2023 A Year in Books
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***
When McKinsey Comes to Town
Make Your Bed
Mission in a Bottle
The Thank You Economy
The Power of Remote
The Circadian Code
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Stealing Fire
The Elevated Leader
Let My People Go Surfing
Navigating Ambiguity
Shorter
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** When McKinsey Comes to Town Make Your Bed Mission in a Bottle The Thank You Economy The Power of Remote The Circadian Code Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Stealing Fire The Elevated Leader Let My People Go Surfing Navigating Ambiguity Shorter
One of my favorite traditions to close out the year is sharing the learning and ideas that have shaped my thinking and challenged my world view in the last 12 months. The ever-evolving landscape of innovation for social impact calls for a deeper understanding of humanity and a reimagining of our approach to work. Join me in exploring ethics, gratitude, leadership, navigating ambiguity, challenging the status quo, and uncovering the secrets to purpose-driven entrepreneurship.
I read When McKinsey Comes to Town (ironically) on a client trip to Kenya. The book is a compelling expose on the ethics of consulting and when money and greed superseded values and integrity. Often McKinsey's advice boils down to major cost-cutting, including layoffs and maintenance reductions, to drive up short-term profits, thereby boosting a company's stock price and the wealth of its executives who hire it, at the expense of workers and safety measures.
Overall I took this as a massive cautionary tale as we are three years into building Rising Solutions. Integrity, humility, and transparency matter.
If you’re looking for a short and sweet motivational read, Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life… and Maybe the World by Admiral William H. McRaven is excellent.
What I loved the most about this book is that although MCRaven uses anecdotes from his time with the Navy Seals to offer simple life lessons, he could easily be talking about the path of entrepreneurship.
My two favorite lessons:
If you want to change the world.. Start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud. McRaven recounts a story from his Seal training where, cold and exhausted, the Seal instructors were trying to get the candidates to tap out. Just as candidates stand up to tap out, a lone candidate starts singing. As other candidates join in, those considering tapping out sit back down and recommit to the exercise. So, find a way to sing and be that light for others in dark times.
The namesake of the book - If you want to change the world.. Start by making your bed. Simply stated, “sometimes the simple act of making your bed can give you the lift you need to start your day and provide you the satisfaction to end it right. Sometimes just that small win is all you need to keep going.
What a joy to learn about the book Mission in a Bottle at DC Startup Week from keynote speaker, Seth Goldman, founder of Honest Tea. I picked up the book after the conference and imagine my surprise when I found out it was a graphic novel!
What an insanely clever and creative way to convey the story of a business. It brought the lessons learned to life in a way no other business book I’ve read can. In particular, the best learnings were in the chapters that detailed pricing, business modeling, and ultimately their acquisition by Coca-Cola.
Throughout the book, Seth and Barry Nalebuff talked about honesty as a core value and I loved how this played out in the transparency of the information and lessons learned in the book. Cannot recommend this one enough. It’s also a nice break from a traditional text format!! 😃
Boy did The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk hit home! At its core, the book is about caring for your customers. Here are my three favorite takeaways:
"When given the choice, people will always spend their time around people they like. When it’s expedient and practical, they'd also rather do business with and buy stuff from people they like."
The reality at this point in my career, even as a small business owner who has a bottom line, is I want to work with people I respect, admire, and genuinely enjoy. If a client doesn't feel like a fit, it's a no... life is too short.
"We’re living in what I like to call the Thank You Economy, because only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way - and do it authentically - are going to have a prayer of competing."
I love the emphasis on authenticity. Just be a good human. Work from love, give grace and patience, we all need it. If you're too tired to provide it, rest. Lead with your most authentic self.
"You cannot underestimate the sharpness of people's bullshit radar - they can spot a soulless bureaucratic tactic a million miles away."
This cracks me up. It's a universal truth that we all know but sometimes conveniently forget or we don't take the time to act on. I hate obviously transparent marketing tactics, they are all over Instagram and TikTok these days.. they feel extractive. I want to know you are insanely passionate about solving my problem.
This is a rather unusual review. I tried to read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** and I literally couldn’t do it.
