666. Q&AF: Creating Value Inside Your Organization, Touching Real Success & Turning Work Mode Off

While many business books tell you how to manage other people, this 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker explains how to manage yourself to be effective. Effectiveness is key to individual and organizational success. Without it, other attributes, such as talent, intelligence, knowledge, and hard work, are useless.

Drucker says anyone can learn five practices for effectiveness: managing your time, focusing on just a few key tasks, making a unique contribution, maximizing your strengths, and making sound decisions. He explains how to implement these practices, which have remained relevant for over 50 years, even as technology and organizations have evolved. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up today and how others have built on them.

Many people believe that if they work hard, practice consistently, and focus on the things they’re good at, they’ll succeed. However, these aren’t the keys to long-term success. What gives successful people their competitive edge? The answer is high-performance habits.

High performers are people who maintain success and well-being over a long period of time. They excel more than their colleagues and can adapt to almost any situation. In High-Performance Habits, personal development trainer Brendon Burchard defines the six habits you need to become a high performer. These habits range from maintaining your health to generating influence. By developing them, you can take your first steps toward increasing your performance.

If you’ve ever asked yourself why you aren’t making as much progress in your business career as you’d like, business and marketing expert Donald Miller says he knows the answer: You’re not adding enough value to your company. Businesses always have the bottom line in mind, and they’re much more likely to notice and promote people who quantifiably bring more money into the company than people who simply do what’s in their job description and nothing more. Therefore, Miller argues that you should see yourself not as a mere employee, but as an investment of your organization, and he provides 11 steps that can help you become an investment that provides an excellent return.

We’ll examine these steps, and we’ll also supplement Miller’s recommendations with advice from other business thinkers, psychological background on some of his ideas, and ideas from his other works.

Many people want to retire as millionaires so that they have the time and money to travel, buy luxury cars and homes, or visit with their friends and families. However, you don’t need to be a millionaire to do all these things. You don’t even need to retire.

In The 4-Hour Workweek, entrepreneur, consultant, and life coach Tim Ferriss explains how anyone can live the retired millionaire lifestyle by building their own business, automating it, and then collecting the income while they go off to live their dreams. In this guide, we’ll describe each of Ferriss’s steps to creating this life. We’ll also examine why some of his recommendations are particularly effective and explore alternatives and counterarguments to other suggestions.

Most of us assume financial success depends on education and intelligence. But in The Psychology of Money, finance expert Morgan Housel presents an alternate hypothesis: The key to financial success lies in understanding human behavior. Housel posits that when you understand how emotions and beliefs influence your financial decisions, you’ll make better financial decisions.

In this guide, we compare Housel’s advice with that of other finance experts and supplement his ideas with concrete recommendations. You’ll learn why people fail to achieve financial success and what’s behind your desire for money. You’ll also learn what to include in a financial strategy, how to create one you can follow for decades, how to follow it through those decades—and how to pay attention to the information you need to do so.

In We Should All Be Millionaires, self-made millionaire Rachel Rodgers argues that all women, especially women of color, can and should strive to become millionaires. According to Rodgers, women succumb to myths and stereotypes that prevent them from earning more. Rather than simply work harder or live more frugally, women must change how they think and feel about money, reclaim their time and energy, and stop underselling themselves. By following Rodgers’s advice, you can become more financially confident, grow your wealth, and live with more freedom and autonomy.

In this guide, we’ll discuss ways to develop a positive money mindset, manage your time and energy, and increase your wealth by recognizing the worth of your work. We’ll also compare Rodgers’s advice with that of other entrepreneurs and financial experts and provide practical tips on how to implement her strategies.

In today’s “hustle culture,” many workers end up ruining their lives in their attempts to get ahead in their careers. They sacrifice the time and energy they should be spending on their lives outside of work. In It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, Basecamp founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson contend that there’s a better way to work: By establishing more reasonable, sustainable goals and business practices, companies can create a healthy, relaxed work culture that radically improves employees’ lives.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to build an organization employees would be thrilled to work for, without compromising profitability. We’ll detail the three qualifications to look for when scouting for any potential hire and explain why it’s vital to give your employees time to work in private. In our commentary, we’ll provide counterpoints from books such as No Rules Rules and The Cold Start Problem. Additionally, we’ll supplement Fried and Hansson’s productivity-related advice with ideas from books like Deep Work and Indistractable.

In Fix This Next, entrepreneur and business author Mike Michalowicz introduces the Business Hierarchy of Needs, a system for determining which of your company’s problems you should fix next. Michalowicz created this system because many entrepreneurs struggle with prioritization. They’re often overwhelmed by problems, so they focus on fixing the most immediate problem instead of identifying the most impactful approach that’ll fix the problem’s root cause. Since the root cause isn’t resolved, problems continue to appear.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how Michalowicz’s prioritization system works and how you can use it to make your business more successful. In our commentary, we’ll compare his advice to that of other business experts like Simon Sinek and Seth Godin, as well as explore concrete tips for implementing Michalowicz’s ideas.

What’s the common thread among the world’s most successful business leaders? In Discover Your True North, business leadership educator Bill George argues that it’s not about being the most talented or the most charming person in the boardroom—it’s about being true to yourself and staying focused on your core priorities and values (your “True North”).

After analyzing interviews with 48 international business leaders about their career journeys, George distills their most salient insights into simple guidelines that anyone can follow to become a leader in their organization. In this guide, we’ll explain how to identify your core purpose and ethics by reflecting on your unique life experiences, common mistakes to avoid on your leadership journey, how to hone a team-oriented approach to leadership, and how to maintain a personal support system. We’ll also compare George’s recommendations to those of other business leaders and include tips for executing his guidelines.