During the 1990s, Bell Labs teamed up with Robert Kelley, a Carnegie Mellon professor and organizational consultant to study what actually made their people productive. This book is the result of a 10-year long assessment.

While the focus of the work was on productivity, they studied those who were deemed "stars" at work by peers and superiors. At the time, it was assumed that some pre-determined trait such as intelligence or personality would determine who the stars were. This turned out not to be true, and a good thing because, as Kelley identifies, since the traits of stars are identifiable behaviors (he calls them strategies) then anyone can adopt them and anyone can be a star!

Here are the 9 strategies they identified, in order of importance:
-Initiative: blazing trails in the organization's white spaces.
-Networking: knowing who knows by plugging into the knowledge network
-Self-management: managing your whole life at work.
-Perspective: getting the big picture.
-Followership: checking your ego at the door to lead in assists.
-Leadership: doing small-l leadership in a Big-L world.
-Teamwork: Getting Real about Teams
-Organizational Savvy: Using street smarts in the corporate power zone.
-Show-and-tell: Persuading the Right Audience with the right message.

Kelley wants to distinguish between what most people perceive these strategies to be and the way that stars actually implement them. For example, with initiative he points out that while average performers think initiative means coming up with ideas to help them do their jobs better, stars view initiative as taking them into the white space beyond their job descriptions. (As a side note, I was struck that his number one characteristic of initiative seems very similar to Covey's first habit "Be Proactive.")

Still, I'm having trouble with the easy jump from "most productive workers" to "star." Is the objective to be better than your co-workers so that you get promoted (and they don't) or is it to be more productive, as an individual and as an organization?

I'm not sure that it logically follows that those selected as "stars" were necessarily the most productive workers of the enterprise. For example, one of the attributes of the stars was that they tapped into and exploited the expert networks but without the experts there wouldn't be much for the stars to do. One test for a strategy is to think "what if everyone did this" and here I'm not sure this particular trait holds up.

At the same time, if these are the traits of the most productive workers then we should be able to increase overall productivity by getting everyone to follow these behaviors.

Since the behaviors seem helpful, then what I'm interested in is how would we organize ourselves so that these behaviors are encouraged and naturally arise? Now that would be really interesting.

This is David Marquet from Practicum, Inc. We help organizations move from leader-follower structures to leader-leader structures. Visit our blog at [...], follow us on twitter[...], email: [...] to sign up for our monthly newsletter.

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You must be wondering why I use the title "A wonderful book to read" and not something else if I were to rate the book 5 stars. This is the first book that I have given full score.

I am an avid reader on performance management and the list of criteria to increase productivity and recognition is not new. However, the similarity with other books stops there. Robert E. Kelley put new meaning into the 9 identified criteria to be a star performer. He gave a new meaning to the criteria "initiative", "organisation savvy" and many others. You need to read the book in order to appreciate the meaning in the context that he had deftly written them.

I believe thoroughly based on what I read that anyone who could master the 9 criteria stated would become a star performer. However, there is a catch. Robert told the reader that you need to possess all 9 criteria and to practise them concurrently. That is a big challenge because any other management book will give you praises if you could manage to be proficient in one to two of the identified skills.

I am not discouraged by the need for all 9 skills to be practised together and so you should not be either. I am going to put what I read into practice and since the average time to see results as Robert stated in the book is 2 years, I will update my review in 2 years time.

Ease of reading: 5/5
Interesting reading: 4.5/5
Value for money (based on what was stated): 5/5
Value for money in practice: Will update in 2 years time
Profound new knowledge: 3/5
Profound new meaning: 5/5
Ease of practice: Will update in 2 years time

I read alot and only once in a few years do I find a book that totally redefines my picture of the world. This is such a book.
"How to Be a Star at Work" is a must read for every employee who wants to become more effective at work and in life, and managers/recruiters that want to improve their team effectiveness over time. What really impressed me is how much sense it really makes, yet how different the attributes indicated as important to develop are from those most commonly associated with stardom.
In that the attributes identified can all be learned and improved throughout a career, it brings me great hope and faith.

You need to read and re-read this book if:
1) you are a person with an undergraduate technical degree,working in a business setting.
2) you are a person with any type of advanced graduate degree working in any aspect of the private sector.
3) you are responsibile for supervising and leading "brainpowered" workers.
4)you are involved with technology-based Knowledge Management initiatives in your organization, and you need to know how the highest performing brainpowered workers collect, process, and repackage an organization's business and technical knowlege.
The title is a clear and honest summary of the book's contents. Ironically, many of the people who would most benefit from this book would be prone to skip over something with this title, dismissing it as a non-serious or non-useful effort. Do not make that mistake!
Take a look inside it, and see that it is in fact a highly credible and useful summary of everyday work practices frequently used by the elite of the high performing brainpowered workers.