Top Highlights

• the voice of popular culture and fad-ridden management books wins out over the voice of scientific research. Jargon-filled, densely written journal papers are harder to access than the pop-psych books filling the shelves. This book aims to remedy that — to give you a clear, practical understanding of what has been scientifically proven to create a ...
• It's important to feel challenged by your work, and this is borne out by many studies that link challenge to increased creativity and innovation. In the 2007 meta-analysis ‘Climate for creativity: A quantitative review', Samuel Hunter and his colleagues found that employees feeling a strong sense of challenge in their work is one of the strongest d...
• mental arousal and performance.
• They found that a high level of arousal enhances performance on simple tasks. That is, it is a simple linear relationship: the more alert and focused people are, the better their performance. However, they found that a high level of arousal actually decreases performance on complex tasks. In fact what they found was that an intermediate level of ar...
• Many people completely ignore the very important finding that the inverted U-shape applies only to complex tasks — not simple ones. For simpler tasks, the U-shaped curve is much flatter, as we can deal with a greater range of arousal when completing basic tasks such as brushing our teeth.