Review: The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao

The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Robert I. Sutton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was provided both the print and audio ARC of this book via Netgalley, all opinions are my own.  

This was great!  I deal with these situations in my day job every day.  We have situations where our executive team asks us to eliminate unnecessary processes and stop inviting 100 people to meetings that only need 5 people.  It is a very expensive meeting that could have been resolved with a 2 sentence email and resolved in about 5 minutes  What do we do instead?   We schedule a meeting to figure out how to schedule a meeting to figure out how to cut down the invitee list for the meeting we actually need to have.  My greatest hope is that the people causing the friction in companies actually read this.  Hopefully future friction fixers will read this and end up in positions of authority and be able to implement more efficient processes and make some of the changes the authors talk about in this book.  

The writing was relatable with examples of places where friction was eliminated to make companies more efficient and successful.  There were examples where patient care was improved and customer service was improved when friction aka the right stuff was improved and taken into account and the wrong stuff aka the stuff that doesn't add value and takes up time was eliminated.  I've experienced many of these types of situations first hand working on projects in my own career.  I think this is a great read if you are an up and coming professional or an aspiring leader.  As a individual contributor, these are all of the things I wish would change in the companies I've worked at and would like leadership to change.   

This book is a presentation of quite a few case studies.  There is alot of telling of friction filled situations and how friction fixers saved the day.  There isn't really a prescriptive checklist of how to make this work in your own industry or how to apply the examples to what you are doing today.    This books isn't going to make you a more effective leader overnight and solve all of your problems after you read it.  It will however make you think about places you can potentially look for friction and where you can look for efficiencies.  If you are a leader in an organization it will also perhaps give you some suggestions of who to talk to within your organization to get ideas of where the friction lies and how to make things work a little smoother for your employees and customers.

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