Great at Work

This morning at Grandma's I finished reading Morton T. Hansen's well-researched Great at Work, subtitled "How top performers do less, work better and achieve more". Written by a Norwegian who's now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the references all fit my experience. What I am fairly bad at, is reading these great business books and then immediately forgetting what I read and going back to what I was doing before. Ergo I'm memorializing the lessons here to try and ingrain them into my thick skull:

Do less, then obsess This one is obvious, but in practice can be hard because it involves a lot of saying no to things that don't fall within your focus.

Redesign your work Getting meta as Hofstadter would say about the problem can often lead to redefining the problem or even realization that the problem one is solving is the wrong one. Or sometimes there are much more effective methods to solve the problem at hand.

Learn & loop Feedback loops allow for iteration, but setting them up can be hard or impossible in some situations. Don't get into those situations!

Passion & purpose If you love what you do and believe that it serves a good purpose then you have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to excel.

Forceful championing Understand why people oppose the change you support so that you can overcome their opposition. Or go around it.

Fight & unite Open argument leads to better decisions, but argument must be focused toward making a quick decision.

Disciplined collaboration Overcollaboration and undercollaboration are both unproductive. To that end, Hansen sets 3 rules:
1). Established a "why-do-it" case for every proposed collaboration. If it isn't compelling, don't do it and say "no".
2). Craft a unifying goal that excites people so much that they subordinate their own selfish agendas.
3). Reward people for collaboration results, not activities