How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life - Hardcover

Webb, Caroline

 
9780553419634: How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553419633 ISBN 13: 9780553419634
Verlag: Crown Currency, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In How to Have a Good Day, economist and former McKinsey partner Caroline Webb shows readers how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform our approach to everyday working life.
 
Advances in behavioral sciences are giving us an ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be at our best. But it has not always been easy to see how to apply these insights in the real world--until now.
 
In How to Have a Good Day, Webb explains exactly how to apply this science to our daily tasks and routines. She translates three big scientific ideas into step-by-step guidance that shows us how to set better priorities, make our time go further, ace every interaction, be our smartest selves, strengthen our personal impact, be resilient to setbacks, and boost our energy and enjoyment. Through it all, Webb teaches us how to navigate the typical challenges of modern workplaces—from conflict with colleagues to dull meetings and overflowing inboxes—with skill and ease.
 
Filled with stories of people who have used Webb’s insights to boost their job satisfaction and performance at work, How to Have a Good Day is the book so many people wanted when they finished Nudge, Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow and were looking for practical ways to apply this fascinating science to their own lives and careers.
 
A remarkable and much-needed book, How to Have a Good Day gives us the tools we need to have a lifetime of good days.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Caroline Webb is a management consultant and executive coach who has spent fifteen years at McKinsey and at her own firm, Sevenshift, showing clients how to use behavioral science to boost their professional effectiveness. An Oxford- and Cambridge-trained economist, Webb and her work have been featured in the Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, Forbes, and on the BBC. She divides her time between New York and London.

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The Science Essentials

I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

—Isaac Asimov



We’re living in a golden age of behavioral science, where every passing week seems to deliver fresh insights into the way we think, feel, and act. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and economists are busy unraveling the important mysteries of our time, questions like: “How can I conquer my inbox?” “Why do perfectly reasonable people get their wires crossed?” “What would it take for me to stop procrastinating right now (or later today, or tomorrow)?” Scientific research has ever more to say in answer to these sorts of pressing questions.

You might reasonably wonder what’s changed. Why are so many media articles suddenly illustrated with pictures of brains? The three disciplines that form the backbone of this book­-psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience­-have been around for a century or more, after all. But right now we’re sitting at the intersection of some big trends that are making these three behavioral sciences more applicable to our everyday lives. Let me describe some of that backstory, before I lay out the three big cross­cutting science themes that run through the rest of the book.



Psychology: Greater Focus on Well­Being

For much of its history, psychology was mostly concerned with investigating the causes of negative behavior. Researchers did important work to understand pathologies such as paranoia and depression; they explored the dynamics of fear and aggression. Given this, it’s perhaps no surprise that one of psychology’s most well­known experiments was Stanley Milgram’s controversial exploration of how far people were willing to submit to authority­-the one where he tested whether volunteers would be willing to give potentially fatal electrical shocks to strangers when told to do so by someone in a white coat.1 (A disturbing number of them obeyed.) Obviously, this kind of research did a lot to illuminate the complexities of the human mind, and has laid the foundations of modern behavioral science. But the findings didn’t readily translate into uplifting guidance for living a good life.

In recent years, however, the balance has shifted toward exploring the conditions that invite positive behavior. Perhaps the most visible catalyst for the shift came when Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1998. Seligman’s own research had previously focused on the study of helplessness. But he announced with some fanfare that the theme for his term of office would be “positive psychology,” the serious study of what it takes for us to be the best version of ourselves. And since then, psychologists have directed more energy toward understanding the jollier side of human experience­-what helps us thrive, lifts our spirits, and boosts our productivity. These are exactly the sort of things that most of us are hungry to know more about, especially on those days when our workplaces feel like a Milgram experiment.



Economics: More Realism in Theories of Behavior

At the same time, economics has also moved toward a more rounded view of the human condition. At its heart, economics is the study of the way people make choices: how we weigh the costs and benefits of different options, and what we decide to do as a result. The choices might be mundane, like deciding which snack to buy, or they might be consequential, like deciding which multimillion­dollar project goes forward. Either way, to predict people’s choices, economists used to build theoretical models that assumed humans always accurately and independently assessed the benefits of each option open to them. But those models weren’t able to explain a lot of real­life behavior: for example, the way we often make snap decisions based on little information; the fact that we sometimes change our minds, based on what others think; the way we occasionally do nice things for other people without any expectation of payback.

This spurred two psychologists­-Daniel Kahneman of Princeton and Amos Tversky of Stanford­-to cross enemy lines in 1979 and publish an article in Econometrica, an influential economics journal. In the article, they highlighted that people don’t behave like machines when it comes to the choices they make.2 Emotional and social considerations drive many of our choices, often for good reason and in quite predictable ways. And with that, they sparked a revolution. Soon there was a new movement called “behavioral economics” that was devoted to apply­ing the powerful analytical tools of economics to the way that real people make decisions in the real world. The result? Well, Kahneman went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. But more important for us is that economists now have a much more nuanced and accurate understanding of the choices we make from day to day, and what it takes for us to nudge our behavior one way or another.



Neuroscience: More Sophisticated Measurement of Brain Activity

Finally, neuroscience has benefitted from dramatic advances in techniques for observing ordinary brains in action. Neuroscientists have long had access to a range of scanning techniques that helped reveal the structures and activities of the brain. Those scanning technologies often came at a cost of exposing the brain’s owner to a good deal of radiation­-so they weren’t ideal for non­medical research. Since the 1990s, though, steady improvements in less risky imaging technologies (including the discovery of functional MRI scanning) have made it easier for neuroscientists to watch what happens to healthy people’s brains while normal things are happening to them. That means researchers can see which areas of the brain become active when a person is tickled by kindness or energized by accomplishment. They can observe the neural activity associated with someone feeling unhappy or stressed (for reasons beyond the fact that they’re lying in a noisy metal tube or have electrodes strapped to their heads).

As a result, neuroscientists are gaining an increasingly refined understanding of the biological mechanisms behind our everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions. And that means they’re exploring the kind of behavioral topics that also fascinate psychologists and economists­-for example, questions about the way we solve challenging problems and handle complex social interactions. In fact, many of the studies I cite in this book result from collaborations across the three behavioral science disciplines; it feels as if we’re living in an era of “neuro­psycho­economics.” (Or something like that.) And this multi­disciplinary mash‑up is great news for us. It means we get to benefit from complementary perspectives (biological, observational, and analytical) on topics that matter to us in the workplace­-which in turn results in richer guidance on ways for us to stay in top form.

So all in all, it’s an excellent time to be thinking about the way that science can help us flourish.



Three Big Themes

Now, how do we apply all this evolving, exciting science to the everyday details of our working lives? That’s where How to Have a Good Day comes in. This book is dedicated to translating the most valuable research into the context of today’s working world­-the tough assignments, the packed schedules, the complex relationships­-to show you how to make every...

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Verlag
Crown Currency
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553419633
ISBN 13 
9780553419634
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

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