REVIEW: Jane Frankel — The Intentional Mindset (BOOK)
“You have the ability to take better care of yourself if you strive to use your mindset to be autonomous, introspective, and collaborative in your activities. Awareness of mindset, inquiry, and learning will help you make good decisions for sustainability and growth for yourself and/or your organization. I aim to share some ideas on how to explore, understand, and manage your mindset for decisions that lead to desired outcomes. I am hoping you will choose to develop an enabling awareness of your mindset and those of others in order to ensure the destiny that you seek,” writes Jane Frankel in her new book, The Intentional Mindset: Data, Decisions, and Your Destiny.
The book as a whole, as its titling suggests, is something of a guide to achieving success in life — not just in a corporate sense. But when Frankel brilliantly demonstrates is such pursuit can be dependent upon multiple factors simultaneously. There’s a distinctive methodology to the pursuit of success and self-determination, in a manner adherent to not just common sense, but implementation of something Frankel christens the Knowledge Economy. Through this concept, Frankel is able to effectively sandwich multiple different ideas and subcategories into something concise, and wholly understandable for a wide audience. There’s never the feeling Frankel is tangential, or has to resort to literary grandstanding to fill in any potential blanks.
“Decision makers must work autonomously as they consider data and information to create knowledge, which allows solid decisions,” Frankel writes, in a key passage titled Acceleration. “This autonomy includes both independent and dependent work. The independence of autonomy gives you control of your work and the dependence seeks other’s expertise to complement your own expertise. Knowledge workers make decisions but only after inquiry and learning have brought insight to the decision.
GOOD READS: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125186941-the-intentional-mindset
Building autonomous mindsets that enable inquiry and learning for decision making, for yourself and with your stakeholders, is essential in the knowledge economy. It is essential that knowledge workers have mindsets that value inquiry and learning, allowing them to continuously evaluate their own thinking and that of their stakeholders to ensure clarity and overarching alignment for successful decisions.”
From this, Frankel effectively states, one can achieve a cumulative state of utilizing all angles simultaneously. “Understanding and using mindset propels a project to success, your own or that of an organization,” she writes. “A community mindset can minimize challenges within project, customer, partner, and/or merged environments. It facilitates and clarifies work with an environment that motivates knowledge workers to inquire, learn, and build knowledge to guide decisions.
This community mindset leads knowledge workers to highest performance…Philosophers describe how mindsets impact society and the actions people take that preserve or change society. Conversely, this same society impacts individuals for good or for bad. It makes sense to understand this connection as best as you can through an understanding of mindset components, what created yours, and how you need to manage them. Ultimately, does your mindset need alternation to lead to better outcomes?”
Colin Jordan
