HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself

By: Harvard Business Review, Peter Ferdinand Drucker, Clayton M. Christensen, Daniel Goleman

Narrated by: Chris Kayser

Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's Summary

The path to your professional success starts with a critical look in the mirror.

If you listen to nothing else on managing yourself, you should at least hear these 10 articles (plus the bonus article "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton M. Christensen). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles to select the most important ones to help you maximize yourself.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself will inspire you to:

• Stay engaged throughout your 50+-year work life
• Tap into your deepest values
• Solicit candid feedback
• Replenish physical and mental energy
• Balance work, home, community, and self
• Spread positive energy throughout your organization
• Rebound from tough times
• Decrease distractibility and frenzy
• Delegate and develop employees' initiative

This collection of best-selling articles includes: bonus article "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton M. Christensen, "Managing Oneself", "Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?", "How Resilience Works", "Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time", "Overloadeded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform", "Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life", "Reclaim Your Job", "Moments of Greatness: Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership", "What to Ask the Person in the Mirror", and "Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance."

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2010 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Oldies But Goodies

If you could sum up HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself in three words, what would they be?

Great review material

Any additional comments?

After 25 years in management at a Fortune 500 company I was familiar with the messages these 10 articles delivered. Each of them offers tips and techniques that when culled to address my personal needs create a map that allows me to be more efficient and effective. I was disappointed that I had not researched the topics well enough to understand the most of the material wasn't current research. It's still very applicable in many ways though.

Annoying Reading Structure

The Narrator jumps from the article to the "Idea in brief" and "Idea in practice" sections. This causes three very annoying problems:
1. It is imposible to know when each section finishes and he is continuing with the article.
2. The flow of the article story is suddenly interrupted by those sections.
3. As those sections are summaries of the article, it is really confusing to hear the same words repeated without a proper structure (a few times I wondered if the audiobook went a few minutes backward, as I was hearing the same words again).

The solution to these problems is simple: read those two sections either at the beginning or end of each article, but not in the middle!

I only realized about this silly mistake when I bought the printed copy and decided to combine it with the audio book.

bad formatting

the text boxes and titles are all read as part of the main text, which is extremely annoying. bad production.

Not a "must read" for a business person

Only a few of the articles were interesting but not "must reads" for a business person. Perhaps the articles were novel at the time they were published. Since then, many of the insightful topics have been expanded into books. A business person would recognize some of the authors like Peter F. Drucker ("The Effective Executive"), Jim Collins ("Good to Great"), and Daniel Goleman ("Emotional Intelligence").

Essential Listening for Leaders and Aspiring Leaders

The content within this audio book hit important topics such as understating ones strength and weakness, understanding the basics of emotional intelligence in order to better manage your work. The monkey discussion hot the nail on the head. Get the monkey off of your back. Delegate and coach subordinates. Much more great topics. Must read.

You are one person

A fantastic collection of texts discussing how your personal life and your business life reflect each other.

Some Articles Better than Others

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Probably not - most of the stories are pretty conventional in the current era; work-life balance, it's not all about money, etc. There were a couple of good articles that I would recommend, but I don't think this compilation is anything special.

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

I think I would pick a few more recent articles to include in the compilation.

What three words best describe Chris Kayser’s voice?

Steady, light, consistent

Could you see HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

If this were a TV series, I definitely think Angela Lansbury would need to be part of the project.

Any additional comments?

If you love the current generation of leadership books, I think you'll find most of these articles to be a bit dated. There are a few classics in this collection, however. The "Monkey on your back" article, particularly.

The Self, Goals, and Building Relationships

Good specific applications. Numerous case studies reveal the power of relqtionships and success. Great examples of how using a mirror both helps and hurts decision making. ultimatly, trust, teamwork, and quality relationship building create environments where success is more the norm than the exception. Emotional intelligence seems to have finally overahadowed cognitive intelligence.

Good book from managing yourself

I really enjoyed listening this. There was surprisingly lot tips what I would categorize as biohacks. Building some good habits, measuring effects and learning and again building ect. I'll recommend this book.

Very Dry

I think this is better read than listened to. I found the content a bit dry as well.

Articles / author list

Unfortunately audible doesn't provide a suitable list of article/author:

BONUS ARTICLE How Will You Measure Your Life? - Clayton M. Christensen, 2010 McKinsey Award Winner
Managing Oneself - Peter F. Drucker
Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? - William Oncken, Jr., and Donald L. Wass
How Resilience Works - Diane L. Coutu
Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time - Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy
Overloaded Circuits - Edward M. Hallowell
Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life - Stewart D. Friedman
Reclaim Your Job - Sumantra Ghoshal and Heike Bruch
Moments of Greatness: Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership - Robert E. Quinn
What to Ask the Person in the Mirror - Robert S. Kaplan
Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance - Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee

I love listening to the same things 50 times over

Something’s very wrong with the audio format. A lot of the stories are repeated a million times over and it’s frustrating.

Good content but dull narration/hard going

There are a lot of really good ideas and suggestions in book but the HBR article format can make for difficult listening and the narration is really dull. With a different narrator or a slightly abridged version this audiobook might be transformed into something really good. I found myself getting lost between ideas in brief and summaries/boxes which I am sure are really helpful in print but need more 'space' or explanation to work in audio (or you need to give the book your whole attention whilst listening!).

Some of these articles are quite dated but the book does a good job of including newer articles where the ideas have been more developed.

It could have been much shorter book

I’ve learnt one or two things from the book. But I should say it is unnecessarily long. I didn’t enjoy it as much as it should have been. The narrator voice was on my nerves all the time. I felt the tone is suitable for marketing rather than reading a book. In short, you’ll learn few interesting stories that probably you have heard before but here it is analysed.

Life principles!

I will be listening to this repeatedly for awhile. So glad I chose this title. Beyond useful nuggets and questions to help position you to live the life you were meant to live.

Tautological

Quite tautological and the authors chew the stories like rubber. Only minor matters are repeated, but major parts are often skipped.

Phenomenal listen!

Content was 100% relateable for me. Easy to grasp lessons. Do yourself a favour really

Glitchy audiobook!

Certain parts of the book keep repeating making it really hard to follow. The book was otherwise interesting.

Compendium of Thought provoking insights

Nothing new here that can’t be found in depth in other books but this is a useful compilation and introduction of the high level principles.

awesome

love it very very good stuff, highly recommend it to others. i thoroughly enjoy listening