Tl;dr – ★★★★★
Every once in a while, we read a book that defies our Tl;dr concept — a book that we want everyone to read in full. We loved this book.
“It was one of my favorite books I read all year, and that doesn’t mean favorite books I read for work, it means of all the books I read last year, I’d recommend this one.” — Kayl P., Business Manager
What most books about productivity miss is the practical link between what you’re reading & what you’re expected to actually do. From the movies Frozen to airplane crashes, Charles Duhigg helps bridge that gap by providing tons of real-life examples where you can see his concepts in action.
It’s a highly-readable book about productivity.
There are a handful of subjects tackled in Smarter Faster Better including motivation, collaboration, focus, goal setting, decision making, innovation, and absorbing data.
We’ll give you one line summaries for each chapter, with the hope that you’ll find time in your increasingly busy schedule to give the book a chance.
- Motivation — When you’re looking for motivation, do one thing that makes you feel in control. Then, find a way to connect that action to something bigger – connect it to the why.
- Teams — Manage the how and not the who of teams. Create an atmosphere of psychological safety and think about how your choices reveal yourself to the team.
- Focus — Envision what can happen; build mental models. Tell a story about your expectations, so you know where to focus when it comes up in real-life.
- Goal setting — Combine stretch goals with SMART goals (the big, audacious with the reasonable, achievable) to produce the best individual and team performance.
- Managing others — Employees work smarter & better when they believe they have control over decisions and when they can link their work with a higher-order goal. Decision-making should be assigned to those closest to the problem, but trust & innovation will only be fostered if ideas & insights aren’t ignored.
- Decision making — Envision multiple futures, especially futures that contradict each other and you will be more prepared to make wise decisions.
- Innovation — Creativity often results from combining old and tested ideas in new ways. Embrace the stress of the creative process – creativity desperation may be critical as it pushes you to envision your ideas in new ways.
- Absorbing data — When you encounter new information, force yourself to do something with it.
If you want more detail on any of the above, check out our full Tl;dr review below.👇
Chapter 1 – Motivation
One line summary – When you’re looking for motivation, do one thing that makes you feel in control. Then, find a way to connect that action to something bigger – connect it to the why.
- “The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.”
- “Self-motivation… is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.”
Essentially, by explaining the “why” to teams, leaders can motivate employees to motivate themselves towards a larger goal.
Understanding why we are doing things allows us to motivate and make decisions towards “doing” — and instills a sense of ownership and control around our actions.
Chapter 2 – Teams
One line summary – Manage the how and not the who of teams. Create an atmosphere of psychological safety and think about how your choices reveal yourself to the team.
Covers Project Oxygen and Project Aristotle from Google.
- Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shared information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.
- Project Aristotle tried to figure out what made teams effective. The findings were, “we had to manage the how of teams, not the who.”
- “On the best teams… leaders encouraged people to speak up; teammates felt like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another; people said they could suggest ideas without fear of retribution; the culture discouraged people from making harsh judgements.”
- Google published material from the project to help share/workshop their findings – Project summary & Team Effectiveness Discussion Guide
- “It was the norms, not the people, that made teams so smart. The right norms could raise the collective intelligence of mediocre thinkers.”
- Five key norms: (1) Teams need to believe their work is important; (2) teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful; (3) teams need clear goals and defined roles; (4) team members need to know they can depend on one another; (5) teams need psychological safety.
- Psychological safety starts with leadership: What messages are your choices sending?
- Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people?
- Are you modeling listening?
- Are you demonstrating a sensitivity to what people think and feel, or are you letting decisive leadership be an excuse for not paying as close attention as you should?
- “Psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, but it’s more productive over time.”
Chapter 3 – Focus
One line summary – Envision what can happen; build mental models. Tell a story about your expectations, so you know where to focus when it comes up in real-life.
Examines automation and cognitive tunneling. Cognitive tunneling is a psychological state, typical of people concentrating on a demanding task or operating under conditions of stress, in which a single, narrowly defined category of information is attended to and processed.
In other words, cognitive tunneling means we focus on a piece of data, instead of the full story that data is telling together. It can “cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks.”
Automation makes it harder to avoid cognitive tunneling, because we’ve trained ourselves to relax. If we’re then needed to focus immediately, our minds tend to focus on one thing, the most immediate thing – instead of the best thing.
MIT studies into productivity found shared traits among superstars:
- Tended to work on fewer projects than others (a healthy load, but not extraordinary)
- Projects were typically those that required new relationships or demanded new abilities
- Projects were typically in early stages of development (rich in information, learning environments)
- And they all loved to generate theories
- “The superstars were constantly telling stories about what they had seen and heard. They were, in other words, much more prone to generate mental models.”
- By creating mental models, you understand what something should look like. This makes it easy to spot issues, but also allows you to focus and pivot easier as well (because you’re keeping your brain active, not succumbing to automation and cognitive tunneling).
Chapter 4 – Goal Setting
One line summary – Combine stretch goals with SMART goals (the big, audacious with the reasonable, achievable) to produce the best individual and team performance.
- “When we’re overly focused on feeling productive, we become blind to details that should give us pause. It feels good to achieve closure. Sometimes, though, we become unwilling to sacrifice that sensation even when it’s clear we’re making a mistake.”
- Efficiency is good, but it isn’t “god” – even if something is circuitous, we shouldn’t shut that down as the right solution just because it is inefficient.
- The chapter explores GE and the dawn of SMART goals (Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timeline).
- Every employee was required to write up their objectives as SMART goals and send them to their manager for approval. From there, manager & employee would workshop them – then lock them down. Now, the employee had their directives and expectations clearly laid out.
- SMART goals (or OKRs, etc.) allow employees to determine a pathway to success, which helps them achieve it.
- The difference between “hoping something comes true and figuring out how to do it.”
