58 BOOK REVIEW Creative Commons Non Commercial CC-BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Cal Newport Piatkus—Litle, Brown Book Group, London, 2016, 296 pages, £8.99, ISBN: 978-0-349-41368-6 (paperback) BOOK REVIEW covers reviews of current books on management T o remain valuable in the new economy, mastering the art of quickly learning complicated things is paramount. This kind of task requires ingraining a crucial ability called deep work to stay competitive in a globally competitive information economy. However, a 2012 McKinsey study found that the knowl- edge worker on an average is spending more than 60 per cent of the work week engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 per cent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mails. Cal Newport in his Wall Street journal bestseller book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World has a valid reason to state that ‘the reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools’. It is quite evident that the rise of social media networks combined with ubiquitous access to them through smart phones and networked ofce computers has fragmented most knowledge worker’s atention into slivers. There is increasing evidence today of the knowledge workers not been involved in cognitively demanding tasks qualifed as deep work but rather in more logical style mundane tasks, which the author refers to as shallow work. To substantiate with an example, say, if we set about trying to brainstorm diferent approaches to a problem at hand, that is deep work. If we just answer a reply all in a department, that’s shallow work. The author observes that if our nature of work is primarily shallow in nature and does not warrant intellectual abilities, we increasing lose our capacity to perform cognitively challenging work referred to as deep work by the author. Therefore, the proposition of the book is based on the hypothesis that the ability to perform deep work is becoming increas- ingly rare at exactly the same time when it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. VIKALPA The Journal for Decision Makers 43(1) 58–60 © 2018 Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0256090917753047 http://journals.sagepub.com/home/vik