Book Review: The Progress Principle
Book Reviews September 17th, 2012Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement and creativity at work.
Author: Teresa Amabile and Stephen Kramer
The Progress Principle Principle is explained in this book with thorough research and great examples as forward momentum in the workplace by everyday events that make employee’s inner work lives better. The book looks at helping people finding more joy in their work, break away from obstacles to progress and to instill catalysts for creativity and progress. I personally didn’t find a lot of new inspiring content in this book, but it does cover its subjects well and provide a convincing set of actions anyone could use. I just found that I’ve read so much of this in other books, there were not many new ideas to work from.
The authors focus on 3 main components of inner work life and dedicate a major chapter each:
- Progress Principle: The power of meaningful accomplishment
- The Catalyst Factor: The power of project support
- The Nourishment Factor: The Power of Interpersonal Support
There are some excellent points in this book about recognizing and making progress, using and bringing leadership to encourage it, finding things that ignite your own work happiness and of course then using other factors to encourage progress. The two big ones of catalysts and nourishment I really liked and are often missing in people’s work lives or workplaces even when there is great accomplishments besides them. Without them however, there is often little or no joy in the work and any progress fades quickly from keeping the workplace a thriving place of enjoyment.
I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in seeking their own progress in their career and especially to anyone who has made good progress, but does not seem to have the joy they want in their workplace. This book will help you recognize what might be missing and to show you ways to bring that into your own work life or workplace. It is probably more suitable to new supervisors or managers but can obviously be useful to any position since leadership can happen at any level, and influence in a leadership position will help you made a bigger impact with these tools from the book.
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Mike King
October 9th, 2012 at 6:35 AM
Here i would like to mention the following sentence
“Progress Principle: The power of meaningful accomplishment”
Whenever you take any work, try to finish it, otherwise dont do it.
October 10th, 2012 at 3:26 AM
Of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work.
October 12th, 2012 at 4:53 PM
Really interesting book review! Got interested on reading it! Thanks for sharing!
October 22nd, 2012 at 10:31 PM
I think Of all the good activities that impact inner perform life, the individual most highly effective is improvement in significant perform.
December 4th, 2012 at 1:01 AM
Wow. I just subscribed to your RSS several days ago, and now you have posted a review on the book I just bought.
December 4th, 2012 at 6:32 AM
The Progress Principle looking nice book of its series.I’m a veracious reader and loves it.These are my true companion and always gives me energy and confidence to face the world.
December 25th, 2012 at 4:49 AM
Reading books in order to become a good manager is wrong, a good manager is a manager who will listen and learn from their employees and always dare to admit when he does wrong. But perhaps one or two manager can learn something new with this book?
December 26th, 2012 at 9:25 AM
Reading books to become better is wrong you say? I think anyone would disagree with you on that. Learning by trial and error and not from expert advice is a very painful, long learning process that is unfair to your organization and to the people you manage if you only learn by trial and error learning to become a better manager. This is exactly why so many managers get such a bad reputation, because they don’t know how to manage well in the first place and get promoted into a position from a different demonstration of skill and then are terrible as a manager without proper help/guidance/training.