QTNT
Gillis takes an unusual angle on career management: measure your value. QTNT (read it as “quotient”) is a simple formula for quantifying what you contribute at work, weighing what an accomplishment was worth to the business against what it cost to employ you, so you can talk about your worth in concrete terms rather than adjectives. The book walks through identifying accomplishments, attaching honest dollar figures or percentages to them, and keeping the record current instead of reconstructing it the night before a review.
The exercise of actually calculating your contribution is the useful part, and almost nobody does it. Most people, including capable senior people, describe their work in terms of activities: managed this, supported that, was responsible for the other. Activities are costs. Contributions are outcomes with numbers on them, and the discipline of converting one into the other changes how you see your own job.
I have a particular sympathy for this problem because IT departments suffer from it institutionally. A technology organization that describes itself by its activities reads as overhead; the same organization described by outcomes, money saved through renegotiated contracts, revenue enabled through client integrations, hours returned through faster service, reads as an investment. I push my team to record their wins in outcome terms as the work happens, partly for their own careers and partly because it is the only honest way I can represent their value at budget time. Gillis is making the individual version of an argument I make organizationally every year.
Two cautions. Some contributions genuinely resist quantification, and forcing a number onto them can undermine your credibility; know when a well-told qualitative story is the stronger evidence. And the math only persuades if the inputs are defensible, so claim your share of shared wins, not the whole win.
A practical read for anyone preparing for a review, a negotiation, or a job search, and worth handing to strong performers who are bad at talking about themselves.