How many countless working hours have you spent on projects, proposals, paperwork, and meetings that felt useless or were ignored or dismissed? Hard work is not the same as real work. Half of the work we do consumes valuable time without strengthening the short- or long-term survival of the organization. In a word, it's fake. Not only does fake work drain a company's resources without improving its bottom line, it steals conviction, care, and positive morale from employees, and adds the burden of high turnover, communication breakdowns, and cultural patterns of poor productivity.
But how can you turn fake work into real work? Internationally renowned business consultants Brent D. Peterson and Gaylan W. Nielson explain how to identify needlessly time-consuming and sometimes difficult tasks (which aren't always as easy to spot as they seem) and shift your focus toward rewarding work that will achieve results. With more than twenty years of experience, Peterson and Nielson have successfully helped corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, schools, and community groups increase their productivity and retain talented employees by understanding and using their skills on things that actually matter. They illustrate their advice with stories about real world employees who have been trapped by fake work.
Fake Work offers solutions that will change the way you view work, including how to recognize fake work and how to get out of it, how (and what) to communicate with your colleagues to eliminate fake work, how to recognize and counteract the personality traits that encourage fake work, and how to close the gap between your company's strategies and the work that needs to be done to reach the results critical to your and your company's survival.
"'Synergy' means the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. These two authors have produced a superior, synergistic product on a subject of immense importance." -- Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
"Read this book and get real!" -- Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager® and The One Minute Entrepreneur™
"Fake Work powerfully diagnoses why most organizations and people are overworked and yet are underperforming, being trapped in the thick of thin things. It will forever change how you and your organization look at work -- and better yet, how real work is identified and done, and the results that follow." -- Stephen M. R. Covey, New York Times bestselling author of The Speed of Trust
"It is refreshing to be exposed to some new ideas with enormous practical relevance. Better yet, the authors propose actionable cures for this silent disease of fake work that most businesses don't recognize they have." -- Jack Zenger, CEO of Zenger Folkman and coauthor of the bestselling The Extraordinary Leader
