Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Steph's Business Bookshelf Podcast
| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How to Work With (Almost) Anyone by Michael Bungay Stanier | 05 juin 2023 | 00:18:55 | |
Liked this? Subscribe to the bookmark newsletter to receive more book, podcast, music, and tech recommendations straight to your inbox every month. About the book The quality of your working relationships determines your success and your happiness. Stop leaving it all to chance. Build relationships that are safe, vital, and repairable. One essential conversation. Five powerful questions. Your chance to build the best possible relationships with all the people who matter Source: https://www.mbs.works/how-to-work-with-almost-anyone/ About Michael I’ve written books that have sold about a million copies all told, including The Coaching Habit, a self-published book that’s become the best-selling book on coaching this century. I founded a training and development company, Box of Crayons, that has taught coaching skills to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. I love that it’s a human-centered place to work, and that it practices what it preaches. But wait! There’s more! I’ve been happily married for 30 years or so; I was a Rhodes Scholar; I’ve created a book in partnership with Seth Godin that raised $400,000 for Malaria No More; I’ve been named #1 Thought Leader in Coaching and a Coaching Guru; I’ve launched several podcasts; I’ve spoken live and virtually to crowds of thousands… Source: https://www.mbs.works/about/ Listen to Michael talk to Brené Brown about the Advice Trap
Big ideas
Let's connect Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| What I read in April 2023; pre-releases, comedy, and books I didn't finish | 01 mai 2023 | 00:14:46 | |
It's April, and it's been a funny month of starting books, not finishing books, and desperately trying to squeeze books in so that I did finish them. So here we are; two books read, two books retired, and two books in progress. This month I'm talking about... Books I read Books I didn't finish Tell me what's on your reading list Hey, have you subscribed to the bookmark newsletter? If you liked this, you might like my monthly email with book reviews and ideas of what you should be reading, and listening to, next. Click here to subscribe. Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| What I read in March 2023; four books on publishing, poverty, poet punks, and preparing workshops | 03 avr. 2023 | 00:14:52 | |
I'm back telling you about what I read last month, and what's worth reading. This month's books include...
If you liked this, you might like my monthly email with book reviews and ideas of what you should be reading, and listening to, next. Click here to subscribe.
Let’s connect Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| What I read in February 2023: four books about creativity, epidemics, and grief | 06 mars 2023 | 00:15:12 | |
Sign up for the bookmark newsletter here ICYMI, this year I'm experimenting with a slightly different style of episode, featuring reviews of what I read over the last month. There'll still be occasional 'three big idea' episodes popping up throughout the year, and the four years and 197 other book based episodes will still be in the back catalogue to be enjoyed. February might be the shortest month, but I managed to read four books, including a big chunky 500+ pager! This month I'm talking about...
I'd love to hear what you think of these new episodes, and what you're reading at the moment. Drop me a message and say hi on... Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| What I read in January 2023: five books on life, food, and the future of work | 06 févr. 2023 | 00:18:47 | |
Sign up for the bookmark newsletter here Welcome to 2023 and to 'season two' of Steph's Business Bookshelf. ICYMI, this year I'm experimenting with a slightly different style of episode, featuring reviews of what I read over the last month. There'll still be occasional 'three big idea' episodes popping up throughout the year, and the four years and 197 other book based episodes will still be in the back catalogue to be enjoyed. January is always a more book-heavy month, and this one was no exception. This month I'm talking about...
I'd love to hear what you think of these new episodes, and what you're reading at the moment. Drop me a message and say hi on... Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| It's 2023: what I'll be reading this year, and a year of experiments | 16 janv. 2023 | 00:12:50 | |
Sign up to get the bookmark newsletter in your inbox Hi friends, as we roll into 2023 I wanted to share some of the reading I'm planning on doing in 2023, some experiments I'm playing with, my word of the year, and a few changes to the schedule that are coming up. Here's Madeleine's newsletter that I mention in this episode. Let's talk books on... Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| The best books I read in 2022 | 09 janv. 2023 | 00:22:03 | |
Want more book recommendations? Get the bookmark newsletter in your inbox. It's time for the wrap that's not quite as good as the Spotify wrap, but still one of my favourite bits of the year; looking back at the books I've spent my year reading. This year I read 52 books, 29% were ebooks, 42% were physical books, and 29% were audiobooks. I use the StoryGraph app to track my reading. Here's some of the books that get a mention... The Top 3
Honourable Mentions
What were your reading highlights this year? Let me know by connecting on Instagram or LinkedIn.
Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Big Feelings by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy: how to be a human | 11 déc. 2022 | 00:12:23 | |
Get the bookmark newsletter in your inbox and don't miss the best stuff of the year wrap. About the authors Liz Fosslien is the co-author and illustrator of the WSJ bestseller No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotion at Work and Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay. She leads the content and communications teams at Humu, where she helps leaders and their teams take small steps towards profound improvement. Prior to joining Humu, Liz designed and led workshops for executives at Google, Facebook, and Nike on how to create inclusive cultures. Her writing and data visualization projects have appeared in CNN, The Economist, The Financial Times, and NPR. Liz starts every day by eating plain Greek yogurt and reading academic abstracts. Mollie West Duffy is the co-author of the WSJ bestseller No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotion at Work and Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay. She was previously an Organizational Design Lead at global innovation firm IDEO, and a research associate for the Dean of Harvard Business School. She has worked with companies of all sizes on organizational development, leadership development, and workplace culture. Her writing has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur, and she’s taught design courses at Stanford and USC. Mollie loves personality tests. Source: https://www.lizandmollie.com/bios
About the book Uncertainty. Anger. Despair. Envy. When you’re overwhelmed by big feelings, it can seem like you’re the only one who is struggling. But having difficult emotions doesn’t mean you’re malfunctioning. It means you’re human. Weaving surprising science with personal stories and original illustrations, each chapter examines one uncomfortable feeling—like envy, burnout, and anxiety—and lays out strategies for making it manageable. You’ll learn:
Big Feelings helps us understand that difficult emotions are not abnormal, and that we can emerge from them with a deeper sense of meaning. Source: https://www.lizandmollie.com/big-feelings Three big ideas
Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Ideaflow by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn: how to have more ideas | 03 déc. 2022 | 00:15:48 | |
About the book Great Ideas. Methods, not Magic. Innovation is not an event; it’s a practice. Don’t leave the big ideas to the creatives. Revolutionize your creative process by mastering Ideaflow: the proven strategy that anyone can use to routinely generate and commercialize innovative ideas. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, student, C-suite leader, or anything in between, this book will teach you how to unleash creativity and innovation to magnify and accelerate all your other efforts, by simply building it into your daily routine About the authors Jeremy is the Director of Executive Education at Stanford d.school and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford's School of Engineering. He is the co-host of the d.school’s widely popular program “Stanford’s Masters of Creativity.” Perry is a seasoned teacher, entrepreneur, product designer, chief executive and co-founding member of the Stanford d.school's faculty with over 20 years of experience. Find out more about the book and authors here. Big ideas 1) All problems are idea problems 2) You're not testing enough 3) Elevate Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni: how to find out if you're a genius or frustrated | 07 nov. 2022 | 00:15:27 | |
About the author Pat is one of the founders of The Table Group and is the pioneer of the organizational health movement. He is the author of 13 books, which have sold over 6 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. As President of the Table Group, Pat spends his time speaking and writing about leadership, teamwork, and organizational health and consulting with executives and their teams. Prior to founding the firm in 1997, Pat worked at Bain & Company, Oracle Corporation and Sybase. Pat lives in the Bay Area with his wife and four boys. Source: https://www.tablegroup.com/pat/#pat About the book Pat's new book, The Six Types of Working Genius, is on track to be his biggest and most impactful book yet. In classic Lencioni fashion, Pat brings his model to life in a page-turning fable that is as relatable as it is compelling. He tells the story of Bull Brooks, an entreprhttps://www.stephsbusinessbookshelf.com/the-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team-by-patrick-lencioni-why-you-need-to-embrace-conflict/eneur, husband, and father who sets out to solve his own frustration at work and stumbles into a new way of thinking that revolutionizes the way he sees his work, his team, and even his marriage. Bull's story is indicative of every man and woman who is striving to avoid burnout and find fulfillment, dignity and success in their work. Beyond the personal discovery and instant relief that Working Genius provides, the model also gives teams a remarkably simple and practical framework for tapping into one another's natural gifts, which increases productivity and reduces unnecessary judgment. Whether you're a team leader or entrepreneur, a front-line employee or executive, or a school teacher or stay-at-home parent, this book will help you find more joy, fulfillment and success in your work and your life. Source: https://www.workinggenius.com/book Three big ideas
Other books of Pat's I've talked about Five Dysfunctions of a Team (my favourite) Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| What's on my TBR: eight books I want to read before the end of the year | 30 oct. 2022 | 00:12:01 | |
Subscribe to the bookmark newsletter for twice-monthly book and listening tips in your inbox. This week's episode is a little different as I wanted to tell you about some of the books I'm looking forward to reading, rather than about a book I've read. Here's the books on my TBR at the moment...
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| Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte: why you need to stop using your head | 24 oct. 2022 | 00:15:28 | |
About the author Hi, I'm Tiago Forte, I’m the founder of Forte Labs, and the question that drives me is, “How can humans reach their creative potential?” To answer that question, I teach and write about new ways for you to thrive in our connected, digital world. Over the last decade, I’ve helped thousands of people build a Second Brain. It’s a trusted place outside your head where you can collect and organize your most important ideas and insights, and use them to do your best work. The ultimate goal of building a Second Brain is to help you lead a more fulfilling life with more ease and less stress. Source: https://fortelabs.com/ About the book How many times have you tried to remember something important and felt it slip through your grasp? How often have you struggled to recall even one useful takeaway from a book or article you read? How much time have you wasted looking for a document or file you were sure you saved? If your first thought was, “This happened to me today!” then you’re not alone. The sheer amount of information flooding our brains every day is overwhelming. Information Overload has long since become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Yet, information is the fundamental building block of everything we do. Anything you want to accomplish, from executing a project at work to getting a new job, learning a new skill, and starting a business, requires finding and putting the right information to use. Your professional success and quality of life directly depend on your ability to manage the information around you Now, it’s time to acknowledge that we can’t “use our head” to store everything we need to know, and outsource the job of remembering to technology. This is where a Second Brain comes in. To make effective use of information, we need to package it up and make it accessible for our future self. Building a Second Brain is a way to cultivate a growing body of knowledge that is uniquely your own… So when the opportunity arises — whether that’s giving a big presentation, launching a new product, or starting a business or a family… You’ll have access to the wisdom you need to make sound decisions and take the most effective action. Source: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/
Big ideas 1) Empty your head 2) Projects not topics 3) The CODE Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Converge by Dr Catherine Ball: how to see into the future | 19 oct. 2022 | 00:15:54 | |
About the author Associate Professor, Dr Catherine Ball is a scientific futurist, speaker, advisor, author, founder, executive producer, executive director and company director working across global projects where emerging technologies meet humanitarian, education and environmental needs. Catherine also likes to create businesses and champion movements, collaborate with peers, and advise game-changers. A sought-after voice across the start-up, futurist and tech world, Catherine works globally across a wide range of projects from creating documentaries and world leading conferences and events, to advising on the use of novel approaches (e.g. drones) across environmental and humanitarian projects. Catherine is a proponent of community engagement with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), and likes to demystify emerging tech. Source: https://www.drcatherineball.com/about About the book As we face challenges globally on multiple fronts, it’s refreshing to hear the positive voice of scientific futurist Dr Catherine Ball. In Converge she presents insights into how technology and science are providing answers to many of the challenges the world is facing today – food shortages, war and conflict, the decline in local manufacturing, health and ageing, and global warming – and asks why we are not embracing these technologies more widely. The answer in many cases is, ‘Because we don’t know about them!’ Well, now we do. Dr Catherine opens our eyes to the amazing, wide world of technological advancements and explores the role we all have in learning more, owning the conversations, and determining what we want technology to be. Source: https://www.drcatherineball.com/books Three big ideas
Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| My Life in Full by Indra Nooyi: why you should put purpose and learning at the centre | 09 oct. 2022 | 00:14:52 | |
☀️ Get in before 21 October to join this year's Steph's Business Bookshelf Summer Book Club: https://www.itsyesand.co/sbbsbc 📚
About the book For a dozen years as one of the world’s most admired CEOs, Indra Nooyi redefined what it means to be an exceptional leader. The first woman of color and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company — and one of the foremost strategic thinkers of our time — she transformed PepsiCo with a unique vision, a vigorous pursuit of excellence, and a deep sense of purpose. Now, in a rich memoir brimming with grace, grit, and good humor, My Life in Full offers a firsthand view of Indra’s legendary career and the sacrifices it so often demanded. Source: https://www.indranooyi.com/thebook
About the author Indra Nooyi is the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo (2006-2019); a Fortune 50 company with operations in more than 180 countries. In this role, Ms Nooyi was the chief architect of Performance with Purpose, PepsiCo’s pledge to do what’s right for the business by being responsive to the needs of the world around it. As part of Performance with Purpose, PepsiCo was focused on delivering sustained growth by expanding its portfolio to include more nutritious products, limiting its environmental footprint, and empowering its associates and people in the communities it serves. During her tenure, PepsiCo grew net revenue more than 80%, and PepsiCo’s total shareholder return was 162% beating the S&P over the same period. Source: https://www.indranooyi.com/meetindra
Three big ideas 1) Find unselfish mentors 2) Learn, learn, learn 3) Purpose Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| The Best Books of 2022... so far (part 3) | 02 oct. 2022 | 00:14:23 | |
It's quarterly review time with a recap of the best books I read between 1 July and 30 September this year. Best books I read
Best audiobook I listened to
Honourable mentions
Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen: why feedback is like a gift and a colonoscopy | 27 sept. 2022 | 00:18:36 | |
About the book The performance evaluation at work; the parenting advice from your mother-in-law; the lecture by the cop who just pulled you over. We get feedback every day of our lives, from friends and family, colleagues, customers, and bosses, teachers, doctors, and strangers. We’re assessed, coached, and criticized about our performance, personalities, and appearance. We know that feedback is essential for professional development and healthy relationships—but we dread it and often dismiss it. That’s because receiving feedback sits at the junction of two conflicting human desires. We want to learn and grow, but we also want to be accepted and respected just as we are now. Thanks for the Feedback is the first book to address this tension head on. It explains why getting feedback is so crucial yet so challenging and offers a simple framework and powerful tools to help us take on life’s blizzard of offhand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited advice with curiosity and grace. Source: https://www.stoneandheen.com/thanks-feedback
