Featured Productivity and Business Books

This article discusses (1) a couple of specific books that will be of interest to you, (2) a new product by Harvard Business Review, and (3) a great resource of book summaries.

I am about half-way through Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long and highly recommend it to any of you who are too flooded with work and other happenings in your life. The book talks about why your brain has difficulty doing certain tasks (and multitasking), and gives you strategies for overcoming its limitations. The book uses case studies of a busy couple, describing several situations they typically face and how to best handle those situations. (The couple consists of a woman recently promoted to a higher management position, and her husband who is running his own upstart IT business.) There are a lot of useful tips in this book for making you more productive AND less stressed.

If you are a busy executive who only wants book summaries, with the opportunity to delve in deeper on chapters that most interest you, a new program from Harvard Business Review may be just what you want. The program is implemented in a special section of the Amazon Kindle store. Quoting from the this section:

Whether you’ve got 10 minutes over coffee, 30 minutes on your train ride to work, or an hour or two on a plane, Harvard Business Review Short Cuts give you the best business ideas just the way you want them. You can download the entire book, an individual chapter, or a book summary that’ll quickly get you up to speed.

I gave it a test drive by buying the 10-minute summary of John Kotter’s Leading Change, a book I had read several years ago. I thought it was an outstanding summary in that it did not miss any key points, and it explained them in a straightforward and understandable way. If I had wanted to get into more detail, the individual chapters are available for download, too … I would only have to purchase the specific one(s) I wanted.

I’ve always been impressed with material from HBR, and think this program is a great idea that is going to be just right for some of you. And, since no sign-up or obligation is required, you can try it out for yourself to see what you think.

Speaking of book summaries, Derek Sivers does a marvelous job of summarizing the books he has read, so marvelous that you can sometimes skip buying a book and just read his summary of it. John’s book reviews are located here.

Finally, if you have a small business, the founders of 37signals has written a book you’ll find helpful: Rework. The book bucks conventional business practices and logic in several areas, such as in hiring practices, product development, and holding meetings. While you shouldn’t try to do everything the book tells you, it should make you stop and think and help you make the right decision, rather than just doing things the way everybody else has done them for years. For example, its advice on “underdoing” your competition “sounds wrong,” but really makes a lot of sense when you understand how much we humans hate having to choose among a complicated list of options. And, while I think their attitude toward meetings undervalues the insight you can gain from others, it truly is way too easy to have too many meetings and to have meetings that are totally unproductive. Bottom line: if you’re in business, you ought to have this book.