From the Author

The more successful you become and the more authority you acquire, the more likely it becomes that you’ll face situations requiring very quick thinking. These situations may include:

Sudden events or problems that require immediate responses,

Unexpected objections or demands from important people, or

Surprise questions it’s your job to answer.

At such moments, the ability to “think on your feet” enables you to increase your productivity and success levels, even in the face of difficulties. It also seems very impressive, tending to instill in others an extra measure of confidence in you, and in what you are saying. But the truth is this: quick thinking is a relatively simple skill you can practice in advance that will significantly improve your performance when under pressure of time and trouble.

It is perhaps a bit counterintuitive that quick thinking is the result of advance preparation, but as you will see, it totally is. This advance preparation includes:

Incremental change is great. And in many situations, that’s the best you can manage.

But there comes a time when, for many of us, incremental change is not nearly enough. At times like these, the best way forward involves a makeover.

I suppose there are as many ways to do a makeover as there are people doing them, from risking everything on a whim to postponing the makeover until you can retire on a pension.

But coming, as I do, from a perspective of organizing your work and life for change, this piece is about setting up for a maximum makeover with minimal risk and minimal delay.

Let’s take it step by step:

Lately I’ve been thinking about the failures in NASA’s 30-year-long Space Shuttle program (1981-2011). There were many, but of course the two biggest were the fatalities associated with Challenger and Columbia.

In both cases, the problems that ultimately brought down the shuttle orbiters (a leak in one of Challenger’s solid rocket boosters and a chink in Columbia’s heat shield) were topics that most of the people involved simply did not want to face.

This brings up a major element in continuing productivity and success: the need to be open and honest about problems and potential problems before they bring down the project or the entire organization.

After a potential problem becomes a real one, and after it has inflicted a large part of its damage, it’s usually easy to see what went wrong and why. But by then it’s too late.

Far better – and practically speaking, more important – is the ability to recognize problems and potential problems early enough to fix them, or at least to alter course sufficiently to avoid their largest negative effects. And the key to this recognition, of course, is the willingness to face unpleasant facts. Here are some ideas to help you do this:

How closely does your work situation match up with your dreams?

For most of us, there’s a pretty significant gap between the reality we have at work and the reality we’d like to have. And that’s a problem, because when our working situation is not entirely satisfactory, we tend to lose motivation, turn in less than our best work, and perhaps even dread certain moments on the job.

The closer you can bring your real-world work situation to your dream situation, the more satisfaction you’ll receive. And with more satisfaction available, the more productivity and excellent work you’ll deliver, and the more success you’ll obtain.

Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to boost your level of satisfaction at work.

It doesn’t matter what you do, anything from digging ditches to pushing paper, from saving lives to inventing new algorithms. If you can “tune up” your job to be more in line with the elements that satisfy you, you’ll be more motivated to do your work as well as you can.

Let’s take a look at the some of the elements that help you boost your satisfaction at work:

You wouldn’t attempt a do-it-yourself project without the proper tools, and you wouldn’t know if you had the proper tools unless you took an inventory of some kind – just to see what tools you have and what other tools you might need.

It’s the same with your efforts to be more productive and successful, except here the “tools” are your personal inventory of such attributes as:

Characteristics,

Skills,

Knowledge, and

Preferences.

The results of this personal inventory will help you recognize the various directions you might want to pursue with your work and your life, and the various steps you might want to take to facilitate your progress in those directions.

Your personal inventory should count up and consider the following:

As I have said before, unless you’re working in a cave somewhere, cut off from the internet and other means of communication, your productivity and success depend at least to some extent on the productivity and success of other people. But simply hoping for them to help you is usually a losing strategy. Instead, what

You’re probably aware that improving your productivity and success is dependent not only on your own efforts, but on your ability to work with and obtain top results from the efforts of others. That automatically brings up the issues of conflict. Conflict with others is a natural and inevitable result of being human. Since we’re