About the authors Doug Stone is a Founder of Triad Consulting and a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. He has also written screenplays, and is determined to play guitar better than his friends. Sheila is a Founder of Triad Consulting Group and a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Her husband teaches negotiation at MIT, and they are both schooled regularly in negotiation by their three kids. Source: https://www.stoneandheen.com/authors
Three big ideas 1) The gift and the colonoscopy 2) The three types of feedback 3) Know your triggers Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Two Hour Cocktail Party by Nick Gray: how to be more interesting | 18 sept. 2022 | 00:13:52 | |
About the book You know that well-connected friend who only exists in the movies? The one who throws the best parties and can set up any introduction you need? Source: https://party.pro/book/ About the author Howdy 👋🏼 I’m Nick Gray. I just launched a new book: The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. Most people know me as the Founder of Museum Hack. I hate museums. That’s why I started Museum Hack. It was featured in a popular TEDx talk. Then I grew it to a multi-million dollar business. In 2019, I sold Museum Hack in an interesting way. It starts with a juicy takeover; read the story here. I just turned 40. For my birthday, I rented out an entire indoor water park. That was fun. Source: https://nickgray.net/about/
Three big ideas 1) Build momentum 2) Nights, nametags, nibbles 3) Icebreakers Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Cult Status by Tim Duggan: why you should throw the old ways of building a business in the bin | 11 sept. 2022 | 00:12:46 | |
About the book Consumers have changed, and the businesses that form around them are principled, purposeful and creative. The next generation of entrepreneurs thinks differently, and Cult Status will show you how you can too. Enough has been written about huge cult brands founded last century – Nike, Apple, Red Bull. What will the cult companies of tomorrow look like? Who is amassing the kind of passionate community that gives them the best chance of getting through difficult times to build long-term, sustainable success? Source: http://cultstatus.com/book/cult-status/ About the author Tim Duggan is an author, advisor and optimist who firmly believes in the power of business to do good. Tim has co-founded several digital media ventures, most notably Junkee Media, the leading digital publisher for young Australians, which was acquired by ASX-listed oOh!media His first book, Cult Status: How To Build A Business People Adore, was named the Best Entrepreneurship and Small Business Book at the 2021 Australian Business Book Awards. His second book on creativity in the workplace, Killer Thinking: How To Turn Good Ideas Into Brilliant Ones, is out now. He’s also the Chairman of the Digital Publishers Alliance, a group representing over 100 titles from the leading independent publishers in the country, as well as working with a range of businesses that he’s passionate about. Source: https://timduggan.com.au/about/ ICYMI - here's the episode where I talked about Tim's latest book, Killer Thinking.
Big idea #1 - Refine & define, the seven steps to cult status Big idea #2 - Be an untrepreneur Big idea #3 - Know your enemy
Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan: How to radically rethink the way you work | 04 sept. 2022 | 00:19:03 | |
About the book What's stopping us from doing the best work of our lives? It's the way we work. Bureaucracy. Hierarchy. Compliance. Everything that slows us down and makes us feel less human. Our organizations are broken. And we can fix them. Aaron Dignan helps teams around the world completely reinvent their operating systems—the fundamental principles and practices that shape their culture—with extraordinary success. He helps them see that organizations aren't machines to be predicted and controlled. They're complex human systems full of potential waiting to be released. In Brave New Work, you'll learn exactly how to reinvent the way you work, not through top-down mandates, but through a groundswell of autonomy, trust, and transparency. Source: https://www.bravenewwork.com/
About the author Aaron Dignan sees the same phenomenon everywhere he looks. Our most trusted and important institutions—in business, healthcare, government, philanthropy, and beyond – are struggling. They’re confronted with the fact that the scale and bureaucracy that once made them strong are liabilities in an era of constant change. For the past ten years, he has studied organizations and teams with a new way of working that prioritizes adaptivity and autonomy over efficiency and control. Aaron contends that teams everywhere need to join them in the future of work. As the founder of The Ready—a global organizational transformation and coaching practice—he helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Dignan is an active angel investor and helps build partnerships between the startups and end-ups he advises. He has sat on advisory boards for GE, American Express, PepsiCo, and Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, as well as the board of directors for Smashburger. Source: http://www.aarondignan.com/#intro
Big ideas
Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| The Four Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey et a: why accountability is the secret sauce to success | 21 août 2022 | 00:16:41 | |
About the book Fully revised and updated, the definitive guide for leaders on how to create lasting organisational change. Source: Amazon, see more on https://www.franklincovey.com/the-4-disciplines/ About the authors Sean Covey is the President of FranklinCovey Education and the original architect of the 4 Disciplines methodology. A Harvard MBA and former Brigham Young University quarterback, Sean is also a New York Times bestselling author and has written numerous books, including The Leader in Me and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. Source: Amazon, see more on https://www.franklincovey.com/the-4-disciplines/
Big idea #1 - Accountability is key Big idea #2 - The four disciplines Big idea #3 - The whirlwind Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| How to plan your own reading week: the do's and don'ts of escaping with your books | 14 août 2022 | 00:20:22 | |
I've just got back from an excellent week away doing some reading, planning, thinking, and pondering. But what is a reading week? How should you plan one? And what traps should you avoid? In this week's special episode I share three tips / big ideas to think about if you're planning your own reading / thinking week. You'll find out...
I mentioned Riparide in this episode. Check them out if you're after an interesting space in nature for your upcoming escape. Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Die with Zero by Bill Perkins: won't somebody think of the children?! | 07 août 2022 | 00:14:18 | |
About the book Die with Zero by legendary energy trader, Bill Perkins, details a thought-provoking framework for maximizing net fulfillment, over net worth. Die with Zero introduces the compelling principles he uses to think about personal finances, and more importantly, life. Die with Zero is not something Perkins came up with after building his wealth. It's packed with stories from his first job on Wall Street making $16,000 annually, to getting fired and feeling lost in life. To his life today: a hedge fund manager, film producer, high stakes poker player, and resident "Indiana Jones" for several charities. Called the "Last Cowboy" by the Wall Street Journal, Bill Perkins is reported to have earned more than $1 billion for his previous firm in five years. Source: https://www.diewithzerobook.com/welcome About the author "The Last Cowboy" according to the Wall Street Journal, Bill Perkins is one of the world's most successful hedge fund managers and entrepreneurs. After studying electrical engineering at the University of Iowa, Bill trained on Wall Street and later moved to Houston, TX where he made a fortune as an energy trader. Perkins is currently the CEO of BrisaMax Holdings, a consulting services firm based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Now at age 52, Bill views his career as an engine for personal growth and spends his time exploring the world, savoring his relationships, and taking in all that life has to offer. DIE WITH ZERO is a labor of love project. Bill has been developing the principles outlined in the book since his first job making $16,000 a year in the 90's as a screen clerk for the New York Mercantile Exchange. Source: https://www.diewithzerobook.com/welcome Big idea #1 - The risk of missed experiences Big idea #2 - Won't somebody think of the children?! Big idea #3 - Timing is everything Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Move to the Edge, Declare it Centre by Everett Harper: how to be more human in complexity | 31 juil. 2022 | 00:15:56 | |
About the author Everett Harper is the CEO and Co-Founder of Truss, a human-centered software development company, named as an Inc 5000 fastest-growing private company for 2020 and 2021. He is a rare combination of a Black entrepreneur, Silicon Valley pedigree, National Champion, and a proven record for solving complex problems with social impact. He had the foresight to build a company that’s been remote-first since 2011, salary-transparent since 2017, anticipating the importance of hybrid work and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) by a decade. Before Truss, Everett was at Linden Lab, maker of Second Life, a pioneering virtual world, and Bain and Company management consultants. Though both his parents had pioneering careers as software programmers for IBM, Everett is the first in his family to attend college, as an A.B. Duke Scholar at Duke University. While majoring in biomedical and electrical engineering at Duke, he also won a NCAA National Championship in soccer. He was inducted into the North Carolina Soccer Hall of Fame in 2019. Everett graduated with an MBA and a M.Ed in Learning, Design and Technology from Stanford University. In his career, he’s leveraged his education and experience to help millions of others, from helping fix healthcare.gov at Truss, fighting poverty worldwide as a Board Member of CARE, and helping low- and moderate-income homebuyers while at Self-Help, a community development finance institution. Everett grew up a small town kid in New York’s Hudson Valley. He currently lives in Oakland, CA, making limoncello when life hands him lemons. Source: https://www.everettharper.com/about
About the book Lead organizations, solve problems, and sustain growth with effective practices for complex, uncertain, and unpredictable environments. Renowned CEO and strategist Everett Harper explores practical techniques for making pivotal decisions through uncertainty in Move to the Edge, Declare it Center—a pragmatic playbook for leaders solving complex problems in high-pressure environments. You’ll discover a collection of practices, processes, and infrastructure that can be applied to your own circumstances and scaled throughout your organization. The author’s framework—which is perfectly suited to an increasingly volatile, uncertain, and unpredictable business environment—offers effective ways to make decisions without complete information. It demonstrates how to sustain a team through uncertain and stressful periods while managing personal anxiety. The book includes case studies from World Central Kitchen, policymakers responding to Covid-19, and California wildfire fighters, adaptable playbooks on salary transparency, remote work, and diversity and inclusion, and personal stories from the author that describe strategies for maintaining high performance and avoiding burnout. An indispensable guide to modern business leadership, Move the the Edge, Declare it Center is a one-of-a-kind discussion of effective, modern strategies to deal with complex problems in the face of uncertain outcomes. Source: https://www.everettharper.com/about-the-book Big idea #1 – Move to the Edge “Move to the edge, declare it centre and let the world reorganise itself around you”. Everett and his team did just this, even if it took the world a decade to catch on with things like being a remote first workplace, which they started doing way back in 2011. This whole approach is one of responding to complexity, and using interior and exterior practices to do that. Move to the edge specifically, is the practices, processes, and infrastructure to address complex problems. Its methodology involves being at the edge of your knowledge and the unknown, in that liminal space between the two. It's where you need to get curious; you're looking for insights, running experiments, and thinking about how you can find out new things and see different perspectives. The more expert or experienced you are, the more you need to do this. It is equivalent to things like Tiger Woods changing his swing several times during his very successful career, or Michael Jordan making a late-career jump shot change. These things force a new perspective, no matter how far into your career you are. Big idea #2 – Declare it Centre A great example of this in the book is painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Every single year on exactly the same day, they start painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Everything is done exactly the same as the year before, to the day, and once it’s done, they are ready to do it again the following year in the same way and on the exact same day. Systemising and scaling ways of working so that you can repeat them allows you to sustain the work. Another great example Everett talks about is the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 1956 that lasted 382 days. In advance, Rosa Parks and her compatriots were training in the Highlander centre and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee for years to get ready to sustain themselves. They had to create plans and infrastructure and build relationships to make sure it was sustainable; to move forward they had to build a whole system around it. Systemic change requires sustained effort. Big idea #3 – Being Human Together Move to the edge, declare it centre creates better human and diverse conversations. It forces you to hear new views and have access to experiences you haven't always aligned with or lived. Everett talks about if you grew up on the edge, because of where you were born, your race, your culture, your gender, or your sexual identity, you’re in a great position to say “this thing was not designed for people like me”. Whereas if you grew up in the centre, you have the opportunity to move to the edge and let the centre be someone else, and you can listen to their perspectives and then design products / services accordingly. This requires the use of internal practices to overcome those voices or discomfort that you will naturally experience as a result of moving to the edge and having some things disrupted in your mind around what is true and what is right. Everett has a great quote in the book - The new normal is complex, train for it. Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Fully Connected by Mel Kettle: how to reconnect with yourself | 24 juil. 2022 | 00:12:02 | |
About the book Are you feeling exhausted and overwhelmed? Being a leader today is hard. We are pulled in so many directions, with big responsibilities and many livelihoods reliant on us. It may be surprising to learn that our first responsibility is to care for ourselves. To make choices that are right for us, instead of what is right for others. With blurred boundaries between work and life, it can be difficult to find time for this. We’ve glorified being busy to become over-scheduled and over-committed and feel guilty about taking time for ourselves. Fully Connected is for leaders who want to take back ownership of their lives and reclaim their health and energy. On their terms. When you figure out what lights you up and how to say no to what doesn’t bring you joy, you become a better leader as you energise your co-workers, communicate with conviction and create a culture of belonging. In these pages Mel Kettle shares practical, simple and actionable ideas for you to increase your self-awareness, understand what motivates you and prioritise self-care so you can become a fully connected leader. Source: https://www.melkettle.com/store/p/fullyconnectedbook
About the author Mel is a trusted mentor to executives and leaders and a highly sought-after speaker and trainer. Her clients include leaders, teams and organisations that want to achieve real connection and sustained engagement. At the heart of everything Mel does is a commitment to self-leadership. She has an over-arching belief that we need to lead ourselves first before we can lead others. This view came after she survived the debilitating effects of work-related loneliness, stress and burnout in her late 20s, and was reinforced when she had a life-threatening melanoma in her early-40s. Mel also brings the unique educational combination of a Master of Business (Marketing) and a Master of Public Health, making her a valuable asset to clients including IRESS, Toll, Queensland Country Bank, ANZ, the Local Government Association of Qld, Pharmacy Guild of Australia, IHC New Zealand, Arup and numerous universities and government agencies. Mel's sub-speciality is helping women and organisations better understand the impact of menopause in the workplace. She is the founder of the award-winning menopause blog, Just as Juicy (www.justasjuicy.com). She has been a frequent podcast and radio guest talking about her experience and how organisations can better support menopausal women at work. In January 2022 Mel was recognised by leadersHum as one of the Top 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership for 2022, one of only seven Australians on the list. Mel is the host of podcast This Connected Life and the author of two books: The Social Association, published in 2018; and Fully Connected, due out in June 2022. In her spare time, Mel loves to cook, go to the beach, dance around the house and read crime thrillers. Source: https://www.melkettle.com/about
The first section of the book is about connecting with yourself, but you need more than that to thrive. If you're struggling, talk to a trusted friend, a colleague, or a doctor to help make some plans to change and regain control. To connect with yourself you need to get back control so that you feel like you have some level of agency about what is happening to you and around you. To know when something isn't right, you need to be connected with yourself first to know what those signs of physical, emotional, and mental stress might be. Ultimately if we don't start with leading and connecting with ourselves, it's going to be very hard to lead others. Connecting with yourself is a leadership capability. It allows you to bring more energy to others rather than being an energy vampire to your team.