- That said, SMART goals are not the answer to productivity, culture, and vision issues. SMART goals created individually do little to drive growth and innovation org-wide.
- Employees can’t just create SMART goals on their own, accomplish them, and assume it contributes to the company as a whole. They need a higher-order goal to plug into.
- Company-wide vision and objectives are key to successful SMART goals.
- Setting audacious goals
- “Some 400 lab and field studies [show] that specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to ‘do one’s best’.”
- Numerous studies “have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity.”
Chapter 5 – Managing Others
One line summary – Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have control over decisions and when they can link their work with a higher-order goal. Decision-making should be assigned to those closest to the problem, but trust and innovation will only be fostered if ideas and insights aren’t ignored.
We return to the idea of psychological safety in this chapter – and explore how management can influence it in the workplace. This happens through empowering those closest to the work the ability to make mistakes and to make decisions to pivot. It’s a form of agile project management.
- “Every person in an organization has the right to be the company’s top expert at something.”
- “Our basic philosophy was that no one goes to work wanting to suck. If you put people in a position to succeed, they will.”
A Yale study of startups found 5 typical workplace cultures:
- Star Culture – hire the best, let them compete (venture capitalists favored these)
- Engineer Culture – engineers worked as a group, focused on solving problems (think Facebook, fast growth because everyone has the same mindset)
- Bureaucratic & Autocratic Cultures – more traditional structures, top-down management styles
- Commitment Culture – hire for the long-term, use the “family” rhetoric, really focused on culture and getting that right above all else
Commitment companies were the most successful overall (none of the commitment companies studied failed, not one). They were the quickest to go public, had the highest profitability ratios, and tended to be leaner (with fewer middle managers). There were fewer internal rivalries, employees felt loyal and committed, and there was a culture of trust among employees.
The only rules were “everyone had to make suggestions, anyone could declare a time-out if they thought a project was moving in the wrong direction, and the person closest to a problem had primary responsibility for figuring out how to solve it.”
Chapter 6 – Decision Making
One line summary – Envision multiple futures, especially futures that contradict each other and you will be more prepared to make wise decisions.
Duhigg positions future forecasting as a process and tool for decision making.
- “The future isn’t one thing. Rather, it is a multitude of possibilities that often contradict one another until one of them comes true. And those futures can be combined in order for someone to predict which one is more likely to occur. This is probabilistic thinking. It is the ability to hold multiple, conflicting outcomes in your mind and estimate their relative likelihoods.”
Duhigg uses poker playing as an example, saying that losers are “always looking for certainty at the table” while winners are “comfortable admitting to themselves what they don’t know”. The understanding that you can use uncertainty to your benefit provides a huge advantage.
“Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.”
Harnesses failures to your advantage, instead of pushing them out of your mind (which is usually the knee-jerk reaction). “Many successful people…spend an enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures.”
- What went wrong?
- Why did failures happen?
Chapter 7 – Innovation
One line summary – Creativity often results from combining old and tested ideas in new ways. Embrace the stress of the creative process – creativity desperation may be critical as it pushes you to envision your ideas in new ways.
Chapter 7 posits that innovation, or creativity, can be thought of as a troubleshooting process. This description of creativity asserts that it isn’t some sort of divine inspiration, but rather a method of finding new uses for previously used (but successful) ideas.
In a study of academic papers, the most creative usually combined “previously known ideas mixed together in new ways”.
The term “innovation” can seem daunting – or appear to be some sort of innate characteristic or skillset. Duhigg insists, however, that innovation can be learned as a practice.
“This is not creativity born of genius… It is creativity as an import-export business”.
The Creative Process:
- “The best designers are those who ‘have thought more about their experiences than other people’” (quoting Steve Jobs).
- “Remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough…can also blind us to seeing alternatives. It is critical to maintain some distance from what we create. Without self-criticism, without tension, one idea can quickly crowd out competitors.”
- “The creative process is, in fact, a process, something that can be broken down and explained.”
- “Creativity is just problem solving… Once people see it as problem solving, it stops seeming like magic, because it’s not. [Creativity] brokers are just people who pay more attention to what problems look like and how they’ve been solved before.”
Chapter 8 – Absorbing Data
One line summary – When you encounter new information, force yourself to do something with it.
This chapter focuses on how to make data into information – and then how to take that information and turn it into actionable knowledge.
We live in an information-rich world. We’re accosted with so much information on a daily basis that we tend to ignore most of it. “Data can be transformative, but only if people know how to use it.”
In a case study around public school performance, teachers were provided with a ton of data about their students, but “rather than simply receiving information, teachers were forced to engage with it.”
Engaging ultimately allowed teachers to turn data into knowledge, which they could then use when creating lesson plans, assigning homework, and dealing with students that were falling behind.
“There’s a difference between finding an answer and understanding what it means.”
Duhigg talks about testing scenarios in a workplace – tests didn’t have to be successful, but performing test after test causes workers to digest the information they’re consuming differently.
- “Workers became increasingly sensitive to patterns they hadn’t noticed before. They listened more closely.”
- “When you track every call and keep notes and talk about what just happened with the person in the next cubicle, you start paying attention differently,.. You learn to pick up on things.”
“This is how learning occurs. Information gets absorbed almost without our noticing because we’re so engrossed in it.”
Duhigg also explores the “engineering design process” which asks you to define a dilemma, collect data, brainstorm solutions, and debate approaches — before you experiment. This process works in a loop and is a “methodical approach to problem solving”.
The process was designed around the “idea that many problems that seem overwhelming at first can be broken down into smaller pieces, and then solutions tested, again and again, until an insight emerges”.
This reframing allows us to “evaluate our own lives more objectively, to offset the emotions and biases that might otherwise blind us to the lessons embedded in our pasts”.