The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life

Game-changing book

I was lucky to receive an advance copy of this book and I've read it twice now. I really believe this book has the potential to change our current economic reality.

Here's why...
What most books, authors, and experts are doing is prescribing solutions, which may or may not work (usually not). But the Three Laws of Performance have nothing to do with techniques. It's all about how to fundamentally shift our view of the situation, and notice how we are living in what they call a "default future" - meaning we're heading to where all of our unsaid beliefs say we're heading.

But once we learn to recognize it, we can shift how the world occurs to us, and actually re-write our future. I know, this may not make sense, but once you read the book it will be crystal clear.

From a sheer practical business perspective, I learned how to disarm any complaint (including my own) and how I can create a company that is literally self-led, meaning the organization (if it is operating according to the three laws) will lead itself.

What's great is that these principles work whether you're in business or not (isn't business just a vast network of individuals?).

I highly recommend reading it, because I believe you will play a part in turning our world around.

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

A Very Timely Book

While this is a business book, it is relevant to all of the challenges that we are facing. From the economy to the environment. If we are to meet the enormous challenges successfully we are going to have to think and act in entirely new ways. The Three Laws of Performance are give an answer to the question of how we are going to deal with the mess we are now facing.

The book offers very practical steps as well as real life expamples of how people in organizations of all kinds have been able to litteraly re-invent the future of their organizations.

This is also true even in organizations where people get paid to do a job. The authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan contend that it is people's individual views and the language they use to describe their situations that determine the actions they take. According to the book, the way people both view and speak about situations is influenced almost exclusively by the past. This in turn limits people's ability to adapt and work cooperatively together as past successes and failures literally limit their view of what is possible. This is true for both individual people as well as the organizations they are a part of. Just think of the auto industry or a losing sports team.

This is about what is possible and about people an organizations not jsut having a say but actually making what is possible a reality.

I highly reccomend this book.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Excellent Book

This is one of the best books on leadership and leadership skills application that I have read. The examples in the book are very insightful. Our team is going through a self-analysis and team improvement process, so this is a great resource.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Great book for all - apply it to what you want to create in life

The first law, 'how people perform correlates to how situations occur to them,' has given me a view on a fixed way that I automatically view things that happen around me. I will react in life as if I am being left out of something when it looks to me like I was not told about some thing after the fact. Who knows why I didn't hear about the thing, but I start to think someone was trying to keep something from me. Very silly, really.

The second law is that how a situation occurs (for someone) arises in language. When we can get how maliable language is, we can alter situations not only for ourselves, but even for others. There is work to do to see what the current future we live into is, but when you can, you can create something new and apply the third law.

One has to use future-based language to transform how situations occur to people, according to the third law. We can learn to create and live in a whole new language, although within our native or other learned language such as English, that gives new views on life. This book presents a way to do so.

I was particularly moved by one of the stories of Mills, CEO of Lonmin in South Africa, who stayed overnight in a hostal with the company workers in a poor part of town. His actions altered how the workers saw him and themselves in relation to the company. He awoke to African warriors guarding him. He stated that he was the safest man in South Africa. I think he was not only the safest but also the most inspiring person in the world that night.

If you want to get what a great leader is or if you are interested in creating a shift in a company or organization or even in yourself, read the book. I highly recommend the Three Laws of Performance!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Creating a future and living into it

I read the book two weeks ago and was subsequently in Jamaica to create a mentoring program for children whose parents are in jail. When I was interviewed on a radio program in Jamaica I used the distinction of creating a future and within 24 hours of the program airing a Team was formed to mentor the children. The Team's participants were from the Departments of Corrections and Social Services and a group of MBA students that were enrolled by their Professor. Creating from the past, this would have taken months to accomplish.

I was "listened" to as creating the future for these children now. What showed up, from the distinctions in the book, was a Team.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Highly Recommended

As you are reading this book you can't help but think that it was written for you. It will make you take action and as a result you will never look at your life the same way.

Excellent read for individuals and groups

As a Landmark Forum graduate, the tools discussed in the book are focused on groups and organizations, and when you read about their group improvements you individually are as well. I know that I will repeatedly read this book and discover something new each time I read it.

Good Companion to the Landmark Forum

We read this book after taking the Landmark Forum and found it a good companion text to the Forum. While the book's primary focus is the world of business and organizations, it still has many applications to individuals and relationships.

When you want to get ahead in business

I highly recommend this book. Read it twice if you need to. I took notes and go back to them quite often. I gave the book to another person. And I suggest you do the same. They will thank you for it.

Three laws, three decades of research at your fingertips

If your default future, read book, doesn't get in the way, the laws in this book will transform any aspect of your life.

Hopeful pitch for organizational openness

Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan recognize that businesses and their leaders face radical shifts in the corporate climate and confront pressing organizational problems. But rather than wallow in negativity, they offer communication-based solutions called the "Three Laws of Performance" that they believe can transform companies and individual relationships. Zaffron and Logan explain how to energize and sustain your organization - and your personal life - by using candid language, fostering open discussion, confronting past wounds and voicing a positive future vision. Their ideas may not be revolutionary, but getAbstract finds them interesting, sensible and worthy of close examination.

Excellent - lots of top notch content packed into a quick and easy read.

This book contains some great instruction on how to systematically alter your perspective to empower yourself. It is illustrated with great examples, mostly from the business world, but is broadly applicable.

An absolute must-read book for our times

One of the things I've always wondered about Management Consultants is "What do they actually do?" Or, to put it another way, "How much difference can they really make, or is it all just a bunch of hot air?"

This book certainly gives some dramatic real-life examples of radical shifts that the authors caused in companies that they advised. Shifts that went way beyond any normal conception of what we would expect to be possible. Right in the first chapter they detail a turn-round at the Lonmin mining company in South Africa, where a disastrous safety record and inter-racial tension stalemated all previous attempts to improve productivity.

The case of Lonmin was an illustration of the "First Law" - that How people perform correlates to how the situation occurs to them. This is profound. It rarely crosses our minds that what we perceive is merely our own interpretation of a situation - we take it for granted that we directly perceive the reality itself. Other people's actions often seem to us to make no sense at all - yet they will be perfectly logical to that person, given the interpretation they have: on that occurs to them as reality!

The second and third laws deal with way that this "occurring world" arises and what can be done to re-cast it both for ourselves and for others.

Although primarily written from the perspective of resolving conflicts and challenges in a workplace contexts, every insight in the book applies just as readily to our family and inter-personal situations.

Powerful read that effectively created meaningful value in my daily life.

I have enjoyed the 3 Laws book. Specifically, just yesterday I found that I was using what I had learned to influence how I was communicating with a client.

The book points to the importance of a person's unique point of view. The authors claim that performance (in any area of life), is really a function of our "occurring" world and that world that arises in the language we use.

The book is full of specific examples of everyone from individuals to large organizations can dramatically alter their performance through the Three Laws. A must read for leaders, business owners and people up to making a difference for the people they care about.

In addition, I have written a series of blogs on the book at:
http://bradyuselman.com/?p=33

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