Another big section of the book is about becoming more self-aware, self-motivated and prioritising self-care, which are the three elements of prioritising yourself. Becoming self-aware is being present with your feelings, your fears, your wants, your needs, your values, your strengths, and your weaknesses. It's thinking about what it is that makes you tick and knowing when those things are out of whack and when to do something about them. Self-motivation isn't just forcing yourself to do all the things you should do (it’s not all about the green smoothies and 5am runs on the beach). It is about creating your own luck, and when you create your luck, you're taking responsibility for what you spend your time and energy on. Self-care is more than just an occasional spa day (although these are also good), it’s about looking after ourselves every single day and looking after all aspects of our health every day. Rather than waiting till there's a problem or waiting for that one big holiday to rest. All of this will look different to everyone and you need to find ways to build your habits around that. Mel gives plenty of examples of different people and their ways of finding their version of self-awareness, self-motivation and self-care. She also provides four very helpful foundation principles
It feels kind of twee, but we do only get one go at this life. If we're not building our habits, our resilience, our health, and generally being better connected to ourselves and with others we are going to find things much harder and much more stressful than they need to be. For leaders, this is essential and is the new expectation. We need to step up. To do that, you need to have a solid relationship with yourself in order to best role model and lead others. Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| 100 Days of Brave by Iolanthe Gabrie: how to build your brave muscle | 17 juil. 2022 | 00:12:25 | |
About the book A legit business: one that’s proof-of-concept tested, compliant and connecting with your customer. For real. Practical and frank, 100 Days of Brave is the ultimate guidebook for building a business that will thrive. It’s for women who want to live life on their terms, enjoying the freedom that entrepreneurship provides – but who haven’t the mentors to get their show on the road. Whether you’re on the cusp of beginning a part-time hustle or you’re in the throes of start-up, 100 Days of Brave presents you with an achievable roadmap to testing and working your business concept. Source: https://iolanthegabrie.com/books/ About the author Iolanthe never imagined herself at the helm of a thriving brand. But after a detour from academia in Dublin and a wrestle with retail management, Iolanthe crossed the final frontier: she became an estate agent and an auctioneer. Iolanthe’s family and friends were about as impressed with this decision as you might imagine – but her intuition served her well: real estate is the ultimate bootcamp for business. In its arid soil, Iolanthe learned to connect with prospects, to market her negotiation skills and to have difficult conversations about money with an agitated public. After a successful career in property, Iolanthe launched Ruby Assembly in 2009, intuiting that social media would play an important role in global marketing in the years to come. She was right. Serving a diversity of professional categories from real estate to law, finance to franchise and local governments to psychics – Ruby Assembly enjoys a fine reputation for inimitable social media and digital marketing content that connects. An engaging and generous speaker, prolific business writer and marketing strategy mentor, Iolanthe shares her passion and expertise for very good business via Serious Women’s Business, a 500-strong networking group based in Melbourne. Source: https://iolanthegabrie.com/about/ Big idea #1 – Being Brave The book is split into three sections. Brave beginnings, building brave and being brave. Ultimately it is about building the brave muscle, the mindsets, the skills, the actions, and the activities, that you need to bring your idea to life as a business or as a side hustle. We don't have to be creating the next unicorn or tech venture, and Iolanthe is very strong on the fact that any business is a start-up, so whether you are walking dogs, financing multi-billion-dollar mergers or acquisitions deals, all of this is relevant to you. By the end of part one of the book, you almost forget that you needed any bravery at all. The advice in the book is so practical and outlines what you have to do, you can go off and do it. There’s also lots of good advice in there about what to worry about and what not to. Bravery is also required to avoid some of the noise - those awkward questions from your family, friends, and ex-colleagues. And that's before you've even needed to dig into the bravery required for hard client conversations and feedback.
Big idea #2 – Brains & Guts Brave involves both knowing your stuff and knowing yourself. Iolanthe talks about how you do need to tap into a bit of intuition, a bit of your internal knowledge, to do some of the things that you will need to do as a business owner. But your business foundation can't be based on woo woo, or intuition alone. You do need to have some substance behind it. Iolanthe provides a really good amount of caution to those drawn to the Instagram fantasy or influencer types that lie to you about the reality of running a small business and getting one off the ground. She talks you through defining your initial offering, tricky legal things to avoid, money, hiring, firing, marketing, business development, prospecting, and SEO. She also covers what you should consider for branding, what to outsource and how to surprise and delight your clients and customers.
Big idea #3 – Too Legit to Quit The first part of the book is about getting clear on your business. The second part is more about creating legitimacy and looking at the part. You can do this by creating branding that's fitting, professional and walks the talk of your work. You need to be findable, trustworthy, clear, and consistent. It doesn't need to cost millions to do this, and it is a marathon not a sprint. This is the stuff to outsource (branding, copy, photography, building a website or even social media) because it's probably the stuff that you're going to put off or you might not have the skills to do and may take you longer. But once you've got this stuff down, it becomes the baseline for having some fun with your business which allows you to make it your own and make it memorable.
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| Power by Kemi Nekvapil: why power takes practice | 10 juil. 2022 | 00:15:13 | |
About the author As a black child raised by five sets of white foster parents (some incredibly loving, some - not so much) I always felt that I had to prove my worth, so that I would to be 'allowed to stay.'' I had to be not only a 'good girl' but a 'good black girl'. I had no say in where I would live or who my new mum and dad would be, or where I would be living next. I was told to always be thankful, always be grateful for what I had, to never ask for more and, to never rock the boat. And now with thirty years of personal and professional development in my bones, things have changed. Professionally, I am an ICF credentialed coach with nearly a decade of ethical coaching under my belt. I work with women who want to lead value based and empowered lives. I am a feeling person. I can be with and honour my own feelings; so I can sit with and honour your feelings. I am a person of meaningful action; so I can guide you to create meaningful action that supports you and your life. I have no agenda and I don't judge. If you want someone to walk alongside you, as you step into your worth and begin to create the life that you want, it will be my honour and privilege to support you. Source: https://www.keminekvapil.com/aboutkemi
About the book The world does not need busy women, it needs present and powerful women. Blending inspiring stories with reflective coaching practices, POWER provides the tools to navigate the challenges that impact who we are, from discrimination and burnout to trauma and self-doubt. Reclaim your power and create a life of true joy and fulfilment. Source: https://www.keminekvapil.com/power-book Big idea #1 – Defining Power Kemi pays careful attention to the definitions. Throughout the book, she pulls out the Oxford English dictionary and defines some words where their meaning has been attached to things that aren't their original dictionary definition. Included in this is defining power. She talks about how power is abstract and intimidating for many women so often we need to call it other things, to feminise it, call it 'soft power' to make it more palatable. But it's time to redefine and reclaim it for what it is. Power might have always looked male, white or some other combination of traits that just aren't yours. Power might also feel associated with other words, for example, ambition. Kemi associated ambition as a less positive trait until she looked it up, and realised that ambition is not a bad thing at all. She calls for a new paradigm, starting on the inside; women believing in themselves and feeling like they belong, owning their power and supporting and coaching others to do the same. Power redefined can be used as individuals and as a collective. Importantly it is power ‘with’, not power ‘over’, using the Brené Brown language. Power ‘over’ is what most people have experienced, hence the more negative connotations and ideas that we have about the idea of power. Like most systems, patriarchy is designed to support itself and sustain itself. So, we must dismantle it by using power differently. Big idea #2 – POWER Kemi breaks power into its own acronym. ‘Presence, ownership, wisdom, equality, and responsibility’
Using these principles, you'll be able to build power from the inside out. Which allows you to shift the structures around us so that more people are empowered.
Big idea #3 – Practice Makes Power
Power is not something that can just be reclaimed by reading a book. It's not knowledge based. It does take work and hard conversations. It takes uncovering our preconceptions and ideas that maybe we haven't ever explored. To do all of this it takes practice, it takes boundaries, which need to be clear, communicated, and committed to do the work. This practice might cause you to realise some hard truths, but ones necessary to reclaim and redefine power and use it for collective good. Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| The best books of 2022... so far (part 2) | 03 juil. 2022 | 00:12:50 | |
Here's the best books I read between April and June this year (in no particular order)...
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| The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker: why curiosity is more important than productivity | 27 juin 2022 | 00:13:12 | |
About the book A thought-provoking, gorgeously illustrated gift book that will spark your creativity and help you rediscover your passion with “simple, low-stakes activities [that] can open up the world.” — The New York Times Welcome to the era of white noise. Our lives are in constant tether to phones, to email, and to social media. In this age of distraction, the ability to experience and be present is often lost: to think and to see and to listen. Enter Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing — an inspiring volume that will help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises — 131 of them — Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague, and finally, to rediscover what really matters to you. Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/570033/the-art-of-noticing-by-rob-walker/ About the author ROB WALKER is a columnist and contributes to a wide of publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, NewYorker.com, The Boston Globe, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of Buying In and Significant Objects (coedited with Joshua Glenn) and on the faculty of the Products of Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts. He lives in New Orleans. Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/59959/rob-walker/ Big idea #1 — Less productivity, more curiosity The answer to having lots to do and endless lists is not to add more. “A hyper effective schedule designed to maximize productivity is in fact, more likely to distract you from what’s important than help you discover it.”We’re doing so much and we’ve all experienced the situation where you have lots to do but get to the end of the day and feel like you’ve achieved nothing meaningful. Instead, Rob suggests dedicating just one hour per week to consciously directing your attention. Stop trying to be more productive and instead try to be more curious (or embrace “joyous exploration”). The more we do, the more we push against this attention deficit that we are all facing at the moment. Given the complexity of what’s going on in the world, and some of the terrible things that are happening, we really need the best of our attention to solve these problems. We need to push against this attention deficit and our state of peak destruction, and in order to do that we need to practice paying attention, which means practicing noticing. Attention makes us human, let’s get it back through noticing. Big idea #2 — The types of noticing The book is split into five types of noticing. In these five sections there’s different activities with different levels of difficulty that you can do in order to practice noticing. Those five sections are;
*there’s a whole section in ‘looking’ chapter about galleries that’s well worth a flick through if you have a gallery visit planned. Big idea #3 — Attention is creativity It’s seeing things well that brings your work or your art to the next level. This is absolutely not only relevant to “creatives” or “artists”, it’s the skill that allows you to transcend the boring and the surface level things and instead see connections that others may overlook. The art of noticing allows sports coaches or scientists to see data links that others might miss, it allows teachers, leaders, or doctors to see subtle clues that might be important, and allows investors to pay attention to undervalued companies. This is the thing that could make the difference between you and others in your field, in your industry, and/or your company and allows you to do what you do really well. “The difference between looking and seeing, between hearing and listening, between accepting what the world presents you and noticing what matters to you.”The art of noticing is the importance of bringing these things together and paying attention to the right stuff at the right time, and making the difference between missing something vitally important, and being able to make the most of it.
