Tony Schwartz, Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy have written a provocative book that takes a serious look at the one area in business that seems immune to change -- the human costs of doing business in the digital age.
Schwartz is also the co-author of The Power of Full Engagement. In this new work, he, Gomes and McCarthy provide a proven prescription for making positive changes in the way we work. The book is an extension of ideas that Schwartz and McCarthy introduced in a Harvard Business Review article Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time in 2007.
The premise is simple: “The furious activity to accomplish more with less exacts a series of silent costs: less capacity for focused attention, less time for any given task, and less opportunity to think reflectively and long term.” In other words, less energy. More importantly, less sustainable energy.
Like Dan Pink’s book, Drive (highly recommended), this book challenges the notion of what truly works in today’s business environment. While Pink focuses on motivation, Schwartz, Gomes and McCarthy challenge the idea of how to enhance the performance of employees -- and much of it is counter-intuitive to how we do business. “A growing body of research suggests that we’re most productive when we move between periods of high focus and intermittent rest. Instead, we live in a gray zone, constantly juggling activities but rarely fully engaging in any of them -- or fully disengaging from any of them.”
Within the first 10 pages, they make a persuasive case. “Most organizations enable our dysfunctional behaviors and even encourage them through policies, practices, reward systems and cultural messages that serve to drain our energy and run down our value over time.
They make a make a case that we’re at our best not when act like computers running at high speed for long hours, but when we pulse rhythmically between expending and regularly renewing energy across each of our four needs.
If you want to make positive change in your organization and want to move beyond the status quo, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working -- is a working blueprint for any company’s future.
