matter of “following” or “ignoring,” but rather of “matching.” • In our study,
managers and employees who matched passion and purpose performed far better than those who didn’t. They
were likely to place 18 percentile points higher than those who didn’t in our 5,000-person dataset. • People with
a strong sense of both passion and purpose are more energized, getting more done in each hour of work (and
they don’t work many extra hours).

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I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget
how you made them feel. —Maya Angelou

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When we analyzed our case studies, I was struck by how the best performers went beyond rational arguments
and adopted various tactics to advocate for their projects. I discovered that the best advocates—what I call
forceful champions—effectively pursued their goals at work by mastering two skills to gain the support of other
people. They inspired others by evoking emotions, and they circumvented resistance by deploying “smart grit.”

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To inspire people and gain their support, line up high-arousal emotions on your side—make them mad and
fearful about the present, and joyful and excited about your proposed future goal. The chart “Lining Up
Emotions in the Right Ways” lists high-arousal emotions that you will want to provoke when persuading others
to follow your lead.

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The tactics of lining up emotions properly, showing (and not just telling), and making people feel purpose enable
you to inspire people so that they will support your efforts. Everyone can use these tactics; you don’t have to
have a charismatic personality to inspire colleagues at work.

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Grit at work is not about putting your head down and bulldozing through successive walls of resistance. Smart
grit involves not only persevering but also taking into account the perspective of people you’re trying to
influence and devising tactics that will win them over.

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Forceful champions use a variety of behaviors to arouse emotions and inspire coworkers to support their efforts:
• They make people angry about today and excited for tomorrow. • They show and don’t just tell, using striking
 photos and demos to evoke intense emotions. • They make people feel purpose, connecting daily tedious work to
a grander purpose.

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Based on our interviews, I tried to discern the unspoken rules—social scientists call them “implicit norms”—for
having a good fight at Reckitt Benckiser. I came up with the following list: • Show up to every meeting 100
percent prepared. • Craft an opinion and deliver it with conviction (and data). • Stay open to others’ ideas, not
just your own. • Let the best argument win, even if it isn’t yours (and often it isn’t). • Feel free to stand up and
shout, but never make the argument personal. • Always listen—really listen—to minority views. • Never pursue
consensus for its own sake.

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The best performers advocate properly: They craft an opinion, argue their case with vigor, outline its weaknesses
and assumptions, listen to other points of view, debate the issues, and change their mind if warranted. (See the
sidebar for tips for debating and listening drawn from my conversations with hundreds of managers and
employees.)

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To have a productive fight in meetings, pursue the following strategies, either as leader or participant:
• Maximize diversity, not talent • Make it safe to speak up • Prod the quiet to speak • Show up as an advocate,
not a salesperson • Ask nonleading questions.

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Disciplined collaboration consists of the following five rules: 1. Establish the business case—a compelling
reason—for any proposed collaboration initiative, small or large. If it’s questionable, say no. 2. Craft a unifying
goal that excites people, so that they prioritize this project. 3. Reward people for collaboration results, not
activities. 4. Commit full resources—time, skills, and money—to the collaboration. If you can’t obtain those
resources, narrow its scope or kill it. 5. Tailor trust boosters—quickly—to specific trust problems in the
partnership.

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The Mayo Clinic defines job burnout as a “special type of job stress—a state of physical, emotional or mental
exhaustion combined with doubts about your competence and the value of your work.”