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| Love + Work by Marcus Buckingham: why your what is more important than your why | 19 juin 2022 | 00:16:10 | |
Hey, have you subscribed to the bookmark newsletter? If you liked this, you might like my twice-monthly email with book reviews and ideas of what you should be reading, and listening to, next. Click here to subscribe. About the author Marcus Buckingham is the author of two of the best-selling business books of all time, has two of Harvard Business Review’s most circulated, industry-changing cover articles, and has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, Fortune, Fast Company, The Today Show, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. After spending two decades studying excellence at the Gallup Organization and co-creating the StrengthsFinder tool, he built his own Coaching + Education firm, The Marcus Buckingham Company. As CEO, he quickly turned it into a Human Capital Management company working with some of the world’s largest organizations. He is known as the world’s most prominent researcher on strengths and leadership at work, and today leads research at the ADP Research Institute. Challenging entrenched preconceptions about achievement to get to the core of what drives success, Marcus’s strengths- based approach is defining the future of work as we know it. Source: https://www.marcusbuckingham.com/about/ About the book You’ve long been told to “Do what you love.” Sounds simple, but the real challenge is how to do this in a world not set up to help you. Most of us actually don’t know the real truth of what we love — what engages us and makes us thrive — and our workplaces, jobs, schools, even our parents, are focused instead on making us conform. Sadly, no person or system is dedicated to discovering the crucial intersection between what you love to do and how you contribute it to others. In this eye-opening, uplifting book, Buckingham shows you how to break free from this conformity — how to decode your own loves, turn them into their most powerful expression, and do the same for those you lead and those you love. How can you use love to reveal your unique gifts? How can you pinpoint what makes you stand out from anyone else? How can you choose roles in which you’ll excel? Love + Work unlocks answers to these questions and others, so you can:
Love, the most powerful of human emotions, the source of all creativity, collaboration, insight, and excellence, has been systematically drained from our lives — our work, teams, and classrooms. It’s time we brought love back in. Love + Work shows you how. Source: https://loveandwork.org/about-the-book/ Further listening: I enjoyed this episode of Marcus Buckingham on the Diary of a CEO podcast, talking about some of the ideas from the book.
Big idea #1 — You are wyrd (but nobody cares) From an early age, we’re pushed in certain directions. And often those directions have little to do with our unique strengths, preferences, loves, or desires. More often than not we are constantly pushed to work on our weaknesses or our ‘development areas’ rather than actually focusing on what we love and what we’re good at. When you get to work, you’re given goals from above, a performance review that ranks you soullessly against your peers, and pushed towards a fixed career path. Our education and work systems aren’t designed this way through malice, but through this relentless search for efficiency or standardisation, but at the cost of people’s unique contributions. The idea of wyrd is not ‘weird’, it’s wyrd; an ancient Norse term which means “the idea that each person is born with a distinct spirit, a spirit unique to you that guides you to love some things and loathe others.” Your wyrd can be found in your ‘red threads’; the situations where you lose track of time, you’re in that flow state, times where you’re the only one to notice something, or the only one who can come up with a new way of doing things and improving things. Big idea #2 — A little bit of love, every day Love belongs at work, without it work would be pretty miserable. But we don’t have to love all of it, all of the time. We know this because when we survey a group of people who are highly successful, resilient, and engaged, and a contrast group of people who are less so, the two best questions that separate these groups are these; - do you have a chance to play to your strengths every day?- were you excited to go to work every day, last week? The people who are thriving the most answer ‘strongly agree’ to both of those questions. So do you have a chance to play to your strengths every day? It shows that frequency trumps intensity when it comes to loving what you do. They reckon that you need to love what you’re doing around 20% of the time in order to thrive. It means that you, you don’t need ‘a whole quilt of red threads’ to thrive and be resilient, just enough of them every day. You can write a love note to dig a bit deeper. If you say you love helping people, ask if it matters who you’re helping, when you’re helping them, why you’re helping them, what you’re helping them with, and how you’re helping them? Your why matters, but your what matters so much more because that’s really what you think about when you answer the questions around enjoying what you did that day / if you’re excited to go to work. It’s important to note that your strength is not something that you’re good at but you hate doing. You might be good at it, but it doesn’t count as a strength. Big idea #3 — Love and leadership If you think that love has no place at work, and that work is to be endured, then listen up. You don’t just need to ‘suckitup’, and love can be found in all kinds of jobs for different people. What one person loves, another will loathe, and vice versa. Love and work leaders prioritise their people as people. They push against some of the formulated systems and processes that exist in most workplaces and instead focus on the individuals, their loves, and what helps them contribute. Leaders who check in regularly with their team members get better results. There’s a particular check in formula that he suggests; a weekly 15 minute conversation held each week about the upcoming week. The conversation is built on four short questions (two about last week and two about the next coming week).
Team leaders who had this conversation every single week with their team members had engagement scores 77% higher than the control groups and attrition at 67% less than the control groups. This checking can be done in any manner of ways; email, text, voice, face-to-face… it doesn’t matter, as long as it happens. Marcus says that if you don’t want to do this, or the idea of this bores, you really need to consider your role as a leader. If you’ve got too many people reporting to you to make this possible, focus on fixing that. Marcus also presents some bold things that love and work organisations don’t do.
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| The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll: why you need to get it all on paper | 13 juin 2022 | 00:14:58 | |
If you liked this, you might like my twice-monthly email with book reviews and ideas of what you should be reading, and listening to, next. Click here to subscribe. About the book Bullet Journal® (or BuJo® for short) was created by Ryder Carroll, a digital product designer and author living in Brooklyn, NY. Diagnosed with learning disabilities early in life, he was forced to figure out alternate ways to be focused and productive. Through years of trial and error, he developed a methodology that went far beyond simple organization. Now he focuses on helping others learn what the Bullet Journal method is truly about: the art of intentional living. Though it does require a journal, Bullet Journal® is a methodology. It’s best described as a mindfulness practice disguised as a productivity system. It’s designed to help you organize your what while you remain mindful of your why. The goal of the Bullet Journal is to help its practitioners (Bullet Journalists) live intentional lives, ones that are both productive and meaningful. Source: https://bulletjournal.com/pages/about About the author Ryder Carroll is a New York Times best-selling author, digital product designer, and inventor of the Bullet Journal method. He’s been featured by the New York Times, LA Times, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Vogue, Bloomberg, and others. Watch his TEDx talk on intentionality. Source: https://www.rydercarroll.com/ Big idea #1 — Outsource your brain Our brains are too full, this isn’t what brains are best used for. Before we can start properly journaling we need to first see what we’re working with. The mental inventory is the brain dump of getting everything out of your brain, onto some paper, and into three lists;
It’s very important that you write it down (pen/pencil and paper), so much of the bullet journal method is based on this pen to paper action, it helps us think and feel at the same time, unlike typing things which can be quite unconscious. Once you’ve written those three lists you can ask two questions of each item;
And if the answer of those two things is no, you can ditch it because it probably shouldn’t be on your list and living rent-free in your brain. “True efficiency is not about speed, it’s about spending more time with what really matters”Note: there’s quite a few similarities between this method and David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Big idea #2 — The system The bullet journal method is part to do list, part journal, part planner, part sketchbook, part scheduler, and anything else you need it to be. And that’s the best thing about it is that you can make it your own and make it yours by mixing and matching. Side note: I don’t recommend looking at BuJo content online before you start because the level of artistic skill that people put into their journals will both amaze and inspire you and absolutely put you off. The actual original method is very simple and contains seven key concepts;
Big idea #3 — Get your goals You can use your bullet journal for setting and smashing your goals. Firstly, the book advises you to consider what interested you in this particular goal, what motivated you to want to invest my time and energy here, what you’re trying to accomplish, what would it require, and your definition of success with this goal. Once you’ve answered these questions you can break it down into sprints, which are self-contained projects. An example from the book is about learning how to cook. A self-contained project as a sprint for this broader goal could be to learn knife skills. You can then block that sprint into your calendar over a period of time and turn this into tasks or activities. This approach creates momentum as these mini goals give you lots of ‘wins’ along the way, because they stand alone as a goal and accomplishment, rather than having to wait until you reach the ‘whole’ goal before you’ve achieved something. You can link to this to your bullet journal by setting up a habit tracker/goal tracker to log your process or consistency towards the goal and see those very satisfying ticks build up over time.
Tell me what you're reading Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| I'm Not a Numbers Person by Dr Selena Fisk: why it's not just about the money (honey) | 05 juin 2022 | 00:14:22 | |
Hey, have you subscribed to the bookmark newsletter? If you liked this, you might like my twice-monthly email with book reviews and ideas of what you should be reading, and listening to, next. Click here to subscribe. About the book A practical and fascinating guide from leading data expert Dr Selena Fisk that teaches us how to make informed decisions using the numbers around us so we can work smarter and live better. Data is everywhere. Smart watches track our steps and heart rate, social media platforms recommend people we might know and products we might like, and map applications suggest when we should leave home depending on the traffic. From organising your home budget and understanding social media metrics, to running a side hustle or a multi-national, multi-million-dollar organisation, having the mindset ‘but I’m not a numbers person’ is no longer helpful or accurate. I’m Not A Numbers Person takes us through the ‘why’ of data, the types of data we often see and use in life and work, and the key areas of data literacy, which is understanding the data and what it all means, and data visualisation, which is where we make the data look beautiful in tables, graphs or other visuals. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a small business owner, an emerging leader, or in an executive leadership role, this book is a must-have guide to understanding data and making decisions in the 21st century. Source: https://majorstreet.com.au/products/im-not-a-numbers-person-by-dr-selena-fisk About the author Selena is a data storyteller who is passionate about helping others sort through the numbers to tell the real stories and lead positive change. She fiercely advocates for a world in which we are all data-informed, not data-driven; yet she realises that this isn’t a skill set we all have or are confident in. As a data coach and storyteller, Selena is as enthusiastic about building data storytelling skills in others as she is about building her own understanding of the evolving ways data can support individuals, organisations and communities to flourish and thrive. For her, using data in a way that benefits others is the only way to use it. Almost nothing will accelerate the impact we can have as humans like being able to see trends in the numbers, and using this information alongside our understanding of context to inform our decisions. Source: https://www.selenafisk.com/about Big idea #1 — It’s not just the dollars When I first picked up this book, I assumed it was going to be a lot more about the financial side of businesses/work. However, on page one that assumption was dispelled. Of course, financials get a mention, but it goes way beyond that. The data literacy that Selena is talking about is the stuff that is all around us. Everything from the dollars to the SEO stats and your website, your Google analytics, your podcast listeners, staff turnover, clicks on a job ad you posted, and a myriad of other stuff. In short data is everywhere. We’re dripping in it. And we’re not very good at always using it or making the most of it. Early in the book, Selena looks at the levels of data use versus impact. This gives us the six types of data users that might exist in the world.
Ultimately, we want our decisions to be data informed, not data-driven. Data informed decisions, consider the world in the context, rather than just blindly following the numbers. To do this means you need to make data your friend. Whether you’re running your own business or working somewhere, this is equally as important. If you’re working in an organisation, you absolutely need to understand the data uses and impacts of your own work/your team’s work, and be able to articulate and challenge that. Especially as you get more senior, as this is already areal expectation of leaders in all departments. Big idea #2 — Make a plan One of the main ideas in this book is about having structured plan and approach for your data. You can do this as a team to uplift the literacy for everyone. Selena suggests making a table of all the data you have access to, or you have available to you in your organization. With this you can consider which data informs your work, ranking them into order of importance, noting the relevance for each bit, and using these to improve your literacy. You might consider how are those numbers or those bits of data are calculated or gathered; what’s their origin, what drives them going up/down/sideways, what is good or bad? This plan can then help you better create, measure, communicate, analyse, and understand the available data, and maybe help you work out where extra data would be helpful. Big idea #3 — Get trendy One of the most important elements of effective data use is data storytelling. Communicating data to have an impact and for it to help you decide what to do next. To do all of this, you need to find the trends. There’s not one way to find trends in a set of data, but Selena has five key principles that overlay on whatever data you’re looking at.
