The 12 Week Year
2009 • 208 pages
Ratings20
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings20
Average rating3.9
The guide to shortening your execution cycle down from one year to twelve weeks Most organizations and individuals work in the context of annual goals and plans; a twelve-month execution cycle. Instead, The 12 Week Year avoids the pitfalls and low productivity of annualized thinking. This book redefines your "year" to be 12 weeks long. In 12 weeks, there just isn't enough time to get complacent, and urgency increases and intensifies. The 12 Week Year creates focus and clarity on what matters most and a sense of urgency to do it now. In the end more of the important stuff gets done and the impact on results is profound. Explains how to leverage the power of a 12 week year to drive improved results in any area of your life Offers a how-to book for both individuals and organizations seeking to improve their execution effectiveness Authors are leading experts on execution and implementation Turn your organization's idea of a year on its head, and speed your journey to success.
Reviews with the most likes.
I really enjoyed the philosophy portrayed in The 12 Week Year and am excited to give it a go. The one thing that I wish this book could have given me (and maybe it's in the extra material provided with the book, but I was listening to it in the car) was more concrete examples of what people were doing in their 12 week year. The book leaned heavily on people with very calculable professions (i.e. sales or business owners) and I wonder how these practices will translate to me. Still going to give it a try.
I'm surprised by the low rating on GoodReads, as I think the plan/strategy is solid. My guess is it's because of the self-helpiness of the whole thing. When you read mostly in the productivity space, you've heard all the meta stuff before.
I would have preferred purely a how-to guide that was half the length and skipped the motivational stuff. There isn't much to the plan itself, but it is about the execution. Time will tell as to how it works for me, but I recognize the value in it because I generally do vision/system stuff at the beginning of the year, but the full year is too long. For that reason alone I'm going to try 12 week cycles because it makes more sense. Not revolutionary, and you don't need the book to do that, but if you've never done similar vision, goal setting activities this would be a good place to start.
There is plenty to sift through in this book. Like a typical business/self-help book, it is full of stories of people turning their lives around 765%! Many of the examples center around sales. For a lot of us, it is a snapshot of a world we don't live in.
That being said, there are plenty of things to potentially adopt in here that actually boil down to a straight-forward and simple system, which gives me hope.
