Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long by David Rock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This central thesis of this book is summed up perfectly in its own conclusion:
[M]icroscopic changes in brain functioning, made in a hundredth of a second, can sometimes create massive change in people’s lives.
That is what is argues: understand how your brain works, pay attention to what it’s doing, and take control of it to improve your work life.
Not just work, people who master the skills set out in this book are (according to its author at least):
… less stressed, have more fun, have a better relationship with their kids and even appear to have a better sex life. People like this tend to be healthier, contribute more to their communities, and even have longer lives.
The first part of the book is about how to manage your brain to make it easier for you to concentrate, get on with things, be creative and succeed at other essential work tasks. The metaphor he uses is that of a theatre stage. The point being that we can only manage a few actors on stage at the same time, it’s a very limited resource, and we need to tightly control what goes on on the stage (be our own Director), keeping distractions out the way. Rock goes through several chapters explaining techniques that can be learnt to help achieve this.
The latter parts of the book are more interesting, they deal with conflict, social situations, teamwork and change.
The change section is slightly weak – I think there was a lot more he could do with this bit.
He addressed individual change well, if superficially, by rightly suggesting that we turn “constructive performance feedback” (which is usually more destructive than constructive) into “facilitating positive change” (CPF to FPC!) (1). This is fine, I liked this bit, I have long wanted to form a more coherent model of performance feedback, and this will feed into that (hold on to your hats, my views of feedback and performance appraisal will appear on this blog in the future).
The bit on wider change was less good. Earlier in the book he proposed a model called SCARF which represents the factors that the brain seeks: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. If these are absent or threatened, the brain will move away, if these are considered positively, the brain will move toward. Most change is a package of threats across the SCARF model and therefore bound to meet resistance. We need to be far more considerate of SCARF to better effect change.
This is a useful add-in to change management, but I feel he could really pull this whole section out and expand into something much wider, incorporating other change management models and knowledge.
A great book, everyone should read it.
Below is a video of David Rock at Google Tech Talks discussing this book.
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Notes
- One of the best things I ever learnt from the guys at Manager Tools was the idea that feedback was about the future not the past. A huge lesson for managers.
Filed under: Books, Change management, Management
