Step Back: How to Bring the Art of Reflection into Your Busy Life

The title says it all in this skimpy, tiresome look at the need for businesspeople to take a break. Harvard Business School professor Badaracco (Managing in the Gray) spent four years interviewing more than 100 managers about the “art of reflection,” and determined that the key action for effectively incorporating this act into one’s job is to step back from the slog of everyday work. Successful people practice “mosaic reflection,” he explains, by setting aside small segments of time for deeper thinking. His breakdown of the ways to step back from the “cult of productivity”—be content with “good enough” when it comes to reflections, “downshift” occasionally into a mode of quiet reflection, and make time for considering difficult issues from different perspectives—are solid enough, but the exhaustive descriptions of the many people who use these methods are too similar to keep interest. His interviews turn up nothing terribly surprising; interviewees engage in the usual methods of exercise, prayer, keeping a journal, and sleeping on a problem, suggestions which are too familiar to be of much use. The result is an unnecessarily protracted look at an already well-understood concept. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn, ICM/Sagalyn. (July)