I identify as a practicing Buddhist and while the underlying philosophy espoused in the book is based on the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism – which explores why we suffer (the author even introduces the story of the Buddha in the second chapter) the sarcastic rhetorical prose of the book, which I think is a tactic towards an “every man” type lingo, loses all the compassion, kindness, and love that makes Buddhism so powerful. Instead, it read almost nihilistic to me.
If you’re interested in this concept of detachment from suffering, I suggest Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright or Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. I will say that The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** is a New York Times Bestseller so clearly folks liked it, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. 🙂
Not only was The Power of Remote useful as the manager of a fully remote, global team, but my favorite part was the depth of workplace research around productivity and innovation:
The fear of remote work is the narrative that productivity will drop. In fact, a 2020 survey of managers found that more than 40% expected remote staff to be less productive than their office-bound colleagues" (pg47)
However, an August 2020 study of 800 employers by Mercer found that 67% of employers felt productivity stayed the same after going fully remote and 27% reported it increased. (pg 34)
A Flexjobs survey in 2022 of more than 2000 employees who worked remotely during COVID found that 95% felt their productivity had either increased or stayed the same. (pg 34)
Here's what's interesting about remote work and innovation, one of the reasons we are champions of remote work is because it allows organic opportunities for your Default Mode Network (DMN) to turn on. Your DMN is the part of your brain that turns on during mind wandering, while your brain is actively using your memories and experiences, and the data it has absorbed to come up with creative solutions.
Innovation requires "collisions" - interactions and learning that spark new creative insights which are often triggered following time in the DMN.
The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda details the amazing benefits of aligning your day with your circadian code. Specifically, Panda talks about the impacts of light, time-restricted eating, and the ability to prevent chronic disease by aligning sleep and diet. Here's a favorite takeaway:
"Your optimal brain function is highest between 10 AM and 3 PM. That’s when you should notice that your best work or learning is done. Studies have shown that this is the window during which we are in the right frame of mind for making decisions, solving multifaceted problems, and navigating complicated social situations” (p.126).
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World by Margaret Wheatley is deeply beautiful and thought-provoking. Wheatley draws from new discoveries in biology, chaos theory, and quantum physics to offer a new way of looking at organizational development.
She writes, “the real world stands in stark and absolute contrast to the world invented by western thought. We believe that people organizations in the world are machines and we organize massive systems to run like clockwork in a steady-state world. The leader's job is to create stability and control, because without human intervention, there is no hope for order. Without strong leadership everything falls apart. It is assumed that most people are dull, not creative, that people need to be bossed around, that new skills develop only through training. People are motivated using fear and rewards; internal motivators such as compassion and generosity are discounted. These beliefs have created a world filled with disengaged workers who behave like robots, struggling in organizations to become more chaotic and ungovernable over time.” (p.170)
But what we need is “fewer descriptions of tasks, and instead learn how to facilitate process. We need to become savvy about how to foster relationships, how to nurture growth and development….The organization of a living system bears no resemblance to organizational charts. Life uses networks; we still rely on boxes. But even as we draw our boxes, people are ignoring them and organizing as life does, through networks of relationships. To become effective at change, we must leave behind the imaginary organization we design and learn to work with a real organization, which will always be a dense network of interdependent relationships.” (p.39 and 144).
What we need more: “gardeners, midwives, stewards, servants, missionaries, facilitators, conveners. Although each takes a slightly different approach, they all need a new posture for leaders, a stance that relies on new relationships with their networks of employees, stakeholders, and communities.” And to experiment with new organization charts, webs of influence, and “lattice organizations that describe more fluid patterns of relationship….”To manage in a world that is round, a world not of hierarchies, but of encircling partnerships.” (p.165 and 109).
She concludes, “perhaps, if we understand the deep support we have from natural processes, it will help dispel some of the fear. It is not that we are moving towards disorder when we dissolve current structures and speak of worlds without boundaries. Rather, we are engaging in a fundamentally new relationship with the order, order that is identified in processes that manifest themselves only temper rarely as structures. order itself is not rigid or located in any one structure; It is a dynamic, organizing energy.” (p.112).
