Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder than Ever but Accomplishing Less, and How to Fix the Problem

by Brent D. Peterson, Gaylan W. Nielson

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.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Leadership, Productivity, Management

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 2009

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The subtitle of Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson's book sums it up pretty well: we're working harder than ever but accomplishing so much less. Fake Work does a great job of describing fake work but it's a much harder proposition to eradicate it from our lives.

One of the big problems with fake work is that it's so frequently assigned, managed, expected, graded, tossed aside unread by or otherwise involves bosses, and it's difficult to actually get fake work out of your work flow in general. That's the one area where Fake Work falls short. It's otherwise great at helping you to identify and eradicate self-imposed fake work (checking email a dozen times an hour? Creating reports that don't matter?). It certainly helped improve my productivity.

[steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a constant struggle to prioritize and understand what is real work and what is fake work. the costs of fake work are not always apparent and there's some good discussion around some of the 2nd order impacts of fake work.

on the whole, I found this to be an interesting and relevant discussion on the topic. it got a little tedious and repetitive at times but gets the point across. it could be shorter by a good 30-40% and still have conveyed the concepts.

even if you're not in management and have retained the use of your frontal lobes. the coverage is beneficial.

[Serri · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this book was a quick read because many of its principles are logical and well known business practices. However, there were a few interesting ideas and overall it served as a good reminder to not get bogged down with meaningless distrations that keep you from making progress on your most important goals.

[LG]

Very repetitive - probably would have made a decent blog. I couldn't finish it.

[Danielle Rovito · Rating 3 out of 5]

Includes historical data, statistical analysis and real-world stories of how to eliminate useless work and add value in your company. You do not need to read the whole book.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

You don't actually have to read it. Just internalize the phrase "Fake Work" and you will know all you need to know.