Fake Work : Why People Are... | Buy

Written by two successful business consultants with decades of experience, "Fake Work" is a groundbreaking and useful business book that shows employees at every level how to be more productive and efficient in the workplace.

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Chapter 1 Fake Work: Building a Road to NowhereJoyful is the accumulation of good work.-- BuddhaSuppose you are building a road on a mountainside leading to the site for your new cabin. You have worked for months clearing sagebrush and aspen trees. You've moved rocks and filled in roadbed through the exhausting heat, the raging downpours, even early snow. You've pushed forward, working from your best understanding of the surveyor's plans. Your road winds over a dusty hill, cuts through the trees, moves along a rocky ridge, and then -- you find yourself looking down from the edge of a cliff.Fake work looks and feels like that. The building of the road was purposeful. Your effort was admirable. The blood, sweat, and tears you poured into the project were real and your commitment was profound.But none of that really matters!You are still left with a road to nowhere.So many of us have dedicated weekends and long nights to a project, proposal, or presentation that ended up being canceled, ignored, or dismissed -- essentially roads to nowhere -- and see all one's efforts lead to nothing. That is the road to fake work -- work that, at the end of long days, weeks, months, or even years, just seems to drop off a cliff.What Is Real Work and What Is Fake Work?We spend more than half our lives and a vast percentage of our waking hours going to work, being at work, leaving work, and thinking about work -- even when we're not at work. What we sometimes miss, when we think about work, is outcomes.Real work, as we define it, is work that is critical and aligned to the key goals and strategies of an organization-- any organization, corporation, nonprofit company, government agency, church, school, or family. It is work that is essential for the organization's short-term and long-term survival.Fake work, on the other hand, is effort under theillusionof value. Fake work is work that is not targeting or aligned with the strategies and goals of the company. Fake work is what happens when people lose sight of their personal or company goals -- whether it's increasing sales, opening new offices, or designing new products -- and what, amid all the work being done, they'reactually doingto achieve those goals. Prime examples of fake work -- which drains both the individual and the company -- are meaningless paperwork, time-wasting meetings, empty training initiatives, or countless other activities that do nothing to move us toward our objectives, either as individuals or as companies.Often it is easy to identify fake work, simply because it is so blatantly obvious and stupid. One manager, Ricky, describes one such situation:Picked to Waste My TimeI was put on a committee to study my company's travel policy. A lot of complaints had surfaced, and employees seemed to have a lot of problems interpreting the policy correctly. But most of us on this committee felt that the real intent of upper management, which put together the committee, was only to validate the current policy, because we had been through the same kind of charade before with other issues.In the first meeting, Katrina, a committee member, asked,"Does anyone think that we can make any changes, or make any difference at all?" Most of us answered no. Kurt, another coworker, added, "Nothing is going to change, so let's write up a proposal and get this over with."I had been here before. I'm in HR, and last year I was asked to renew our benefits plan and make recommendations on changes. So I wrote up a long analysis and proposed a lot of changes. Then later I learned from a coworker that most of those changes had already been determined. They just wanted to say that they'd asked for my contribution. I knew -- most of us knew -- that we could write or propose anything, and the leaders wou