The Three Big Questions for the Frantic Family

A Leadership Fable...About Restoring Sanity To The Most Important Organization In Your Life

By: Patrick Lencioni

Narrated by: uncredited

Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

In this unique and groundbreaking book, business consultant and New York Times best-selling author Patrick Lencioni turns his sights on the most important organization in our lives - the family. As a husband and the father of four young boys, Lencioni realized the discrepancy between the time and energy his clients put into running their organizations and the reactive way most people run their personal lives. Having experienced the stress of a frantic family firsthand, he and his wife began applying some of the tools he uses with Fortune 500 companies at home, and with surprising results.

©2008 Patrick Lencioni (P)2008 Random House Audio

30 minutes of content padded with fours hours of fluff.

The overall message is great. I would STRONGLY suggest listing to the interview the author did at the Art of Manliness podcast. So much of this is just pointless filler designed to turn this into a book.

Let me clear, it is worth slogging through the nonsense in order to get the author’s points. However, the VAST majority of this book is completely unnecessary and comes off as filler just so it can be made long enough to call it a book.

Extremely practical, highly useful

I have read a number of Patrick Lencioni's books. This one, too, does not disappoint. I read a lot of business writing and Lencioni again does well to help us grasp new habits that could be complex if we were left to decipher them ourselves.

This book takes us through a family's trek to discern their own family values (using the 3 q's), and as a product of that, they are able to develop their own priority statements, which they use to develop short term goals while maintaining crucial priorities.

I initially picked up this title because it promised to answer the questions my wife and I have debated for so long. My wife has come out of it even more enthusiastic than I!

This was time well spent. My wife and I are already using it to define our own value and family priority statements.

Great bridge from organizational thinking to family life

The author did a good job of taking some basic business principles and integrating them into a family's day to day living. It is surprising how easily this transfers but how compartmentalized we can be. Bridging these theories , I believe, can bear a lot of fruit in one's home life. Excited to give it a shot!

Spot on!

My wife and I listened to this on a recent trip back from KC to Dallas. She said the life of the wife was spot on. She ordered the book from Amazon and we're going to give this approach of family planning a try to put some agreed priorities in our lives.

Very good reading for families like us

The examples in the book are extremely authentic. It was like narrating every day activities for my family. Sound practical solutions and, in many ways, fresh look at how to inject more success in family life. The narrator is a weak point.

Articulates how I feel daily.

Every example used is completely relatable. I can definitely take the model and apply it to my family and quickly see progress. It's about CONTEXT not PERFECTION!

Worth reading, but annoying

Could’ve been much shorter. I enjoyed the real examples more than the fake ones.

Just the three questions with explanations of what is an effective answer or not would’ve been more helpful than some made up family

Insightful

What I like the most is that Patrick Lencioni applies his core principles about organizational clarity for example in many books. That way they become clearer! Didn’t know these principles were universal! Great read

Must read

This is his best book yet. The best part is it gives you clear steps for implementation and examples

THE MOST helpful clarity guide for work and FAMILY.

I’m a member if Front Row Dads, an organization with the moto “Family Men with businesses not Business Men with Families”. With the amazing support from this group, it can still be tough to completely break clear of the insane over scheduling and lack of direction that happens with family life but not well run businesses. This book makes it easy - to run family life as optimized as possible, with very little homework and very little thought. Simple process but life changing for anyone that gets this book. Best wishes for your new and improved family life!

Contrived and impossible to take seriously

I couldn’t get more than a third of the way through this. The fable is a story so co thrived it was insulting. It was inauthentic, had twee interactions, and patronising. I couldn’t connect to the fake questions Theresa asks to expose the story.

For example, she says, “A few weeks ago I saw a sign in the elevator of a hospital that said their core values were... She thought about it for a moment before slowly ticking off the ones she could remember: [cue thinking voice by narrator] innovation, quality, teamwork, customer service, patient care, integrity, financial responsibility. She hesitated before continuing. They also had community service and diversity and environmentalism in there. They laughed.”

I was expecting something a bit more heavyweight and in keeping with Lencioni’s gravitas. Fine to make theory more accessible, but this was insultingly “dumbed down”.
I couldn’t see/hear through it to extract any legitimate content.

Great practical takeaways

Highly recommended. I'm an organised, forward-thinking person, so this kind of approach really appeals to me. I'm excited about sharing this with my wife - it'll provide us with a excellent framework and universal language for focusing our family on what's important and how we make decisions.

Four stars instead of five because I thought too much of the "business stuff" from other books (specifically The Advantage) was covered early on. For me, that's fine, I'm a big fan of Lencioni and have introduced a lot of his work at my company. However, I think others may have to battle through some of that to get the real value from this book. But battle through they should, because the second half - when the main family starts breaking through and Lencioni provides several examples of real families implementing the three questions - is great!