Scorekeeping for Success

I agree with the premise of this book and I try to apply its principles to my job. I am in charge of between 10 and 20 people depending on the project. The ideas work for my area which is film production. I also recommend "The game of work" by the same author.

You absolutely need to keep score. Based on this book's advice that I had read in some other book, I was already following doing some basic scorekeeping of my own "productive work hours" every day in an Excel sheet. I have already seen the benefits of keeping track of how you are doing. So the "scorekeeeping" strategy already works, it's proven. This book explains how to it in more detail, whether you want to improve your own productivity or your employees'. Of course, there are many uses of this book even if you don't run a business. You can improve your "focussed study hours" for example. But keep in mind that you won't benefit from it by simply reading it, you will need to give about 15-30 mins. a day to doing your analysis. I do it, it has already proved useful, and I plan to implement scorekeeping stategies in as many areas as possible -- wherever I want to get more of what I want -- whether it is making more money, working out more hours a week, doing more productive work etc. etc. hope this helps...

This book assumes one thing - people like to win! People inherently want to succeed, but they often don't try or bother because they don't know how to win nor do think it matters if they do win, so they just go through the motions, never reaching their true potential. And the way most management operates today, they're pretty right. What this book points out is that in order to excel, people need to know HOW to win and to know IF they're winning or not. The simple way to enable that is to keep score. Keeping score keeps everyone focused on what is important (what's important is what's being scored) and gives them immediate feedback as to whether their succeeding or not. A company I worked for used this book's method, and it was amazing to see the score charts climb up as the workers started to quickly buy into it. (Not that the company wasn't without it's cynics). The whole idea is very simple and obvious and it was amazing to watch. People really do want to win, just get out of the way and keep score. The book does a great job of how to go about doing this, how to incorporate it into different facets of jobs, how to have the person score keep themselves and not have it be micro-managing, etc.