Once you’ve done all of this, and you’ve decided if you’re exploring or explaining with your data analysis, you can work through the data and see the story it’s telling you. And then obviously go forth and tell that story to others. Let’s connect Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| How We Read: Adam Ashton reads a lot of books | 22 mai 2022 | 00:32:59 | |
Adam Ashton is the co-host of the What You Will Learn podcast. I had lots of fun asking Adam about how he reads (especially as he read over 70 books in 2021), what he's reading, hearing about his unique way of pairing audiobooks and hard copy books, making notes, and finding out whether he starts more books than he finishes. And make sure you check out Adam (and other Adam's) podcast; What You Will Learn, over at https://www.whatyouwilllearn.com/ Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| How We Read: Madeleine Dore takes a lot of notes | 15 mai 2022 | 00:26:11 | |
Madeleine Dore is a writer. She's recently released her first book, I Didn't Do The Thing Today, all about letting go of productivity guilt (which I talked about on episode 157 of Steph's Business Bookshelf (listen here)). In her writing, both in the book and in her Extraordinary Routines newsletter, she brings in such a breadth of different quotes and references. So in this conversation I ask her more about how she reads, dig into her process of note taking and collation, and how writing a book impacts the way she reads. Madeleine is such a pleasure to talk to, I hope you enjoy this conversation. Find out more about Madeleine here. Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Killer Thinking by Tim Duggan: why you need to schedule your boredom | 08 mai 2022 | 00:13:42 | |
About the book We need better ideas right now. Everywhere you look, there are growing problems that require fresh, creative thinking to help us solve. The good news is that anyone can learn to master the art of creativity to turn good ideas into brilliant ones. That’s what this book is about: those killer ideas that have a positive impact on many people, with near-infinite winners. The type you hear about and think, ‘Damn, I wish I’d thought of that!’ Tim Duggan, the co-founder of Junkee Media, will show you how to identify and generate your own ideas with big potential, and then how to refine and bring them to life. Learn from the creative minds behind some of the most innovative ideas out there, like Canva, KeepCup, Movember, Linktree, B Corps, Zero Co and more. Source: https://timduggan.com.au/book/killer-thinking/ About the author Tim Duggan is an author, advisor and optimist who firmly believes in the power of business to do good. He has co-founded several digital media ventures, most notably Junkee Media, the leading digital publisher for young Australians, which was acquired by ASX-listed oOh!media His first book, ‘Cult Status: How To Build A Business People Adore’, was named the Best Entrepreneurship and Small Business Book at the 2021 Australian Business Book Awards. His second book on creativity in the workplace, Killer Thinking, is out now. He’s also currently the Chairman of the Digital Publishers Alliance, a group representing over 100 titles from the leading independent publishers in the country, as well as working with a range of businesses that he’s passionate about. Source: https://timduggan.com.au/about/ Big idea #1 — The best ideas are killer Tim’s model for what makes an idea better than good and better than great is the acronym KILLER, which stands for;
These are about the idea, being killer, but it’s also about the execution; the idea alone is not enough, the execution has to be killer as well. Ideas that go beyond good and great and become killer ideas have an infinite amount of upsides, and none or very, few downsides. Tim talks about putting a winners and losers lens over your ideas and using the losers, or the potential losers, as a result of your idea as a trigger to stretch your idea further and design downsides out of it. Nobody should lose as a result of your idea coming to life. It’s important to note that the creative thinking for a create for a killer idea exists within everyone. You might just not have had a chance to show it just yet, but by using some of the techniques in the book and your own creativity, you can absolutely come up with your own killer ideas yourself. Big idea #2 — The eight steps to a killer idea Now that we know a killer idea is and what it looks like, you might want to know how to come up with one or refine your ideas into one yourself. There’s eight steps to this, which Tim has put into a model that looks like a little key hole, and you start the bottom with step number one and work your way up.
Big idea #3 — Space, inputs, time Killer ideas don’t appear fully formed. As Tim says in the book, we need to get better at nurturing them into existence and make sure that we have the space, the inputs, and the time in order to make our idea even better. Giving an idea space might look like physical space for it to float around and ferment. You might plan to go on a boring long drive, do some chores, or go out on a hike and immerse your idea in the physical space of nature to grow. Some ideas need fertilisation along with the fermentation of space. You can fertilise your ideas through inputs such as conversations, reading about adjacent or abstract ideas, listening to music, or even peeling a piece of fruit. The important thing here is to think about where are those inputs coming from, and how might they help your idea. Finally, time; boredom, sleep, and purposeful thinking time are the key ingredients to giving yourself the time to think about the idea in a deeper way. Schedule boredom into your days and weeks, and definitely make sure all of your ideas get slept on Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | |||
| Let's Talk Culture by Shane Michael Hatton: how communication is the key to culture | 01 mai 2022 | 00:12:59 | |
About the book Packed with research-based insights from Australia’s leading workplaces, Let’s Talk Culture is the how-to guide for people leaders who want to shape a world-class team culture by design. Successful leaders and organisations know that culture is the unseen advantage of world-class teams. But can it be influenced? And what role do managers play in building and shaping it? Author and expert in leader communication, Shane Michael Hatton, says the research suggests it can be influenced and that the people leader plays a crucial role — but it all starts with effective communication. Based on extensive research with people leaders on the ground, Let’s Talk Culture reveals the five practical conversations people leaders need to have to design a world-class team culture within their organisation. An easy-to-understand guide for future culture champions, this book will give you the tools to build a team that attracts and retains your top talent, confidently address cultural inconsistencies in the workplace and meaningfully reward the behaviours that strengthen your team culture. Source: https://majorstreet.com.au/collections/coming-soon/products/lets-talk-culture-shane-michael-hatton About the author Shane Michael Hatton is an expert in leader communication, blending his experience in business and psychology to help leaders communicate, connect and collaborate more effectively in order to bring out the best in those they lead. As a speaker, coach and trainer, Shane has partnered with well known and loved businesses across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. He is a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach and the author of Lead the Room: Communicate a message that counts in moments that matter. Source: book cover Big idea #1 — What is culture? This is a good place to start because it is hard to define. Two thirds of managers who were part of the research for this book were confident that they could define culture, but when they were asked to do so. The definitions were pretty vague and generic, or just taken straight from Google. One of the things the research did find is that there were four different commonalities in the culture definitions.
There’s a group of leaders referenced in the book as ‘the 11%’, who seem to have a stronger grasp of culture and their impact on it. There were 11 things they knew to be true about culture:
Big idea #2 — Communication is culture So many cultural issues are made or broken by the quality of communication. When we communicate well, though, we can resolve all sorts of issues. Shane says that culture has three challenges, the definition, the leadership, and the skills required. Half of the people leaders in the study told the researchers that they somewhat or strongly agreed that culture is not something that can be influenced. But that’s incorrect, culture needs intent, and it needs strategy, and it needs leadership participation. Leaders do this though the everyday conversations that build culture. There’s five elements or characteristics to those culture conversations; trust, vulnerability, empathy, curiosity, and safety. Your role as a leader is to build and role model those in order for culture conversations to happen. Big idea #3 — Culture conversations There are five different conversations that you need to have in order to build, maintain, adapt, change, influence a culture in an organisation.
Having the discipline around these conversations as a leader with your teams will greatly help overcome the lack of clarity people have around culture.
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| Mastering Community by Christine Porath: why you need to let people go to keep them together | 24 avr. 2022 | 00:12:35 | |
About the book Despite our deep desire to feel a sense of belonging, many of us feel isolated. The rise of technology and modern workplace practices have led people to be even more disconnected, even as we remain constantly contactable. And as our human interactions have decreased, so too have our happiness levels. This is sparking a crisis in mental health that will have repercussions for years, leaving people lonelier and organizations less productive and profitable, too. What Christine Porath has discovered in her research is that leaders, organizations, and managers of all stripes may recognize there is a cost but have few solutions for how to implement the cure: Community. Source: http://www.christineporath.com/books/ About the author Christine Porath is a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. She’s the author of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace and co-author of The Cost of Bad Behavior. Christine is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and has written articles for New York Times, Wall Street Journal, McKinsey Quarterly, and Washington Post. She frequently delivers talks and has taught in various Executive programs at Harvard, Georgetown, and USC. Prior to her position at Georgetown, she was a faculty member at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. Christine’s work has been featured worldwide in over 1500 television, radio and print outlets. It has appeared on 20/20, Today, FoxNews, CNN, BBC, NBC, msnbc, CBS, ABC, and NPR. It has also been included in Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Fortune, Forbes, NY Times, The Washington Post, and L.A. Times. Source: http://www.christineporath.com/ Big idea #1 — Bring them together and let them go The first rule of community is bringing people together, which is probably comes as no surprise. Connecting and uniting people is the core of a community, that can be people on the same team, such as the Chicago Bulls, or disparate people who share a common ailment, as in the practice of shared medical appointments used in some medical institutes in the US. Unity has an exponential effect if it’s done well, by positively impacting one person the whole community gets better. However, to truely realise the potential of a community you have to let go of them, let go of yourself, and let go of your ego. The founders of the 100,000 Homes Campaign found this when they discovered that a community group was using their manual, but they hadn’t been through the 100,000 Homes official training. This group had got hold of the manual through another group who had been through the training. Now at first the 100,000 Homes team were a bit affronted, they thought that if these people hadn’t been trained properly how could they have do the work? It’s easy to let ego get in the way, but you can’t get the scale and the impact if you stay too centralised and controlled. For a campaign like this, trying to get 100,000 people experiencing homelessness into homes and into stable living arrangements, they quickly realised that they were not going to do that on their own. What they instead decided to do was help empower other groups and set the principles and practices. What you need to do is have clear guidelines and guardrails on what matters, what you can do, what you can’t do, and let people get on with it. Southwest Airlines do a really good job of this, they let their people make the best decisions for their customers by making it incredibly clear what’s important. As a result you get amazing stories of the lengths that Southwest staff will go to for their customers. Big idea #2 — R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Respect is at the core of any community you’re building. Without it, you won’t have a healthy community. Christine takes this idea further with the behaviour of civility, which is to move culture forward in a more civil way. Civility happens throughout the life cycle; as you hire reward, promote, and train for civility. She says that civility boosts, trust, likeability, and perceived integrity. Some situations get to the stage where you just have to start again. There was an example of this in the book of a company called Traeger, led by Jeremy Andrus. When he joined Traeger the culture was toxic, at one point it became physically dangerous, this was the catalyst that something drastic had to change. After a number of months of trying to make some changes and coming up and getting more and more resistance because of what had come before, Jeremy decided to shut down the headquarters and move it to another state. This meant they let a lot of people go, but it also meant they could bring the right new people in to lead the company going forward. There was obviously a huge financial, emotional, and operational cost involved in doing that, but the results that the company achieved in the time that Jeremy was was CEO as a result of those changes were phenomenal. Big idea #3 — Your role As the world feels bigger and more complex, it’s easy to dismiss our own roles in community and culture, because it feels so much bigger than just us. But Christine says there’s four things you can influence that will help you better contribute to a community.
