Paid to Think: A Leader's Toolkit for Redefining Your Future

My wife gave me Paid to Think as a birthday gift and have found it the most valuable business book I have ever read. I keep thinking, "I wish someone had told me that earlier in my career!"This is the kind of book that when your skills wane and you want to read something new, just keep re-reading this book. In my nearly 25 years of professional experience, I can say that this covers everything a leader/manager needs to know. Everything.You can think of this book as an MBA-in-a-box. It is a very practical how-to manual for leadership and management. It is a big book (599 pages) and dense - it is not a book you breeze through. However, it is well-written, and simple to understand.Goldsmith believes that effective leadership and management is based on four things:* Strategizing: Developing plans, creating new products and services, establishing alliances, learning technology* Learning: Acquiring new knowledge, enhancing global awareness, watching competition* Performing: Leading the charge, empowering others, innovating everywhere, selling continuously* Forecasting: forecasting the futureAll four weave together - where you cannot strategize without the ability to forecast, you cannot perform without learning, you cannot learn without strategizing, etc. The book is broken out into these four areas - but Goldsmith does a good job pulling them all together.Not everything in this book is original - which I believe is a tremendous strength. Goldsmith is wise to understand that there are existing strategies that already work well. The purpose of this book is not to give you 100% original thought - but to teach you everything you need to know (whether his idea or someone else's) to be an effective leader. For example, in managing projects, he talked about the Critical Path Method that was invented in the 1950s - there is nothing he could invent that is better. This said, he does have some incredibly creative approach to problems that I have never seen before - so it is a good mix.Goldsmith is also good at challenging conventional wisdom. For example, he takes exception to the phrase, "Our employees are our most valuable asset" suggesting that good employees are the end product of good processes, good tools, and the right environment.I am an avid Harvard Business Review (HBR) reader and read a lot of business books. Most business books have a gem or two that I take forward but this one book has reset my expectations for what a business book should deliver. It is pure meat - with practical advice on every page. I wish Amazon allowed for more than five starts - because I would give this 100 if I could.

Yes Paid to THINK is a big book, but I can't imagine how it could be any smaller - this is the comprehensive guide to what is truly important in the disciplines of management and leadership. Read it, highlight it, and flag pages, because it is designed as a kind of toolkit that you can draw from today and over the course of your career.This book is different from any other book I've read on critical leadership thinking, because it doesn't just tell you what to do, it teaches you HOW to do it. All those other books that tell you only what to do or simply provide interesting concepts only get you so far. However, when you finish Paid to THINK, you don't question how to duplicate the ideas, because you learn exactly how to convert your ideas and your leadership style into results!We all know leaders' need to consider the right things and to use smart processes, but how do we truly know if we actually are considering the right things and using the smartest processes at any given time? Even the most successful leaders will attest that making these determinations can be challenging, but I've found that Paid to THINK takes the mystery out of both. The author, David Goldsmith, offers what some call "an MBA in a book", and it's apparent that he not only sees things others miss, but he has developed very specific tools and instructions to enable readers to see opportunities and capitalize on them. The content is transformational for anyone who is in a leadership position and those who aspire to be.If at first you are intimidated by the size of the book, trust me, you shouldn't be. Once you read the Introduction and first two chapters, you get a basic foundation for the rest of the book, and you can then jump around from chapter to chapter depending on which material you think is most relevant to your present challenges. If you are tired of searching for answers in business and leadership/management books, you won't be disappointed after reading Paid to THINK. It will confirm your belief that your real value is to think and make great decisions (if you worked your way up from middle management then you know the truth in this), and it will show you what to think and how to turn your thoughts into realities. Make one of your decisions a commitment to read this book now. Your team will thank you!Beverly Babb, CAEFormer Executive Director of the Global Speakers FederationPresident of AdamsChandler, a practical project management firm

Excellent read! A genuinely new model for leadership building upon some tried and tested existing tools but combined with new ideas that challenge current thinking. A must read for all in management positions.

I'm absolutely shocked at how high this book has been rate. Maybe if the book was title Paid to Read and I got paid large sums of money to plow through this tripe, it may have been worth it, but even then probably not.This book is at best self-indulgent and basic and at worst irresponsibly long and a huge time waster. The advice is super basic and lacking anything truly innovative. Here's a smattering of some gems:- Rushing to action before doing the homework or laying a solid foundation can result in costly mistakes... p.37- Build an environment of system, structures, tools, equipment, etc. to support the talent and skills of your people and you will earn your trust. p45- Talking about project capacity he says: Full capcity is just a multiplication of the Two-Project Rule... a six-person management group... has a Full Capacity limit of twelve projects. Simple enough. p. 108Too simple in fact. There are hundreds of companies out there not using this simple formula and successfully completing projects at a rapid pace, yet there's no discussion about how to truly ramp your delivery, just an all-too basic formula. It's hundreds of pages of this garbage. Real research references are few and far between while interviews with companies you've never heard of and anecdotes about how "Fred" solved a strategy problem or "Nancy" solved a people problem litter the pages like trash on the grass after a rock concert.Seriously, if you got a lot of out this book, good for you. But if you're someone who's been around for a while and worked in any remotely successful business, save your money, there's nothing to see here. Read a book like "Making Ideas Happen" by Belskey for example if you want to get performance insights. It's a far more insightful, data driven, actionable and entertaining read that you'll get so much more out of. Oh, and it's not 700+ pages long!!!

Es un muy buen libro, con una buena cantidad de consejos sobre liderazgo, innovación y dirección de negocios. Encuentro especialmente sobresalientes las técnicas para conducir innovaciones tecnológicas y crear nuevos productos y servicios, así como la elaboración de pronósticos.

One of the best business books related to strategic thinking, planning, management I’ve ever read! The book is long and quite dense however ever page is worth reading as it provides useful tools and insights in thinking through problems and developing solutions.

Good to Read