John Doerr was an early OKR practitioner and has spent much of his life enabling organizations to use OKRs to reach dramatic levels of success. This book is his effort to make that work available to a wider audience. This was my first reading and I will be going back to the book as a reference for setting my own OKRs.
An interesting approach to focusing your attention on what you care about. The core idea is picking a Highlight for every day. The book provides a framework for why this works and over 80 specific approaches to keeping what you do and where you focus on what you want as opposed to what sucks you in. Along the way, the tips aim towards a healthier, more balanced life. While many of the tips may be familiar to readers of other books on improving focus, the Highlight framework is a little different take. And the authors wrote the book in an informal, conversational style that's fun to read. They are also very cognizant that not every tip will work for everyone, and not doctrinaire about your following every detail exactly as written. They suggest picking specific individual tips to work on, only a couple at once, and trying them and modifying them as needed or moving on if they don't work for you. If you decide you want to implement their tips, you'll need to buy the book so you can keep referring to it as you work on implementing various tips of your choosing. It's very much about making small changes and seeing what they do and building to big change from lots of little changes over time.
Interesting coverage from the person who literally wrote “the” book on how to make games and social media addictive. Good advice and for a fairly directive self-help book, recognition that the problems to be solved fit everyone but not every technique for addressing them will fit everyone. It was definitely useful for his framework on how we get distracted and ways to interrupt those cycles.
An interesting book if a little dated. The basic idea is around getting clarity on organizational mission and goals and asking questions to focus on how to achieve them. There is a big focus on improving the availability and accessibility of information and providing people with appropriate tools to do their jobs.
This is set out as a transformational book. In spite of my resistance to rah-rah self-help books and mnemonics for lists or turning everything into an acronym, the fundamental ideas in this book make a lot of sense and are consistent with other sources I've read for being more energized and successful at reaching goals and having higher energy levels. I can't answer transformative since I've only done one day but so far I'm pleased.
As horrific as it is to have Trump as President, Klein shows how his election is part of the pattern of corporate dominance of the governing of the country, going back many years. This is a highly enlightening analysis. She also relates the shock politics (get everyone focused on a crisis, then make the changes to benefit corporations and the rich) currently used to past uses of these techniques. While the section on what to do is uplifting and hopeful, it leaves a lot yet to be figured out. Passionate leadership to harness people to take back their government is needed and no one seems to have figured out how to make that happen or stepped up to lead.
While the authors do some justice to the serious side of the topics they are raising, the book has some flaws, in my opinion. It was written in the late 1970s, so it reflects a certain point in time in the history of computers. My objections are unrelated to the inevitable datedness since it is simply a consequence of when it was written. In fact, a number of the predictions they make which seemed far-fetched at the time have come to pass and even be surpassed by futher technological change.
I have two complaints. One is that in attempting to lighten up a fairly serious book, they got way too cutesy with language and too loose in making clever wordplay at the expense of using technical terms properly and precisely.
My second complaint is that in discussing the negative impacts of computers on society, the book turns polemical and even almost hysterical ranting which takes away from the serious issues raised.
An engaging book about eating proper food. The science is sound and the author has done her homework. In spite of some important material, it's an easy read with a tone of blog posts and an informal memoir. Enjoyable and inspirational, especially if you think you should be eating better food and less junk from the supermarket.
This is an excellent biography by a journalist and author who became personal friends with Steve Jobs and had close access to Steve when he was alive and most of the key figures in the history of Apple. Unvarnished and honest but largely sympathetic to his subject, Schlender has richly researched and interviewed Steve Jobs and his inner circle and other industry figures for many years, so he knew Steve Jobs and Apple over most of the period he covers. He writes well and the book is a pleasant read.
This book is a collection of articles reviewing the state of research into self-efficacy in a variety of contexts (see the table of contents below). It's an interesting book, somewhat challenging if you are not a professional or academic in this space.
The takeaway is that perceived self-efficacy, defined by psychologist Albert Bandura as one's belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task can play a major role in how one approaches goals, tasks, and challenges. (Luszczynska, A., & Schwarzer, R. (2005). Social cognitive theory. In M. Conner & P. Norman (Eds.), Predicting health behaviour (2nd ed. rev., pp. 127-169). Buckingham, England: Open University Press. cited in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy).
Each article expands on the specific application of self-efficacy theories (and frequently compares them with other theories used in the application area under discussion) and reviews research and how it supports the theories.
A basic knowledge of statistics is helpful to reading the book since the discussion of research frequently includes the statistical analysis and inferences about causality and magnitude of self-efficacy in the areas of behavior being studied.
