The Way We're Working Isn't Working

Author: Tony Schwartz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451639457
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
This book was previously titled, Be Excellent at Anything. The Way We're Working Isn't Working is one of those rare books with the power to profoundly transform the way we work and live. Demand is exceeding our capacity. The ethic of "more, bigger, faster" exacts a series of silent but pernicious costs at work, undermining our energy, focus, creativity, and passion. Nearly 75 percent of employees around the world feel disengaged at work every day. The Way We're Working Isn't Working offers a groundbreaking approach to reenergizing our lives so we’re both more satisfied and more productive—on the job and off. By integrating multidisciplinary findings from the science of high performance, Tony Schwartz, coauthor of the #1 bestselling The Power of Full Engagement, makes a persuasive case that we’re neglecting the four core needs that energize great performance: sustainability (physical); security (emotional); self-expression (mental); and significance (spiritual). Rather than running like computers at high speeds for long periods, we’re at our best when we pulse rhythmically between expending and regularly renewing energy across each of our four needs. Organizations undermine sustainable high performance by forever seeking to get more out of their people. Instead they should seek systematically to meet their four core needs so they’re freed, fueled, and inspired to bring the best of themselves to work every day. Drawing on extensive work with an extra-ordinary range of organizations, among them Google, Ford, Sony, Ernst & Young, Shell, IBM, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Cleveland Clinic, Schwartz creates a road map for a new way of working. At the individual level, he explains how we can build specific rituals into our daily schedules to balance intense effort with regular renewal; offset emotionally draining experiences with practices that fuel resilience; move between a narrow focus on urgent demands and more strategic, creative thinking; and balance a short-term focus on immediate results with a values-driven commitment to serving the greater good. At the organizational level, he outlines new policies, practices, and cultural messages that Schwartz’s client companies have adopted. The Way We're Working Isn't Working offers individuals, leaders, and organizations a highly practical, proven set of strategies to better manage the relentlessly rising demands we all face in an increasingly complex world.

Be Excellent at Anything

Author: Tony Schwartz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451610262
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Offers strategies for enabling sustainable high performance by systematically investing in employee health and happiness, citing the vulnerabilities of common business practices while offering examples of effective leadership.

Work Won't Love You Back

Author: Sarah Jaffe
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1568589387
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
A deeply-reported examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives. You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love. In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth—the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries—from the unpaid intern, to the overworked teacher, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete—Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work. As Jaffe argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.

The Great Mental Models, Volume 1

Author: Shane Parrish
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593719972
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

What Really Matters

Author: Tony Schwartz
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553374923
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Book Description
At the height of his career as a journalist, Tony Schwartz hit an unexpected wall. Why did success suddenly feel so empty? How could he add richer meaning to his everyday life? What guides could he trust on the road to wisdom? During the next five years his search for answers took him from a meditation retreat in the mountains of Utah to a biofeedback laboratory in Kansas, from a peak-performance workshop at a tennis academy in Florida to a right-brain drawing course in Boston. Blending the hunger of a seeker with a journalist's hard-headed inquiry, he discovered the best teachers and techniques for inner development--and identified the potential pitfalls and false gurus he met along the way. What he found dramatically changed his life. It may change yours as well.

Rework

Author: Jason Fried
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307463761
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses. What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you. With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of "downsizing," and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.

Trust Exercise

Author: Susan Choi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250309883
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Electrifying” (People) • “Masterly” (The Guardian) • “Dramatic and memorable” (The New Yorker) • “Magic” (TIME) • “Ingenious” (The Financial Times) • "A gonzo literary performance” (Entertainment Weekly) • “Rare and splendid” (The Boston Globe) • “Remarkable” (USA Today) • “Delicious” (The New York Times) • “Book groups, meet your next selection" (NPR) In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

The Power of Full Engagement

Author: James E. Loehr
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743226752
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. This fundamental insight has the power to revolutionize the way you live. As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in their groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. Their Full Engagement Training System is grounded in twenty-five years of working with great athletes -- tennis champ Monica Seles and speed-skating gold medalist Dan Jansen, to name just two -- to help them perform more effectively under brutal competitive pressures. Now this powerful, step-by-step program will help you to: · Mobilize four key sources of energy · Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal · Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do · Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully. It provides a clear road map to becoming more physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned -- both on and off the job.

The Artist's Way

Author: Julia Cameron
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101156880
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
"With its gentle affirmations, inspirational quotes, fill-in-the-blank lists and tasks — write yourself a thank-you letter, describe yourself at 80, for example — The Artist’s Way proposes an egalitarian view of creativity: Everyone’s got it."—The New York Times "Morning Pages have become a household name, a shorthand for unlocking your creative potential"—Vogue Over four million copies sold! Since its first publication, The Artist's Way phenomena has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron's novel approach guides readers in uncovering problems areas and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to free up any areas where they might be stuck, opening up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery. The program begins with Cameron’s most vital tools for creative recovery – The Morning Pages, a daily writing ritual of three pages of stream-of-conscious, and The Artist Date, a dedicated block of time to nurture your inner artist. From there, she shares hundreds of exercises, activities, and prompts to help readers thoroughly explore each chapter. She also offers guidance on starting a “Creative Cluster” of fellow artists who will support you in your creative endeavors. A revolutionary program for personal renewal, The Artist's Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

Author: Jason Fried
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0008323453
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Book Description
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the authors of the New York Times bestseller Rework, are back with a manifesto to combat all your modern workplace worries and fears.