Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World. Available from Amazon here.

Forget what you know about the world of work

You crave feedback. Your organization’s culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. Your competencies should be measured and your weaknesses shored up. Leadership is a thing.

These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they’re lies. As strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies–distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking–that we encounter every time we show up for work. Nine lies, to be exact. They cause dysfunction and frustration, ultimately resulting in workplaces that are a pale shadow of what they could be.

But there are those who can get past the lies and discover what’s real. These freethinking leaders recognize the power and beauty of our individual uniqueness. They know that emergent patterns are more valuable than received wisdom and that evidence is more powerful than dogma.

With engaging stories and incisive analysis, the authors reveal the essential truths that such freethinking leaders will recognize immediately: that it is the strength and cohesiveness of your team, not your company’s culture, that matter most; that we should focus less on top-down planning and more on giving our people reliable, real-time intelligence; that rather than trying to align people’s goals we should strive to align people’s sense of purpose and meaning; that people don’t want constant feedback, they want helpful attention.

This is the real world of work, as it is and as it should be. Nine Lies About Work reveals the few core truths that will help you show just how good you are to those who truly rely on you.

Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World reviewed

First up, this is a great title for a book. It’s provocative, and then follows with nine statements that we have heard said so many times that they are almost mantra like truisms. Except of course that this book does an excellent job of digging into them and deconstructing them and questioning if they are actually a load of counter productive BS.

They keep the scope wide and provocative to make you think and question previously widely asserted statements. #lie 4 for example, ‘the best people are well rounded’. They then cite Lionel Messi, and is almost exclusive use of his left foot, while also being one of the best players in the world. They discuss his preference for his left foot nine times out of ten. And yet the smart manager looks to encourage Messi to score as many goals as possible, not to use both feet equally.

Throughout the book it continues to deconstruct many other well recited but possibly counter effective truisms, # people care which company they work for – really? # people need feedback, no they actually probably need, want and prefer attention not feedback. Without revealing all of the chapters we enjoyed their approach of taking the axe to a series of business mantra sacred cows. As one culture said, we don’t think in boxes, so why your obsession about thinking outside of them….?

It is a good, readable, smart and thought provoking book, a good one for the summer holiday reading perhaps.

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