PIC No. 32:
• Title: Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work
• Author: Nick Sonnenberg
• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership (Feb. 7, 2023, 320 pages)
• Management Bucket #18 of 20: The Systems Bucket
Welcome to Issue No. 32 of PAILS IN COMPARISON, the value-added sidekick of John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. This blog features my “PICs”—shorter reviews of helpful books—with comparisons to other books in my 20 management buckets (core competencies) filing system.
“Fix the Sink. Don’t Mop Faster.”
Yikes! I’ve always been a time management nerd. You’d love my systems. But…how come no one told me there’s so much more? You’re telling me I need to get the entire team in alignment?
Oh, my. Someone on your team needs to start reading Nick Sonnenberg’s book—today! It’s brilliant. Since my eNews is titled, “Your Weekly Staff Meeting,” I skipped first to Chapter 5, “Efficient Meetings.” I immediately made 10 notes for my Meetings Bucket insights:
• “The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.” (Apple’s Tim Cook)
• The true cost of meetings. (If you’re gutsy enough, check out the author’s meeting cost calculator. Click here.)
• Four ways to reduce the cost of a meeting: “1) Eliminate it entirely. 2) Reduce the number of people. 3) Reduce the duration. 4) Reduce its frequency (if it’s a recurring meeting).”
• Zoom fatigue? “I do want to be clear, however, that meetings—both in-person and virtual—have always been a problem. The pandemic simply exacerbated the symptoms." (Read HBR’s “Stop the Meeting Madness.”)
Similar to a parent tossing their kid into a Little League baseball game without any baseball knowledge, “The real problem is not meetings themselves but the fact that most people have never been taught how to run them efficiently or even how to determine if a meeting needs to occur in the first place.”
By the way, here’s my favorite coffee mug:
“I survived another meeting
that should have been an email.”
(Click here to order!)
• At the author’s company, Leverage, “We also have a rule that anyone is allowed to respectfully leave a meeting if they don’t feel the need to be there or are not adding value to the conversation.”
• Check out the helpful “Do You Need a Meeting?” Yes/No decision-making chart. (Post page 118 in your office or cubicle!)
• “No Agenda, No Meeting.” (Imagine if this were one of your team’s values!) It reminded me of Jeff Bezos’ approach to meetings as noted in the Inc. article, “Silent Start” (click here) and also noted by Jason Pearson in the Meetings Bucket chapter of Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook.
• In addition to recommending the latest time-saving tools for teams (Wow—how did I miss these?), the author adds, “Each quarter, we aggressively audit our recurring meetings and delete anything that isn’t necessary, knowing we can always add them back if needed."
There’s enough value in Chapter 5 to save substantial amounts of time and money for your team. (The author promises incredible ROI when you leverage his systems and tools. It sounds plausible.) But, dig deep and you’ll find gold in every helpful chapter—organized under his CPR theme: Communication, Planning, and Resources—the three big reasons you’re drowning in work.
“WE SKIPPED THE BASICS.” With sobering transparency, Nick Sonnenberg confesses to five major problems that almost torpedoed his company, including “Problem 5: We skipped the basics.” He writes, “We had no org chart, no hiring process, and many of our team members were largely unqualified. We were great at using automations and doing things quickly, but we lacked the foundational principles that were required for our team to operate efficiently.” He adds,
“I wasn’t just underwater; I was at the bottom of the ocean.”
The good news: the book is filled with practical applications, not untested theories. He writes, “The reality is that you’re not drowning in work because there ‘aren’t enough hours in the day’ but because of thousands of seemingly small inefficiencies at work that add up over time to become major drains on everyone’s productivity.”
SCAVENGER HUNT. Here’s a typical example of the author’s contrarian wisdom about the perpetual “scavenger hunts” we all endure when trying to find an email, a document, a meeting notice, or more:
• Former belief: “A business can grow only as fast as knowledge can be transferred.”
• New belief: “A business can grow only as fast as knowledge can be retrieved.”
How much time do you squander every day, every week, and every month in your scavenger hunts? Nick Sonnenberg can help you and—amazingly—he offers his resource-rich website (tools and more) even to those who don’t buy his book. Wow! Visit:
https://www.getleverage.com/tools
Warning! To stop drowning at work, your tendency may be to hire more people. Danger ahead! Sonnenberg demonstrates that “Complexity Scales Exponentially with Team Size” (see page 12)—documenting how complexity grows with three team members (3 connections) all the way up to 10 team members (45 connections). Yikes!
Hire more people? You may be drowning in work because your system is broken. “To put it another way: would you rather bring more people into a broken system and fix it later, or fix the system first and bring more people into an efficient system?” The answer is obvious: “Fix the overflowing sink, don’t mop faster!”
Still not convinced you need to read this book? The author’s pop quiz on which tool to use for which action item will guarantee that you’ll read his new book. Check out the “Tool Selection Checklist” on page 15 and on his website.
And speaking of checklists, I was delighted to see his reference to one of my favorite books, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, by Atul Gawande. He also mentions David Allen’s book—but takes his methodology one step further. Brilliant!
Sonnenberg quotes Peter Drucker often, including this reminder, “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”
Every chapter begins with a Problem and the Solution. And every chapter ends with “Three Key Takeways,” plus “Pro Tips,” and “What’s Next.” Don’t skip the “Nine Principles of Efficiency” on page 31 (and repeated on his website).
Wow. I could have used this book in my CEO years.
PAILS IN COMPARISON: Reading this book reminded me of several other must-read books in the Systems Bucket, plus other buckets/core competencies.
[ ] The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, by Atul Gawande (read my review)
[ ] Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen (read my review)
[ ] Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business, by Patrick Lencioni (read my review)
[ ] The Amazon Management System: The Ultimate Digital Business Engine That Creates Extraordinary Value for Both Customers and Shareholders, by Ram Charan and Julia Yang (read my review)
[ ] Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t – Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0, by Verne Harnish (read my review)
[ ] No! A Guide for Busy People: Banish Busyness and Focus on What Matters Most, by Doug Fields (read my review)
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work, by Nick Sonnenberg. Listen on Libro (7 hours, 59 minutes). For more book reviews, visit John Pearson’s Buckets Blog and subscribe to Your Weekly Staff Meeting. And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.
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