I started reading this book last week Friday May 21, 2021 because Cal Network praises it in his book Deep Work. For me there is not much new stuff in this book if all you consider are the individual disciplines. As a leader I applied some of the principles illustrated in this book with my previous employer (Tanzania Leaf Tobacco Co. LTD) and we got some decent results. Here is what I learnt from my experience when we used some of the principles in our IT department;
- Focusing on your most important goal you will likely get the results you want. In our case the focus was reducing IT Systems downtime by more than 90% by end of production season December 2019. We ended cutting downtime by 50% after four consecutive years of poor performance.
- Identifying and tracking your lead measures. These are the stuff that are predictive in nature and can help you achieve the goal, and it can be influenced by the team members. In our case we had two lead measures;
- Scheduling automatic database maintenance twice per week
- Checking status of standby printer sever and standby label printers every after two hours.
- And last but not least it’s always necessary to hold people accountable for their behavior and their performance. Here we had daily, weekly and monthly meetings to make sure there is ongoing attention and consistent monitoring, analysis and reporting.
In our case what we didn’t know and eventually we didn’t apply is the principle of Keeping a Customised & Compelling Scoreboard. Instead we used a general daily downtime report from the factory. This is something new I learnt from this book. In our case the daily general downtime factory report was like coach’s scoreboard typically designed for leaders. As a leader I liked it but it turns out it didn’t boost team engagement. We failed.
I think as a leader I struggled and I failed to get the team fully engaged because we didn’t have a visible, continually updated scoreboard that was simple and appealed to the IT team. I now know that for the IT team to be fully engaged we were supposed to personalized the general downtime factory report. I can’t I agree more with authors here, noting: “Personalizing the scoreboard is of course fun, but it also serves an important purpose—the more the team feels it’s their scoreboard, the more they will take ownership of the results”.
The last thing I learnt from this book is that the four principles are like a system. From my experience you can adopt any one of the four disciplines, or improve the way you handle each one, but to get the best results, you have to use all the four principles in a very coordinated way. And that’s very tough, but the good news is people like you and me can make it work not only in our professional lives but also in our personal lives.
Therefore if you are willing to do the tough work and take the time and make the changes, this book is for you and it will definitely help you.