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| Do/Open by David Hieatt: why you need to be more interesting | 17 avr. 2022 | 00:13:08 | |
About the book How do you grow your business when you don’t have a marketing budget? And what if the answer is right in front of you? ‘For me, the newsletter is the most important tool I have in building a global denim brand. Second only to the sewing machine.’ So writes entrepreneur David Hieatt who has based his entire marketing strategy around a simple email newsletter. And it’s worked. His company has grown into a creative global jeans business with a fiercely loyal community. Now, David shares his insight, strategy and methodology so you can do the same. In Do Open you will discover:
Build community. Build your brand. Build long-term growth. Discover why the humble newsletter is pure and utter gold. About the author David Hieatt is not a theorist. He has built brands from nothing, with next to nothing, just by understanding a few basic rules. The Scrapbook Chronicles newsletter has become a cult offering from his company, the Hiut Denim Co. Its open rate exceeds almost any industry standard and it is one of those rare emails that people actually look forward to receiving. And it has delivered results. It has grown the company by 25 per cent each year for the last three years. And each year for the last three years, the company has turned a profit. David is co-founder of The Do Lectures and has spoken at Apple, Google and Red Bull, amongst others. In 2010 he self-published The Path of a Doer and in 2014 he published Do Purpose: Why brands with a purpose do better and matter more (Do Books). Big idea #1 — Be excellent You know your audience are busy people, so the best way of respecting their time is sending them something excellent, and most importantly, interesting. If you’ve not got anything interesting to say, you’re probably going to struggle to keep your audience very engaged. This point of being interesting and being excellent really does underpin the whole book. You can build your excellence and interest by putting in the deep work required to think carefully about what to send your audience. This requires putting the time aside to think, because the best ideas are going to come from that thinking time. You don’t necessarily need to be running a business for this to be relevant. You can absolutely use these ideas and techniques to write better emails or comms within the company you work for, in your projects, or to write better social media posts. Whatever it is, if you want it to be great, spend more time on. David says that a good newsletter shares how you think about the world, therefore you need to put the time aside to think in order to then share those thoughts. David has the equation of Maintenance + Momentum = Strategic use of time. Maintenance is your BAU, it’s the stuff you’ve got to do in order to keep going for things to keep making money or keep operating. But momentum is where you get the movement, the traction, and the growth. So that’s where you need to prioritise spending time. He encourages us to think long term; what if this was a 10-year relationship/activity? Not just a newsletter for a transaction to get some short-term sales. And if you’re a a small business, this will be to your advantage if you use it well; you can act fast and you can likely bring a lot more personality into your newsletters, which helps build that personal relationship with your readers. Big idea #2 — Be generous, but sell You need to give before you ask. David uses the Gary Vee jab, jab, jab, right hook idea in this concept of give and take. But you don’t want to just talk about yourself. Think about talking about your customers, the people around your business, or other topics your audience might be interested in. But, when you’re selling, sell. Don’t leave people wondering whether you’re trying to sell something or not, and don’t make it hard for them — make it really clear that you are selling something when you’re selling something. David suggests actually having two different formats or different newsletters for different purposes, which is not something that you see in a lot of other content around this topic. The Hiut Denim Company have two different newsletters; the Scrapbook Chronicles which contains 14 things: 12 pockets of inspiration and two company updates, which is their community building newsletter. They’ve also got the second newsletter; Factory Talk which contains three things and ends with their latest offer. It’s much shorter and is very much a sales newsletter. Whilst generosity is important, David reminds us not to be too generous; a lot of unsubscribes come from people receiving too many emails. Don’t drown people in your generosity. In order to be interesting and generous in your newsletters, you should curate your own inputs to make sure that you are getting different and interesting inputs in the things that you are reading, because that’s where you’re going to find things to curate and share with your audience. There is a balance between curation which is more your maintenance type content, and creation, which is the momentum content as it’s original thought that’s often a bit more personal. There’s a role for both, but think about where you need to be investing the time in creation because that’s where you get your momentum. Big idea #3 — Build a community Your list is not a list, it’s people, it’s a community. You can use them to help you be more interesting, because if you understand them you can better connect with them and can share more relevant things with them that they’ll find interesting. David encourages you to think about who the minority are that you’re talking to, who is that small group of people or what is the intersect of that venn diagram that where three or four things overlap? This is why unsubscribes for the right reason can be good, as the wrong people filter themselves out. so in Use your newsletter to instigate a conversation with your community and allow a two way conversation to emerge. Make it really easy for people to comment, share, reply or come back to you with a response. In the book he talks about the fact that a community wants three things; connection, meaning, and change. How can you bring those three elements into your your brand, your tone of voice, the design of your newsletter, the things you share, and the way people can interact with you. Finally, you need to show people that you care. If you show people that you care about the work you’re doing, about your process, your products or service, about your message, and about them, they will let you lead. If you’re not very interesting or you’re a bit soulless and don’t have much of a voice, people aren’t going to trust you as much. If you put out good ideas by spending the time thinking about them, you build a community that trusts you and appreciates your generosity.
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| Imaginable by Jane McGonigal: why you need to take a step into an unthinkable future | 10 avr. 2022 | 00:17:41 | |
About the book The COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly frequent climate disasters, a new war — events we might have called “unimaginable” or “unthinkable” in the past are now reality. Today it feels more challenging than ever to feel unafraid, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it seems impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? What we need now are strategies to help us recover our confidence and creativity in facing uncertain futures. In Imaginable, Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. She invites us to play with the provocative thought experiments and future simulations she’s designed exclusively for this book, with the goal to:
Imaginable teaches us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world with possibilities we cannot yet imagine—until reading this transformative, inspiring, and necessary book. Source: amazon.com and https://janemcgonigal.com/ About the author Jane McGonigal is a future forecaster and designer of reality games created to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is also the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011) and SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully (Penguin Press, 2016), and her TED talks on how gaming can improve our lives have more than 15 million views. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research group in Palo Alto, California, currently teaches the course “How to Think Like a Futurist” at Stanford University, and is the lead instructor for the Institute for the Future's series on the Coursera platform. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Source: amazon.com and https://janemcgonigal.com/
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| Best books of 2022... so far (part 1) | 03 avr. 2022 | 00:18:52 | |
It's time for my quarterly review of the best books of 2022 (so far), talking about the six books I've loved the most over the first few months of 2022, featuring...
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| Special: five best books on leadership | 20 mars 2022 | 00:15:59 | |
This little special episode is about the top books on the big topic of leadership. A great little list if you are a leader, are working with leaders, or want to buy a useful gift for a leader in your life. They'd also be great as part of a nice little bundle for new promotions or new joiners to an organisations. Anyway, that's to say that there's lots of use you can get from this bonus episode. If you think I missed a book, or you'd add something else to this list, let me know...
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| The Power of Regret by Dan Pink: why regret is not a dirty word | 13 mars 2022 | 00:16:09 | |
About the book “No regrets.” You’ve heard people proclaim it as a philosophy of life. That’s nonsense, even dangerous, says Daniel H. Pink in his latest bold and inspiring work. Everybody has regrets. They’re a fundamental part of our lives. And if we reckon with them in fresh and imaginative ways, we can enlist our regrets to make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and deepen our sense of meaning and purpose. In The Power of Regret, Pink draws on research in psychology, neuroscience, economics, and biology to challenge widely-held assumptions about emotions and behavior. Using the largest sampling of American attitudes about regret ever conducted as well as his own World Regret Survey — which has collected regrets from more than 16,000 people in 105 countries — he identifies the four core regrets that most people have. These four regrets, Pink argues, operate as a “photographic negative” of the good life. By understanding what people regret the most, we can understand what they value the most. And by following the simple, science-based, three-step process that he sets out, we can transform our regrets in a positive force for working smarter and living better. With Pink’s signature blend of big ideas and practical takeaways, captivating stories and crisp humor, The Power of Regret offers an urgent and indispensable guide for a life well lived. Source: https://www.danpink.com/the-power-of-regret/
About the author Daniel H. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, published in February. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family. Source: https://www.danpink.com/about/
Big idea #1 — Regret is not a dirty word Regret can actually be healthy. Over 70 years of research has concluded two things; that regret makes us human, and regret makes us better. It makes us human because it engages this uniquely human ability that we have to time travel in our minds; forward into a hypothetical future to look at our lives if we took one decision versus another decision, backwards to think about what decision we should make now, and then forwards again into a different path or an alternate reality, to compare that to our current future or an alternative future. Regret is especially painful as well as an emotion, because we can mostly blame it on our own decisions and actions or inactions. It is also a very common feeling, and one that is highly valued. It makes us better by;
Obviously we don’t want our regrets to overwhelm us. There’s a quote in the book that says, we want regrets to “poke us, not smother us”. Big idea #2 — The four types of regret In the regret surveys that Dan created, adults shared their regrets and were asked to categorise them into eight domains. Those eight domains were family, partners, education, career, finance, other, health, and friends. And they were in that order. So the most regrets were in the family domain, and the least regrets were categorised in friends domain. But when they looked at the data, they realised that they were looking at the categorisation or those domains all wrong, there was actually a different theming of the regrets that could be established. Those four types of regrets are;
These underpin all of the domains, meaning it’s not the domain that regrets fall into that distinguish them, but the type of regret, or the reason that someone regretted the thing. Other researchers that Dan spoke to said on boldness regrets that “regrettable failures to act have a longer half-life than regrettable actions”. Inaction is so much more painful for people, and throughout the book you can see this sentiment littered within the verbatim responses that people sent as part of the surveys. Regrettable failures to act have a longer half-life than regrettable actionsIt’s incredibly painful reading, you could almost read all the regrets and go away with a renewed sense of purpose and resolve to not let these things happen in your life. Big idea #3 — Avoiding and fixing regrets To avoid regrets we can learn from the ones we’ve already got, take different decisions and pathways in order to avoid doing those things again in the future. For regret we already have, we can do a few things to stop them smothering us. Firstly we can undo it; maybe that’s apologising, or maybe it’s taking action and behaving in a way that will undo, improve, or fix what you did or didn’t do in the past. Secondly we can ‘at least’ it; taking something from a regret to a relief or from an ‘if only’ to an ‘at least’. Eg. Dan shares this example about his regret of going to law school, which wasn’t something he wanted to do. Rather than…
This is good for the pesky stuff that niggles away at us. It’s a bit of gratitude and is more about changing the mindset around a particular regret. This works for certain types of regrets, but you might have bigger ones or ones that are created by inaction, which can be harder to undo. The three steps to try here are;
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| Stolen Focus by Johann Hari: why it's not your fault that you can't pay attention | 27 févr. 2022 | 00:18:14 | |
PS. I'll be doing an Ask Me Anything bonus episode in the next few weeks; if you've got something you'd like me to answer / tackle, email me steph@stephclarke.com
About the book All over the world, our ability to pay attention is collapsing. In the US, college students now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and office workers on average manage only three minutes. New York Times best-selling author Johann Hari went on an epic journey across the world to meet the leading scientists and experts investigating why this is happening to us — and discovered that everything we think we know on this subject is wrong. We think our inability to focus is a personal failing — a flaw in each one of us. It is not. This has been done to us — by powerful external forces. Our focus has been stolen. Johann discovered there are twelve deep cases of this crisis, all of which have robbed some of our attention. He shows how he learned this in a thrilling journey that takes him from Silicon Valley dissidents who figured out how to hack human attention, to veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD; from a favela in Rio where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, to an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore their workers’ attention. Crucially, he learned how — as individuals, and as a society — we can get our focus back, if we are determined to fight for it. The answers will surprise and thrill you. This is a book about our attention crisis unlike any you’ve read before. Source: https://stolenfocusbook.com/ About the author Johann Hari is a British-Swiss writer who has authored three New York Times best-selling books. They have been translated into 38 languages, and been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah to Noam Chomsky, from Elton John to Naomi Klein. His latest book, ‘Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention’, was published in January 2022. His first book, ‘Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs’, was adapted into the Oscar-nominated film ‘The United States Vs Billie Holiday’. His second book, ‘Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions’ was described by the British Journal of General Practice as “one of the most important texts of recent years”, and shortlisted for an award by the British Medical Association. Johann’s TED talks have been viewed more than 80 million times. The first is named ‘Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong’. The second is entitled ‘This Could Be Why You Are Depressed or Anxious’. Source: https://stolenfocusbook.com/the-author/
Big idea #1 — The 12 reasons you can’t pay attention The book is structured around the 12 reasons we’ve lost our ability to focus. They are;
James Williams, a former Google strategist (and now dissenter) talks about this idea that we are living through, “a denial of service attack on our minds”. There’s so much information attacking our brains, they are overloaded and don’t function as well. We’re drinking from a firehose.