The research of Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal in their book StealingFire has blown my mind. I can’t think of a better way to spend time than reading about how psychology, neurobiology, technology, and pharmacology can unlock new depths of human potential.
As of late 2016, with the initial phases of the research completed, the city came to two overarching conclusions. First, creativity is essential for solving complex problems. The kinds we often face in a fast-paced world. Second, we have very little success training people to be more creative and there’s a pretty simple explanation for this failure. We’re trying to train a skill, but we really need to be training is a state of mind.
Conventional logic works really well for solving discreet problems with definite answers, but the wicked problems of today require more creative responses. These challenges defy, singular stable solutions. With issues as serious as poverty or as common as traffic, we often tend to throw money, people, or time at these problems. With money, you can fix a symptom, but you create additional problems. For example, financial aid provided to the developing world often reads corruption (p.47).
The amplified information processing and perspective that non-ordinary mental states provide, like meditation, can help solve these types of complex problems, and they can often do so faster than more conventional approaches. Meditation research done on Tibetan Buddhists in the 1990s shows that long-time contemplative practice can produce brain waves in the gamma range. Gamma waves are unusual, they arise primarily during binding when novel ideas come together for the first time and carve new neural pathways. We experience this as discovering an aha insight or a eureka moment – the telltale signature of sudden inspiration.
The Elevated Leader came as the result of connecting directly with the author, Ryan Goffredson, through a fellow connection. His work deeply resonated with me because it combined messages and learning from some of my favorite authors and theories. From Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability to Immunity to Change to Dan Siegel’s work on hyperarousal as well as bringing my own personal trauma into a comprehensive understanding of how we lead. I found The Elevated Leader, a fast-paced, digestible, and clear call to action for vertical leadership development.
This work is a tremendously inspiring read on how to build what I would say is my dream company. The history of outdoor appareling company, Pagagonia, as told by founder Yvon Chouinard gives an insiders perspective on the values that drove the company from the beginning. The following quote brings to life the heart of Let my People go Surfing, an inspirational book for anyone looking to start a purpose-driven business:
“I knew, after thirty-five years, why I was in business. True, I wanted to give money to environmental causes. But even more, I wanted to create in Patagonia a model other businesses could look to in their own searches for environmental stewardship and sustainability, just as our pitons and ice axes were models for other equipment manufacturers” (p. 66).
The role of an innovation strategist or a design thinker is to provide a roadmap for teams navigating ambiguity which is often inherent when formulating new ideas. Sometimes, as the guide on that journey, you find yourself questioning even what you KNOW to be true, amidst the messiness, complexity, and challenges. When that happens, I turn to Navigating Ambiguity by Andrea Small and Kelly Schmutte.
This short read (you can do it in about an hour) is a pocketbook of mantras for the designer or innovators to stay the course. I recently read this again amidst the complexity of a project we are working on and inevitably, the book helped to center me and bring me back to what I know is true, unlocking a new way forward on the project.
The fabulous book, Shorter: Work Better, Smarter and Less - Here’s How, is by one of my absolute favorite authors Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.
As an innovation strategy firm, we are deeply passionate about and committed to creating workplace cultures that are based on neuroscience, nutrition science, and psychology. In our experience, when you are working your smartest you have your best ideas.
The current 9-5, 5x day a week workday has no basis in science. It’s a vestige of factory hours during the Industrial Revolution when capitalists were pushing the human body as far as it could with physical labor.
Now that we are seeing a global wake-up call to the consequences of this working style, we are also experiencing a lot of questions about “HOW” we do things differently.
In this easily digestible book, Pang looks at 60 companies around the world that are taking real, bold steps to change how they work, whether it be a 4-day work week or a 5-hour work day, Pang offers tangible insights into what companies at the forefront of the workplace revolution are doing.
Nudge is truly a staple for anyone in the behavior change, change management, or design thinking space. What I love about Nudge is the way the authors look at behavioral psychology for the world's most complex challenges – healthcare, climate change, and retirement. Nudge forces you to ask why certain products, services, and systems have been designed the way they are, and why people aren’t doing more to change them.