About Being Effective

The inspiration for Being Effective came from a book titled The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton.

This book is written for the business community and asks the question, "Why do so much education and training, management consulting, and business research books and articles produce so little change in what managers actually do." I was greatly impressed by the book and based on my experience working for corporations, I can say that I have observed all of the issues that they discuss.

While reading "The Knowing Doing Gap" I had an epiphany of sorts. I thought to myself, that it is no wonder that corporations have problems turning knowledge into action and why they substitute knowledge for action. Most people also suffer from these issues in their personal lives.

An example of this is the person who consumes knowledge about an important issue and assumes that being knowledgeable will substitute for action. More specifically, consider the person who reads a newspaper story about a genocide occurring in Africa. They may be horrified and disgusted, but it is likely that they will do nothing more than discuss the story with a partner or a work colleague. This is an example of what Pfeffer and Sutton describe as substituting knowledge for action.

The question is how to leverage the principles put forth by Peffer and Sutton to enable the the individual to become more effective in their personal life.

The Being Effective Web site, blog, and online discussion are the seeds for what will become a book of the same title.

Max Lent
http://www.maxlent.com