It's not a light read but there is a lot of detail about self-efficacy in a wide variety of contexts. Recommended if you are interested in understanding self-efficacy theory in a fairly in-depth psychologically rigorous way. Stay away if you want a fast, summarized introduction with little effort needed to read.
Table of Contents
1 Exercise of personal and collective efficacy in changing societies
2 Life trajectories in changing societies
3 Developmental analysis of control beliefs
4 Impact of family processes on control beliefs
5 Cross-cultural perspectives on self-efficacy
6 Self-efficacy in stressful life transitions
7 Self-efficacy and educational development
8 Self-efficacy in career choice and development
9 Changing risk behaviors and adopting health behaviors: The role of self-efficacy beliefs
10 Self-efficacy and addictive behavior
Excellent book on how we are perceived (and perceive others) and how to improve how and how accurately we are perceived and how to improve the accuracy of our perception of others. While the book is supported by research cited in detail, it's a very accessible read. The author is careful to explain the psychological terms used in the book. I'll be reading it again to move beyond understanding the mechanisms explained to employing some of the suggested approaches to better communication.
An interesting take on using a mix of simplifying life, disconnecting from work in the office and geographic ties and setting up an Internet-based business to take “mini-retirements” during your entire life instead of working and then retiring.
It's an interesting measure of how the world has changed that even the revised 2009 edition seems a bit dated - the concept of telecommuting was still fairly new when the book was originally written - it's been routine for over a decade now.
For those with strong reasons to stay in one place, some of the approaches will work better than others. And while Ferriss advocates for fully following the approach, he acknowledges that it won't fit all readers' situations and recognizes that people will take away pieces from the book as well as jumping in. Regardless, there is lots of specific advice, presented with the expectation that the reader will take the advice as places to start making changes they want to their lives and work.
Personal Kanban is a recognized productivity approach and one I'm experimenting with. I see great potential in Personal Kanban as a tool and technique but I was disappointed with the book, in spite of really wanting to like it. I felt too much time was spent extolling the virtues and benefits of the techniques and not nearly enough describing how to apply Personal Kanban to personal productivity.
As a long time GTD (Getting Things Done) adherent and practitioner, the point where the authors suggested Personal Kanban as an adjunct approach to GTD resonated more for me than a lot of the rest of the book. I don't see how to make Personal Kanban work with the numbers of tasks and projects I have to deal with in personal and work life. How to scale the system and work with it were discussed only briefly. These were probably the most important issues to me after the basic description of the two rules and the cards that make up the system.
Should you read this book? I don't want to discourage anyone since it is the seminal work on Personal Kanban. And my responses are only to the book as a reading experience. I have just begun to explore the system, so my response to the book might change on a future re-reading after I've actually used Personal Kanban as a system.
Others may find the approach less annoying than I did and it does introduce the system successfully. Less selling the benefits and more hands on discussion of the system and ways to use it would make this a much stronger book.
This book is a polemic. Styling himself as “the world's leading Google critic” in his dust jacket bio, Scott Cleland certainly has an ax to grind. Sadly, his points about Google's bad side get lost in vitriol, absurd jumps in reasoning in lieu of logic and misinterpretation of many of his sources make the book almost unreadable. It took me multiple tries to get through the book because it is so badly written. It is repetitive enough that the author could have covered the material in half the space or less. There is an attempt at organization in the chapter titles, but the contents of the chapters frequently has nothing to do with the titled subject.
Truly a disappointment of a book and for Mr. Cleland, a missed opportunity to raise some valid concerns over privacy and other societal issues and Google's unique profile as an Internet company. Written in 2011, there is some foresight about the directions the web is taking, but those issues are far from unique to Google. And although there is a wealth of material, key sources like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://eff.org) and others with similar privacy concerns are never mentioned.
Written in a casual style, the author provides a fairly comprehensive and well documented description of the theory and practice of the Paleo diet and lifestyle. The book is marred by what I suppose were intended to be humorous jabs at vegetarians and vegans. Since they are among his targeted audience, this is counterproductive. And the comments are too mean spirited to be funny. A woeful lapse from an otherwise decently written book, designed to try to get folks without a huge tolerance for detailed scientific information past the technical details of why the food choices are what they are and the expected benefits at a fairly detailed chemical and metabolic level. Recipes and menu plans could be stronger - for someone who claims to be a great cook, a number of them are pedestrian. The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain is a more serious treatment and just as easy to read, in my opinion. I don't regret having this book but I don't use it as much as others day to day.