Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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The book covers a lot of ground through meticulous reporting and deft analysis, presenting a wide range of case studies . . . with insights that apply to the rest of us.” — The Wall Street Journal

Charles Duhigg - Wikipedia Charles Duhigg - Wikipedia

Experiments have shown that people with SMART goals are more likely to seize on the easiest tasks, to become obsessed with finishing projects, and to freeze on priorities once a goal has been set.” Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “creating mental models.” Understanding how people build mental models has become one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology. All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not.To do this, you should implement two management techniques. The first is lean manufacturing. In this ideology, the person who's closest to the problem should have the authority to fix it. When strong ideas take root, they can sometimes crowd out competitors so thoroughly that alternatives can’t prosper.”

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Investigators would later deem Qantas Flight 32 the most damaged Airbus A380 ever to land safely. Multiple pilots would try to re-create de Crespigny’s recovery in simulators and would fail every time. 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 for someone to predict which one is more likely to occur.”

Smarter Faster Better Summary

Unfortunately, finding motivation is something that many people struggle with. We can all recall the feeling of knowing that we need to do something, but fundamentally not wanting to do it! Fulgham had taken his experience in the private sector on Wall Street and applied it to the public sector and the FBI. Duhigg finds that cross-pollination and unexpected combinations are yet another key ingredient in increasing productivity. Across a wide range of settings — including academic publishing, show business, and product design — successful innovation is often rooted in unusual combinations and interdisciplinary thinking. A joint study by MIT and Carnegie Mellon reached similar conclusions. Successful teams exhibited a wide range of personalities and styles, but they shared two core qualities. Members of the best teams spoke in roughly the same proportion. And they exhibited high average social sensitivity: the ability to read one another and react appropriately.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

The first airplane de Crespigny had ever flown was a Cessna, one of the single-engine, nearly noncomputerized planes that hobbyists loved. A Cessna is a toy compared to an Airbus, of course, but every plane, at its core, has the same components: a fuel system, flight controls, brakes, landing gear. What if, de Crespigny thought to himself, I imagine this plane as a Cessna? What would I do then? People who are particularly good at managing their attention are in the habit of telling themselves stories all the time.” But how can you make sure that your decisions are productive? In short, making good, productive decisions is arguably all about being able to predict the future with some degree of accuracy. You need to be able to discern the consequences of your decisions, whether these consequences will be positive or negative, and whether they’ll help or hinder your productivity. Once you’ve got an idea of what the consequences of your decision will be, you can decide whether or not to proceed with it. If the likely consequences are positive, great! If not, it might be time to rethink your course of action.

One of his main tactics is a kind of intentional disruption: mid-project, he will step in and shake up a team by tweaking its dynamics, even if he knows that by doing so he will generate a certain amount of tension. In the case of Frozen, he named the film’s writer, Jennifer Lee, as a second director. A writer is more a lone voice, where a director must listen to and incorporate suggestions from across the production. The new responsibility and point of view were just the jolt she needed. After the crew’s visualization session, de Crespigny laid down some rules. “Everyone has a responsibility to tell me if you disagree with my decisions or think I’m missing anything.”