What Your Employees Need and Can’t Tell You

I had mixed feelings while reading “What Your Employees Need and Can’t Tell You” by Melina Palmer. Sometimes, I felt very positive about the book, giving me a lot of valuable insights and knowledge, but then I got confused about what the book was about. While its subtitle, “Adopting to Change with the Science of Behavioral Economics”, suggests it is about driving changes in a workplace, I often didn’t feel at all.

I was also thinking about how many genuine thoughts the book has or if it is a nicely done patchwork from various sources.

Finally, the book tried to introduce its “It’s Not About the Cookie” framework, but I would have difficulty recalling it and explaining it to someone else.

Despite all these negative thoughts, the book is still informative, attention-grabbing, and worth reading. It introduced me to the term behaviour economics, which I’m grateful for. I found some references and terms valuable, such as choice architect, planning fallacy, time discounting, confirmation bias and IKEA effect, to name a few.

What I liked the most:

• Getting to know the behaviour economics.
• Several good references and terms.

What I didn’t like much:

• Sometimes it was foggy what the book was about.
• It was less genuine than many other books I have read. Too often, it was referring to thoughts from other sources.