GREAT AT WORK

From New York Times bestselling author and one of the most influential voices in the world of organizational research, comes this culmination of Morten Hansen’s twenty years of study in the area of individual performance, his tireless quest to answer the provocative question: what really explains extraordinary performance?

Through rigorous evidence-based research, case studies and practical instruction, Hansen explains the key differences between a good performance and a great one, and provides an action-driven roadmap to outstanding performance. He outlines seven practices that, when followed, will dramatically increase your odds of delivering an exceptional performance. He explains the forces in today's world that have profoundly altered the landscape of work: competition, connectedness and change, and challenges how we measure performance, focusing on a "domain" of work rather than measuring performance over the course of an entire career, and tailors his framework for whether you seek to out-perform yourself or others.

While the focus of this book is generally work, it applies to many other activities that involve performance, and especially those activities that involve working with and through others. The primary reader is what Hansen describes as a ‘knowledge worker’, but the book is also relevant to anyone setting and achieving goals: the parent who wants to successfully fundraise for a school, or the city council person looking to reduce crime, for example.

Out-Perform is a modern, evolved take on success at work and has the potential to replace Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and Tom Rath's Strengthfinders (both trail-blazers in their time but dated in the new knowledge-based economy) as the go-to book for outstanding performance.

Morten Hansen is the author of Collaboration and the co-author of Great By Choice (with Jim Collins), which was a New York Times bestseller and sold more than 400,000 copies in hardcover. He is currently a management professor at Berkeley (School of Information) and at INSEAD, France. He was previously a professor at Harvard Business School and holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, where he was a Fulbright scholar. Hansen has also been a senior management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. His award-winning research has been published in leading academic journals, including several articles for the Harvard Business Review on collaboration, leadership and innovation that have been among their most downloaded.