Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder than Ever but Accomplishing Less, and How to Fix the Problem

How many countless working hours have you spent on projects, proposals, paperwork, and meetings that felt useless or were ignored or dismissed? Hard work is not the same as real work. Half of the work we do consumes valuable time without strengthening the short- or long-term survival of the organization. In a word, it's fake. Not only does fake work drain a company's resources without improving its bottom line, it steals conviction, care, and positive morale from employees, and adds the burden of high turnover, communication breakdowns, and cultural patterns of poor productivity.

But how can you turn fake work into real work? Internationally renowned business consultants Brent D. Peterson and Gaylan W. Nielson explain how to identify needlessly time-consuming and sometimes difficult tasks (which aren't always as easy to spot as they seem) and shift your focus toward rewarding work that will achieve results. With more than twenty years of experience, Peterson and Nielson have successfully helped corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, schools, and community groups increase their productivity and retain talented employees by understanding and using their skills on things that actually matter. They illustrate their advice with stories about real world employees who have been trapped by fake work.

Fake Work offers solutions that will change the way you view work, including how to recognize fake work and how to get out of it, how (and what) to communicate with your colleagues to eliminate fake work, how to recognize and counteract the personality traits that encourage fake work, and how to close the gap between your company's strategies and the work that needs to be done to reach the results critical to your and your company's survival.

Brent D. Peterson, Ph.D. is a partner and co-founder of The Work Itself Group, Inc., an organization that provides learning interventions that help organizations and individuals align strategy with work. He serves as chairman of the board of two learning and change companies, Integrative Learning Corporation (headquartered in Singapore) and The Navigational Leadership Group (a U.S.-based learning company). He has spent 30 years at 5 universities as a professor of human resource development; is author or co-author of 20 books; is founder and owner of 3 consulting companies; has facilitated more than 3,000 corporate workshops; is a trusted business partner with many Fortune 500 Companies; and was a Senior Vice President for the FranklinCovey Company and directed their Center for Research Assessment.  

Gaylan W. Nielson, M.A. is a partner and the co-founder of the Ascent Group. As a business consultant, he helps organizations focus on organizational results by developing strategies and aligning those strategies at the team and personal level. He has been a senior consultant for more than 20 years; an owner, director, and general manager for 14 years; a strategist, implementation consultant, and process designer for numerous clients; a trainer and facilitator for more than 1,500 corporate and federal agency programs; a trusted business partner with Fortune 500 Companies. He was also Vice president, director, and general manager for Custom Projects for Custom Learning Group for FranklinCovey Inc.