Genres: Nonfiction
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explained why a person does what he does. He is out with a new book this time, entitled— Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive and applies same relentless level of details, with numerous research studies and interviews, makes this one too, highly informative.
Unlike The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better offers a variety of chapters, each different from the other in terms conceptual illustration and every chapter’s locus is on the key ideas of expanding productivity. Some elements related to productivity discussed in this book are the mental state of a person’s mind in a particular situation. Then comes decision making part. Duhigg explains the importance of creating mental models to take control of a situation through various interviews including Marine Corps, Google, the original team that created Saturday Night Live, General Electric.
For enhancing decision making, Duhigg suggests one should involve probabilistic possibilities of a significant outcome in terms of both negative or positive. That’s the fundamental of calculating odds. Along with that, the author has also enhanced on how data is important to us and how an organisation of any form can learn something from it by its implementation.
When I saw the book, I liked the overall idea of the book as I was impressed by Duhigg’s previous book. In conceptual terms this book doesn’t fail to offer. The writing is good, the research studies and interviews are well in-depth. The suggested examples for a particular element related to productivity are informative and situational.
The book failed to appeal on the concept of productivity as whole to me. It started well but then I felt some dragging of related elements. The concept of productivity is a vast feature and I don’t think that there can be limited formulative options to a person when implementing it in his daily work. Due to this reason, every chapter is left as a chapter in itself and fails to connect to the whole concept the book is related to. In other terms, there cannot be a definitive conclusion to this book and author fails to show that too.
2 out of 5!
Appreciation from the Author:
I like Charles Duhigg’s “Power of Habits” and I was lucky to attend his speech at a conference two days ago! He’s great.
He does conferences? I did not know that. Plus, I am sure I might find a few of them on youtube.
Thanks for visiting by.
Sounds like Power of Habits is a better one to check out.
Yeah!
So many of these books are a gamble on whether the tactics will work for the reader. Great review. Thanks for sharing.
You’re welcome.