The modern workplace feels increasingly impossible. Work has intensified and chaos seems constant. What if you simply want to get things done well without losing your mind? Melissa Swift, founder of Anthrome Insight, draws on current research and provocative interviews with business and academic leaders to help each of us understand how to be amazing in a working world seemingly designed to make us feel incompetent.
Each chapter in Effective delivers actionable approaches, enabling readers to improve their daily work life immediately with a paradigm-shifting framework for thriving rather than merely coping in modern professional environments. Readers will emerge with strategies they haven’t tried before—shifting their approach to work on a deep level.
Effective helps each of us understand our own sources of effectiveness through the simple Effectiveness Architecture that gives us the power to withstand change and disruption.
It features:
- Strategies to triumph amid four trends making work tough today: work intensification, emotional inflection, hyper-transparency, and sheer chaos
- Practical, research-backed approaches to improve their daily work life, from entry-level employees to CEOs
- Tips for maintaining competence in a working world seemingly designed to make you feel incompetent
- Insights on how to make sure your personal sources of effectiveness don’t get disrupted by technological change
- Lessons to be learned from jobs where you simply cannot screw up, such as firefighters and air traffic controllers, and how to apply them to a corporate environment
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About The Author
Melissa Swift is a leading voice on how organizations, teams, and individuals can succeed in an ever more challenging world of work. As founder and CEO of Anthrome Insight, she is a practicing consultant and keynote speaker helping organizations with data-driven views and concrete actions to shape a productive future in chaotic times. She has held consulting leadership roles at Capgemini, Mercer, Korn Ferry, and Deloitte, and is the author of Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World and Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace.
Throughout her career, Melissa has leveraged unconventional analytics and broken down traditional people consulting siloes to provide actionable guidance on topics such as the organizational side of digital transformation and the changing nature of leadership in the C-suite and beyond. Both a humanist and a pragmatist, Melissa has continually explored the balance of maximizing human potential and worker health while simultaneously achieving outstanding business outcomes.
Melissa is a member of the MIT Sloan Management Review’s Editorial Board and one of the publication’s most widely-read columnists. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Newsweek, and a host of other prestigious publications, as well as appearances on NPR. Melissa was named to the Thinkers50 Radar 2030 list, and Work Here Now appeared on awards lists from McKinsey and Porchlight Books. She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
“Effective is a rare blend of rigor and humanity. Melissa Swift gives leaders and employees a shared language for what ‘good work’ actually looks like across roles, industries, and moments of real pressure. If you care about building organizations where people can be effective and sane, this is essential reading.”
—Nick Avery, Chief People Officer at Carta
“In this book, Melissa Swift answers the one question everyone is asking today: ‘Knowing work is a mess, what can I actually do differently?’ Swift offers a compassionate, practical ‘third way’: Effectiveness. Moving beyond the tired battle between ‘fix the worker’ and ‘fix the system,’ this book hands the power back to you. With wit, empathy, and deep industry insight, Swift builds an ‘Effectiveness Architecture’ to help you withstand the forces crushing modern workers—without losing yourself in the process.”
—Dr. Anna Tavis, Clinical Professor and Chair of the Human Capital Management Department at NYU’s School of Professional Studies, Author of Humans at Work and The Digital Coaching Revolution
“What stands out about Effective is its respect for fundamentals. It shows how clarity, preparation, and strong systems enable people to perform reliably—even in chaotic, fast-moving environments. I can’t imagine a single industry where that doesn’t resonate today.”
—Michael Steen, CEO of Atlas Air Worldwide
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Donate a copy of Effective to WorthyBooks
Melissa Swift has partnered with WorthyBooks, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, to share her book on how to navigate the weird, chaotic world of modern work to nonprofits, libraries, and underserved communities across the country.
Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace
90 strategies that organizations and teams can employ today to create a powerhouse workplace and make people-centered decisions.
Work Here Now offers business and HR leaders a practical humanistic roadmap for reinventing work.
Take a close look at all the ways we’ve made work downright inhuman–inadvertently stifling growth, profitability, and innovation.
Melissa Swift offers a better model of work, helping leaders look in unexpected places for next-generation improvements that benefit everyone.
From rethinking work hours and top-down management to making small tweaks that will make a big difference, Work Here Now helps organizations of all shapes and sizes create environments that help people succeed.
