Skip to main content

Get Out of Your Own Way

This book, by Robert K. Cooper, was on the library's newly arrived shelf. It's pretty good, although if you read biz books a lot, there's a lot you'll want to skim. Still, the principles he talks about are good to think on.

The subtitle of the book is "the five keys to surpassing everyone's expectations." These keys are:

1. Direction, not motion

2. Focus, not time

3. Capacity, not conformity

4. Energy, not effort

5. Impact, not intentions


Each key has three or four supporting chapters that talk about subprinciples. Some things that I identified with from key one is that a) "good and great are the enemies of possible," a quote Cooper attributes to his grandfather. It's pretty self-explanatory though. The other thing
is he talks about "what's automatic, accelerates." Basically, if you can put effort into something until it becomes automatic, you've won the battle. So focus resources on issues and behaviors that will eventually run themselves, and thus produce payouts. He makes this point very well, so I would suggest if you're curious about that to get the book.

Under key two, I really liked the idea of "emphasizing the right moments, not the clock." Although I love my current position and I have a great deal of freedom, those around me are not always as fortunate. They seem to have employers who don't get this point at all. People have pent-up frustration about not being able to apply this principle in their paid employment. The visionary in me says watch out for this issue, because we will see problems with it in the future.

For key three (capacity, not conformity) I want to underline the point that "constructive discontent drives growth." In the literature, the need to accept change is a yawn-making bore at this point. However, the concept of "constructive discontent" is a, if not the, causal force behind this change. So, to quote scripture, we can "act or be acted upon."

Keys four and five are pretty self-explanatory.

I did enjoy the book, which helped me to articulate some of my personal philosophy and things I've observed to work.



In the mail: We've Always Done it That Way: 101 Things about Associations We Must Change

Popular posts from this blog

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of ...

Managing the Nonprofit Organization (Part Three)

1. What is the bottom line when there is no bottom line? Businesses as a default can rely on profit as an effectiveness measure. Nonprofits cannot use this concrete measure meaningfully. There are many different ways of looking at measurements that can serve as bottom lines of sorts, but the trick is to pick the right measurement to look at. And that can change over time, so it needs to be incorporated into the strategic planning (or whatever you want to call it) process. Nonprofits have many different customers which all need to be pleased to differing degrees. Drucker talks about the difficulty nonprofits have abandoning lost causes. Nonprofits have to distinguish between moral causes and economic causes. A moral cause is an absolute good. Preachers have been thundering against fornication for five thousand years. Results, alas, have been nil, but that only proves how deeply entrenched evil is. The absence of results indicates only that efforts have to be increased. This is the essen...

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.