Big idea #2 — The system is rigged All of the 12 reasons have some link to a broader systemic issue. Talking to the different people and scientists and researchers etc, that Johann spoke to as part of this book, who have been doing the work around this, this is the common theme. And this isn’t just about Facebook or big tech, but frankly most of the big tech companies reward structures are based around usage. More use = more data,, which is what they sell, which = more money. People from the inside of these tech companies are now speaking out about the decisions being made internally in those organisations, why they’re being made, and the impact of them. It is completely in these company’s control to make those different decisions, make the ones that would actually be an improvement to society. That would maybe get back to where social media could have been, and maybe was 10-15 years ago when it first started. The things that made it appealing in the first place. However, now they know that something that inflames or angers gets a bigger response; it gets more shares, and it gets more attention, which brings them more money. Therefore that’s what is pushed to us. The timeline and the infinite scroll that’s a feature of a lot of social media platforms could also easily be changed at the flick of a switch, but they don’t, because the more you’re on there, the longer that infinite scroll keeps you there with the distorted timeline, the more information they’re gathering. We can’t just tech detox ourselves out of this by silencing our notifications or going on a silent retreat. A lot of the people designing these platforms, won’t let their kids use them, and they won’t use it themselves. So it just goes to show that if they’re not eating their own dog food, why should we be the guinea pigs doing it? Ex-Googler James Williams was speaking at a conference with leading tech designers. And he asked them the simple question; “how many of you want to live in the world that you are designing?”. There was an uncomfortable silence in the room, nobody put up their hand. These platforms really are the dumbing down of humanity and society, and diminishing our attention at a time we need it more than ever. The way that social media platforms are changing the conversation and shaping the conversation, is really quite terrifying. And never mind when you get into the stories and the evidence around radicalization and some of the really dark things that social media platforms are feeding people and continue to feed people, because that’s how they’re designed. We can’t just not use tech. It’s too simplistic and too unrealistic. But it is worth considering what we’re using and how we’re using it. Johann speaks to Nir Eyal, who literally wrote the book (Hooked), which became the book these big tech companies used to build their platforms and build their systems and services in a way that people cannot escape from them. The interview is quite heated as Nir suggests that people just turn off their notifications, and if they don’t, that’s on them. There’s a role for personal responsibility, but when the system is designed for the opposite, it’s a real challenge at a societal level. There’s lots of tech examples there, but it’s the same with some of the food systems about what gets rewarded; keeping costs low and therefore the decisions that are made in order to maintain the status quo, maximise shareholder profitability, rather than maintain (or improve) nutritional value. Similar with climate change and pollution. There’s examples of different health, stress, and attention outcomes for people living in areas with more pollution, versus those who get to live in slightly cleaner areas. It all goes to show the level of systemic decisions and issues at play in terms of the holistic health and wellbeing of society and populations. And it’s really hard to read some of this and not feel like you’re being taken down a conspiracy theory route. But at the same time, given how public much of this information is, you realise it’s not really a conspiracy, this is actually how things are happening and we are the guinea pigs (and the product) in this experiment. Big idea #3 — What to do? One of the things that the book is not, is a book of hacks. This book is not about how to hack your way around the, the systems that are designed to set us all up to fail. At the same time, it’s easy to throw hands up in the air and assume that we can’t do anything because there’s such huge power at play. There is a balance of using things in a smarter way, and looking for bigger change. Some of the things that Johann talks about in terms of the individual things that he does include;
He says that the pandemic has supercharged the direction in which we’re heading. If we were heading down a pretty miserable path, when it comes to technology use and our stolen focus beforehand, this has been exacerbated by the last couple of years as we’re much more connected, spending much more time on devices trying to block out the outside world, numbing ourselves, and more stressed. He also importantly, calls for a bigger change. He calls it Attention Rebellion, which would call for;
He says it’s small creative groups of individuals and societies that will create this change, that’s why we have things like weekends. We need people who get together and say, ‘this is not good enough, something needs to change’. We need to be these people, and find these people; join them, vote for them, support them, whatever it needs to be, because without that, nothing will actually change.
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| Powerful by Patty McCord: why it's time to start treating your employees like adults | 20 févr. 2022 | 00:14:53 | |
About the book When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley. McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR―annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs―often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability. Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run. Source: https://pattymccord.com/book/ About the author Patty McCord brings the Silicon Valley concepts of fresh ideas and innovation and applies them to rethinking the way we work. She challenges norms and invites us to reconsider the idea of “best practices.” From her many years working with companies that range from very large global tech companies to small very small innovative start-ups, Patty saw first-hand how companies can become slow and complacent and employees become cynics and whiners. She spent 14 years at Netflix experimenting with new ways to work. Making the Netflix culture deck become reality for the people who work there. From abolishing performance reviews to challenging the need for policies, Patty believes people come to work as fully formed adults with a desire to make an impact and be proud of what they do and she’s on a mission to spread the word that we can do this differently. She is frequently in the media with interviews and articles from Harvard Business Review, NPR, Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal. She speaks at CEO Forums, Business schools and for large groups around the world. Source: https://pattymccord.com/about-patty/
Big idea #1 — Your employees are adults Your employees have power, but only if you don’t take it away. There’s been a big theme for a number of years around employee empowerment. We only need to empower employees if we disempowered them in the first place. Netflix wasn’t built on elaborate systems. They kept stripping away policies, but they did it experimentally. This doesn’t therefore create a ‘free for all’, which is usually what people freak out and assume is going to happen when you start removing policies and procedures. Instead it removes the ‘senseless bureaucracy and stupid processes’, and instead focuses on discipline and behaviour. This is what the Netflix culture deck is. It’s a summary of the behaviours that they expected people to be disciplined about in their time working for Netflix. Patty’s belief is that a business leader’s job is to ‘create great teams that do amazing work on time’. That’s it. We don’t need loads of policies and processes and practices in order to do that, we just need to create the environment where people can do their best work. And even more so to create a company where people want to come in and ‘solve these problems with these people’, which is one of the phrases that Reid Hoffman used when he was describing to Patty the company culture that he wanted to create. Now it’s worth noting that Patty was at huge tech companies before Netflix. She was at SunMicrosystems for a number of years, which is a huge, traditional tech company. She wasn’t always in this super cool startup Netflix kind of place. She says in the book that she often in her previous life she had implemented some of the policies and procedures that she eventually began to question, as she began to realise they just weren’t effective, and therefore were a huge waste of time and resources.
Big idea #2 — The principles These are lessons that Patty learn about how to instill principles and behaviors of high performance in teams and set a culture in an organisation. All teams and companies are different, so you can’t just lift the Netflix culture deck and adopt it as your own, but these five principles seem to be common and true and underlying whatever the ‘culture deck’ would look like for a company:
(Can you imagine if this was the case in all companies, it would be utopia), All of this shows the underlying principles of discipline, and creating the environment, the systems and the conversations that allow that to sustain. None of those require endless policies and practices. One thing that Patty is really strong about in the book is about your people. really knowing and understanding the business. Your people aren’t going to make the best decisions, and possibly behave in the correct/desired way if they don’t know the business. Knowing what you’re striving for, what you’re aiming for, what’s important, and what’s not is even more important than any learning curriculum. Help people understand, which will help give them the discipline to decide, act, and behave in the way that’s best for the customer and the business. Big idea #3 — Create debate One of the principles was around creating strong fact-based opinions to debate them avidly and test them rigorously, and also that the point of a debate was not about you being ‘right’. They took this very seriously in Netflix. In her HR role Patty regularly tested “best practices” or “conventional wisdom”, and experimented by removing things, seeing what happened, tweaking, testing, and then putting things back in or taking more things out. The Netflix exec team would orchestrate debates in front of each other, including having to argue the other side or different position to the one they maybe wanted to take or they believed in. They would also do this publicly in monthly debates in the Netflix theatre, where they would invite all of the staff to come and watch the debate a particular real business challenge they were facing at the moment. This was no role play just for the sake of doing it. Part of this was to show that there’s no easy or obvious answer to hard questions, particularly at that strategic level, so it helped people see that there were multiple different, equally good directions, that decisions could go in and that it’s hard to decide which one to do. This is a great way of role-modelling debate, and really powerful to show debate for the best betterment of the company, the customer experience, the clients, whatever it happens to be, and not for personal gain / being ‘right’. Patty says this was much more powerful than any conflict related course or debate course that companies send their employees too. Because they’re seeing in real life, they’re seeing it in the context of the work that they are doing, and importantly that they can see that this is all in service of getting the right outcome for the company and the customer.
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| Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown: how to learn to feel again | 13 févr. 2022 | 00:18:01 | |
About the book Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience If we want to find the way back to ourselves and one another, we need language and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories and to be stewards of the stories that we hear. In Atlas of the Heart, we explore eighty-seven of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human and walk through a new framework for cultivating meaningful connection. This is for the mapmakers and travelers in all of us. Source: https://brenebrown.com/book/atlas-of-the-heart/ About the author Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. Brené is also a visiting professor in management at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. She has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy; is the author of six #1 New York Times best sellers; and is the host of the weekly Spotify original podcasts Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead. Brené’s books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and her titles include Atlas of the Heart, Dare to Lead, Braving the Wilderness, Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection. With Tarana Burke, she co-edited the best-selling anthology You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience. Her TED talk on the Power of Vulnerability is one of the top five most-viewed TED talks in the world, with over 50 million views. She is also the first researcher to have a filmed lecture on Netflix. The Call to Courage special debuted on the streaming service in April 2019. Brené lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Steve. They have two children, Ellen and Charlie. Source: https://brenebrown.com/media-kit/ Big idea #1 — We need to start feeling Most of us don’t fully feel. We numb, we avoid, we deflect, and we do anything to not feel painful or uncomfortable feelings, in an attempt to remain in control. When we start feeling our feelings, we discover we need to do a lot of work to reevaluate ourselves, to reset boundaries, choose ourselves over the comfort of others. We can’t outrun our feelings, and we need to be, to hold people accountable for their hurtful behaviors. If we don’t understand the link between thoughts and behavior, we become more and more disconnected from each other. There is a lot of disconnection in the world at the moment because we’ve lost the ability to see things from a different point of view, to extend empathy, to connect, and to have the courage to have some uncomfortable conversations. But to do any of this successfully, we need language. Most people unfortunately can only recognize three big emotions; something looking like mad, sad, and glad. As a result, we’re only really accessing a tiny slice of what it means to be human. The more emotions that we can define, access, and recognise in ourselves and others, the wider and better the conversations we can have.
Big idea #2 — The categories of emotions The book is structured into 13 groups of emotions;
All of those clusters have several different emotions that sit within them, some of them are a mix of what we would commonly call positive and negative emotions (although many in the field would avoid this language). Each emotion is then broken down to cover how it shows up in our bodies (the biology of the emotion), how families and communities shape our beliefs around the connection between feelings, thoughts, and behaviors (the biography), how to examine our go-to behaviors and recognizing the context of what we’re feeling or thinking (behaviours), and the backstory of each emotion (backstory). Note: I think this is one of the most powerful parts of the book, the categorization of the emotions in this way, based on how and when they show up. Big idea #3 — The confused emotions There’s lots of examples in the book around emotions that often get confused with each other. For example, the difference between stressed and overwhelmed, jealousy and envy, and the link between resentment and envy. Brené shares an interesting conversation Professor Marc Brackett (author of Permission to Feel). She asked if resentment was linked to anger, and he said that it was linked to envy. This was a huge penny-drop moment for Brené who realised that the ‘anger’ she felt when she was resentful, was actually envy, usually because the other person was able to put a boundary in place that she wished she could, but felt like she couldn’t. This ability to recognise the subtle nuance between certain emotions is so important for having better conversations with each other about how we feel. Another example was the subtle differences between disappointed, regretful discouraged, resigned, and frustrated. If you’ve only got access to ‘mad, sad, and glad’, you might bunch all of those into ‘mad’. But actually there are really distinct differences in why those five emotions could be showing up. The conversation you might have someone who’s feeling disappointed when they felt like an outcome was outside of their control, versus the conversation you can have with someone who was able to identify as feeling frustrated are quite different conversations and therefore quite different questions, and empathy are required. For this reason, this book is an absolute go-to resource for labeling, understanding, demystifying, and defining the emotions we all feel. Seeing where those lines are commonly blurred, and therefore our actions and behaviors might be too, is a pathway to meaningful connection. Meaningful connection requires grounded confidence and a mindset of learning and improving. Ultimately, all of this is a journey based in reflection, curiosity, empathy, mistakes, a lot of discomfort, and really a lifetime of work. This is not something that you’re going to read the book, and become a fully fledged, emotionally competent human. This is absolutely a lifetime of work, as Brené openly shares in her own stories throughout the book.
I talked about Brené's previous book, Dare to Lead, in episode 2(!) of this podcast. You can go back and listen to it here.
