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Great at Work How Top Performers Work Less and Achieve More


By Morten Hansen Simon & Schuster 320 pages; $39.99


TO CALL JIRO ONO a perfectionist would be an understatement. The owner of a small sushi restaurant in Tokyo, he massages the octopuses used in his dishes by hand for 50 minutes for maximum tenderness. He will only use the best tuna available at the market each day. He required one apprentice to prepare 200 omelette batches before one omelette sushi was served to customers. Obsessive? Definitely. And perhaps the reason he has three Michelin stars and has been called the best sushi chef in the world. Ono’s extreme effort exemplifies one of the practices author Morten Hansen posits is necessary to be a top performer in his book Great at Work. As the title suggests, Hansen, a management professor at the University of California, Berkeley, examines what it takes to achieve superior results on the job. Hansen was curious about one


question: why do some people perform better at work than others? To find out, he embarked on a study that looked at the performance of 5,000 managers and employees. Hansen concluded that the secret to great achievement was not working harder but working smarter. He found that working smarter boils


down to seven practices. Redesign your job by selecting a small set of priorities. Target your effort to create value. Practise your skills through quality


learning. Match your passion with a purpose that benefits others. Gain the support of others by using targeted tactics. Choose which meetings need your attendance and make the most of the ones you attend by having the team debate then unite. Choose only to participate in interdepartmental group projects that will create value and reject those that won’t. The rest of the book goes into detail about each practice. Along the way, Hansen relates interesting anecdotes to illustrate his points, such as the one featuring chef Jamie Oliver. When he arrived at a school in Huntington, WV, to promote a program encouraging healthier eating, the kids didn’t want to try healthy food. To get their attention, he had a dump truck drop huge blobs of animal fat into a dumpster while disgusted parents and children looked on. Aſter telling them that the fat was equivalent to the amount consumed by the whole school, he asked if the parents would support him in getting their children to eat better. He received overwhelming agreement. The point: Oliver succeeded in getting the parents onside by using a targeted tactic.


Punctuating data and statistics with


charts and graphs, the author offers well-supported arguments. He’s also an entertaining storyteller — in the hands of a lesser one, the book would be a dull slog. Like the performer he urges the reader to be, he is inspirational, selling the reader on the idea that anyone can be superior at his or her job. It isn’t easy or quick, but it is doable — if you’re committed. While his arguments are persuasive, not all are airtight. Hansen’s advice to whittle down tasks in order to excel at a few — “do less, then obsess” he calls it — is problematic. He says that you may have to say “no” to your boss if he or she adds to your to-do list. In some compa- nies, saying “no” to your boss could earn you an invitation to check out the door from the outside. He fails to convince that it’s always possible to choose to do fewer tasks in an environment where employees and managers are expected to do more with fewer resources. Still, with many other noteworthy tips


and eye-opening stories, Great at Work is a worthwhile read. You may not become a top achiever, but you can learn how to be better. — Yvette Trancoso


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