EPIC PERFORMANCE

A debut business book offers advice from business leaders and athletes on achieving peak performance.

There is an elegant simplicity to this work that belies its depth. Beneath the surface of what seems to be a straightforward guide relying on an acronym is rich content deserving of serious consideration. Gillette’s own intriguing experiences as an endurance athlete, coupled with words of wisdom from over 100 fascinating people, make for compelling reading. The author’s credentials as a past human resources professional and current performance coach add to the volume’s veracity. The book is divided into five “pillars,” four of which are represented by the acronym EPIC (“Envision, Plan, Iterate, Collaborate”); the fifth one is “Perform.” Each pillar is succinctly summarized at the beginning by Gillette, who also helpfully includes synonyms, such as Dream and Conceptualize for Envision. Each pillar comprises three chapters, or “behaviors.” This structure cleverly provides continuity across the pillars, and it enhances the readability by breaking the text into manageable bites. Chapters are equally consistent; each one starts with a relevant quotation and ends with “Questions To Ask Yourself” and “Exercises,” helping readers to engage with the material and maintain focus. The author often refers to his remarkable athletic challenges—such as running races that were hundreds of miles—using them metaphorically to relate to personal and business leadership. These anecdotes are integrated with descriptions of business leaders’ challenges as well as their observations, all nicely fitting into the appropriate pillar. The Iterate pillar is particularly absorbing because it focuses on “trying, failing, tweaking, and trying again until you get it more right and then moving on.” The counsel conveyed in this section is especially valuable, including “Practicing when it doesn’t matter pays dividends when it does matter”; “You get what you inspect, not what you expect”; and “Big problems are easy to see but hard to fix, while little problems are hard to see but easy to fix.” These are a few examples of the meaningful, memorable lines that frequently appear in the work and should resonate with any high achiever.

An outstanding performance playbook.