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| This Working Life by Lisa Leong & Monique Ross: how to reimagine work for the better | 06 févr. 2022 | 00:13:06 | |
About the book You spend most of your waking life working — a jaw-dropping 90,000 hours for the average person. You deserve to feel joy during that time. But how? Source: https://www.hardiegrant.com/ About the authors Lisa Leong is the host of ABC Radio National’s This Working Life. She is a former corporate lawyer and ABC Eyre Peninsula breakfast presenter whose purpose as a broadcaster, media commentator and master facilitator is to help people find the sunshine in work, in relationships and in themselves. Her work and unique approach has been the subject of a Harvard Case Study and TEDx Talk: ‘Can robots make us more human?’ She is a graduate of the Customer-Focused Innovation program of Stanford University’s GSB and the Stanford .school, the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and the University of Melbourne Law School. Her superpowers are curiosity, creativity and delivering key messages by way of song. Monique Ross is a freelance journalist, writer and editor who has previously worked for ABC News Digital and ABC Radio National. She is also a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide, and the founder of Heartwood Nature Bathing, based in Brisbane/Meanjin. Her superpowers are connection, organisation, grit and making pasta disappear. Source: This Working Life book cover Big idea #1 — There’s not one answer There’s not one answer to work, and there’s certainly not one career path. This is not a book of hacks, or a plan, or a process, or a methodology, or a single model per se. It’s more of a set of mindsets and thought-starters on how to (re)think work in the modern age. It challenges the idea of a ‘job for life’, and encourages us to think about building skills that are transferable, and a career that’s more fluid and ever-changing. At the heart of this is a mindset of learning and experimentation, not an answer or a particular path for everyone that everyone should take. There’s a lot of experimentation woven into the book in little sections called ‘lab experiments’, with ideas that you can put into practice including building a portfolio career, finding a mentor, and everything in between. The important point is that you do have options and you can change things. You can make tweaks by practicing job craft, you can pivot by adding strings to your bow or building a portfolio career, or you can completely reinvent by having a career change. Lisa and Monica give plenty of their own examples of tweaks, pivots, and reinventions they’ve had through their careers. One of the most important things about this book is it really just show the art of the possible. It’s so easy to feel like you ‘can’t’ do these things, or ‘can’t’ change something about how you work. But how much of that is actually you holding yourself back; writing off things without really testing them, experimenting, and pushing a little bit more. Big idea #2 — Category of one This was one of my favourite ideas in the book. It’s the idea of being a category of one by leveraging your unique experiences, strengths, and values so that you (and only you) can add your own magic and impact to your work. First you need to know what your strengths, values, and experiences are. This is important so that you can then develop them and use them with a bit more purpose and intent. The life flow exercise in the book is a great exercise in the book where you look at the the highs and the lows of your life and career to see what those trends and themes are. You get to find the common denominator of when you’ve been really satisfied with your work or life, which means you can design your next move around having more of those elements. This mindset of a category of one also allows you to stand out and can stop comparisonitis because if you’re a category of one, there’s no point comparing yourself or your path or your skills to other people, because they are a different category of one. Being able to play your own game is also very freeing, and much healthier than constant comparison. It allows you to embrace a more infinite mindset rather than playing the finite games (despite the fact that organisations are often set up to pit us against each other when it comes to annual reviews etc). Finally, thinking in a ‘category of one’ mindset can be the thing that allows you to successfully create and/or design a role, knowing what your strengths are, where you’re going, and what your unique individual path is. Big idea #3 — Work/life coherence Work/life balance makes my eyes roll back in my head, so I was very pleased to see for once a different approach in here. Lisa and Monique challenge the idea that work and life should be separate. It often feels like more stress to try (and fail) do that. A coherence, on the other hand, is about finding more of a unified whole, or a connectedness between work and life. They say that if balance draws a line between work and life, coherence starts to unify those two sides, and they become more interconnected, in flow and flexible to change. For work/life coherence to work, we need to remove guilt and presenteeism and instead focus on what actually matters. There’s a two way exchange of course, and requires transparency in your team or organisation. At an individual level we need to be able to self-regulate, we need to better help ourselves focus and be present so that when we’re doing work, we are doing work, and when we were at home, we are doing that thing. Coherence doesn’t work if one are is always spilling into the other. It takes boundaries, it takes self-awareness, it takes self-regulation. And of course, transparency in order for this to work.
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| The 1 Day Refund by Donna McGeorge: how to reclaim a day back in your week | 30 janv. 2022 | 00:12:32 | |
About the book Are you constantly juggling multiple tasks and operating at 100 per cent or more? Do you feel you are permanently on the treadmill and can’t get off? If you needed extra capacity for something urgent, could you find it? In The 1-Day Refund, best-selling author and time management expert Donna McGeorge shows you how to recover an extra 15 per cent of your time-10 minutes per hour, 1 hour per day or a full day each week-to think, breathe, live and work. By creating more space, you’ll discover a new ability to focus on what’s truly important to you. With The 1-Day Refund, you’ll be on your way to getting back a full day, so you can take advantage of any opportunity that comes your way. Source: https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-1-day-refund-donna-mcgeorge About the author Donna is passionate about enhancing the large amount of time we spend in our workplace (too much, for many) to ensure it is effective and productive, as well as enjoyable. Donna has worked with managers and leaders throughout Australia and Asia–Pacific for over 20 years. She delivers practical skills, training, workshops and facilitation to corporates — such as Nissan Motor Company, Jetstar, Medibank Private and Ford Motor Company — so they learn to manage their people well and produce great performance and results. She lives on the Gold Coast, Queensland, a region known for its world-class beaches, but her most creative moments come while sipping tea on her balcony, gazing at the meandering waterways, alongside her husband, Steve, and dog, Prudence. Source: https://www.donnamcgeorge.com/about
Big idea #1 — Aim for 85 We need to rethink the idea of capacity. Most of us live at 100% (and some of us at 120%) in how we work and live. But Donna challenges us to aim for 85% , and design our lives and work around that. Professional sports people do this, knowing that it’s better for endurance as they can be more relaxed. Actor Hugh Jackman also uses this 85% rule when he is performing as it allows him to be more relaxed and leaves his brain with a bit of extra capacity for mulling things over and being more creative. This 15% buffer in our lives allows us not to rush, building in time for those delayed trains or meetings that run over, or any of these unexpected time when life happens to us. And 15% of seven days is one, so by operating at 85% you get this extra day back. Donna uses a nice analogy in the book of a cup of tea; carrying a cup of tea at 100% full is very hard to maneuverer, whereas a cup at 85% is a breeze, with much less risk of spillage and mess. Donna talks about four different types of capacity;
Big idea #2 — Create space We need to offset our off-kilter use of capacity. We need to make space in our lives and our days. And Donna has put a four-part model together that considers our physical and mental capacity, plus our personal and our professional lives.
Big idea #3 — Reclaim a day This is really the whole purpose of the book; the 15% of extra space and capacity is roughly one day per week. If you were one of the many people who found yourself not having to commute as a result of working from home over the last couple of years, that’s an easy 8-10 hours a week that you would get back. If someone had told you in 2019, that you would have an extra 8-10 hours per week, the following year, or for the next couple of years, what would you have said, what would you have wanted to spend that time on? Donna shares that Australians work 3.2 billion hours per year in unpaid overtime. And for what? Do we really want this time many of us gained to be absorbed back into emails and busy work? This is the time to be intentional and rethink capacity and space for our life, our brains, our relationships, and our work.
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| I Didn't Do The Thing Today by Madeleine Dore: why productivity is not the meaning of life | 23 janv. 2022 | 00:14:55 | |
About the book Any given day brings a never-ending list of things to do. There’s the work thing, the catch-up thing, the laundry thing, the creative thing, the exercise thing, the family thing, the thing we don’t want to do, the thing we’ve been putting off (despite it being the most important thing). Even on days where we get a lot done, the thing left undone can leave us feeling guilty, anxious, or disappointed. After five years of searching for the secret to productivity, Madeleine Dore discovered there isn’t one. Instead, we’re being set up to fail. I Didn’t Do The Thing Today is the inspiring call to take productivity off its pedestal — by dismantling our comparison to others, aspirational routines, and the unrealistic notions of what can be done in a day, we can finally embrace the joyful messiness and unpredictability of life. For anyone who has ever felt the pressure to do more, be more, achieve more, this antidote to our doing-obsession is the permission slip we all need to find our own way. Source: https://extraordinaryroutines.com/book About the author Madeleine Dore is a writer and interviewer exploring how we can broaden the definition of a day well spent. For the past five years, Madeleine has been asking creative thinkers how they navigate their days on her popular blog Extraordinary Routines and podcast Routines & Ruts. She has contributed columns and features to Sunday Life, BBC WorkLife, ArtsHub, 99u, Womankind, Kill Your Darlings, The Design Files, ABC Life and more. Madeleine regularly conducts life experiments and hosts events to explore how creativity isn’t just something we do, but how we approach our lives. Source: https://extraordinaryroutines.com/about Big idea #1 — Be a day artist One of the underlying ideas is this concept of being a ‘day artist’, or seeing each day as a work of art. Being creative, rather than doing creativity in how we live. This means being creative with the elements of a day, even when that day doesn’t go to plan. There’s a nice quote in the book from Helena Bonham Carter that says; “Everything in life is art. What you do, how you dress, the way you love someone and how you talk, your smile and your personality, what you believe in and all your dreams, the way you drink your tea, how you decorate your home, or party ,your grocery list, the food you make, how your writing looks, the way you feel. Life is art.”It’s a great reminder that we get to choose how to live. It’s quite a freeing idea. Taking this approach involves a little bit more play, and wonder and curiosity. Maybe you don’t start the day by ‘eating the frog’ or doing the most unpleasant thing first, but maybe you start the day with something that’s pure pleasure instead. There’s a fantastic example in the book, about a chef who starts the day with a bowl of porridge with a dollop of clotted cream on top, along with some brown sugar, and he just thinks that’s the best way to start the day because by breakfast, he’s already won the day! A perfect example of prioritizing delight over dread. Being a day artist might mean making changes to your environment, having a corner of a room dedicated to reading, for example. It doesn’t need to be that you need lots of extra space, but maybe you just use your space differently. There’s example in the book from Austin Kleon, who talks about having a really clear, crisp, clean work area with his computer where he writes, but then a really messy desk, which is where he does all his messy collage work. It means letting go of expectations, or at least holding them much more lightly and letting things surprise us, which can then allow us to explore what we really want, not just what we think we “should” be doing. Now, we can’t seek constant novelty in life, but we can be much more attuned to it and leave space for surprise, even if it’s just for an hour or 10 minutes in our day. Big idea #2 — Embrace the wobble There’s lots of wobbling in our days. Maybe something takes longer than planned, or there’s a distraction, an interruption, or a drama. Whatever it might be, embracing the wobble means that we might need to find ‘puddles’ of time, rather than needing perfect blocks of uninterrupted time in order to get things done. It’s more about self-awareness, than self-regulation, which a lot of productivity guidance can be a bit heavy on. Wobbling is a constant adjustment, we’re constantly twisting and turning and balancing and bumping into things. But berating ourselves for our inconsistency takes up the precious time that we’re telling ourselves off for wasting in the first place. There is no dress rehearsal in life, this is it. Maybe we need to stop letting ambition get in our way. Sometimes ambition can be a good thing, but sometimes it can be a pursuit of recognition from others, rather than a focus on doing things that we want to do. It’s obviously not all bad, but maybe being more micro-ambitious, a term that she took from the wonderful Tim Minchin, is a healthier and more flexible approach that allows us to focus in what’s in front of us, in the present instead of what’s next.
Big idea #3 — Kindness over busy-ness None of us need telling twice about the modern scourge of busy-ness. It’s such a barrier to connection and it’s a fast track to burnout. Kindness, Madeleine says, is the antidote to burnout. Kindness with ourselves and with others. Whether that’s a chat with the person serving you at the post office, or making a donation to charity, or texting a friend to say hi, incorporating a bit more kindness into our days, rather than busy-ness, can be a nice way of slowing down and remembering what’s important. Kindness extends to ourselves by knowing that rest is not a bad thing. Hobbies don’t need to be a side-hustles, and we can challenge all the things we tell ourselves that we should do. Otherwise it’s easy to find ourselves too busy to actually enjoy life. There’s a really nice analogy in the book of being like a sponge. Sometimes we’re in absorption mode soaking up, resting, learning, taking in knowledge etc, but too long in absorb mode will leave us kind of sodden and a bit soggy and wet. So we need to be squeezed. We need a bit of pressure to balance us out. Ultimately, Madeline says; “Maybe we can’t expect to enjoy every day, but we can find it endearing. When we reach the end of the day, instead of berating ourselves, what we did or didn’t do, we can be charmed by the ordinary moments of living and what our days can bring.”Which I think is a rather nice way of thinking about life.
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| How to Begin by Michael Bungay Stainer; how to change your life with a worthy goal | 16 janv. 2022 | 00:12:30 | |
About the book We unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. Instead of doubting yourself, fearing you’ll make a mistake, and feeling like you need to play “small” so you don’t disrupt the status quo, start showing up for yourself so you can show up for the world. Don’t regret a life half-lived. Stepping up and pursuing your dreams is hard … and it’s exhilarating, and it’s important. Let me show you how to get clear, get confident, and start anything that matters. Source: https://www.mbs.works/best-books-training-for-coaches-leaders-and-mentors/how-to-begin-book/ About the author Michael Bungay Stanier is the author of six books which between them have sold more than a million copies. He’s best known for The Coaching Habit, the best-selling coaching book of the century and already recognised as a classic. Michael was a Rhodes Scholar and plays the ukulele badly. He’s Australian, and lives in Toronto, Canada. Source: https://www.mbs.works/about/
Big idea #1 — Set a worthy goal This is the bulk of the book. You go through this process a few different times to refine and improve your worthy goal. The first phase is purposely messy and probably quite dull. And you test this first draft of your goal on whether it’s thrilling, important, and daunting. Round two of the iteration, has you adding some active words and verbs, before testing it again. A final refinement has you scoring the goal on how thrilling, important, and daunting it is, each out of seven. If the score is low (<18/21), your goal needs a bit more work. You might need to add a word, or make the goal bigger, or maybe more constrained, or specific. And then voila, you have a worthy goal. Big idea #2 - The pain of reality As any good coach would, Michael has you taking a good, hard look in the mirror. The book takes you through examining your habits, your false starts, your patterns and behaviours, and your ‘mosquitoes’, as he calls them, that buzz around you and follow you around, whatever it is you try to do. This is an exercise in self-awareness and compassion, not self-loathing. You might go through this and realise some uncomfortable truths about your tendencies and things that may have set you back in the past, but it’s very much about being aware of them, and then being able to work with, or around, them this time. The next part is about painting a picture of your future, whether you do, or whether you don’t, see through this worthy goal. This is really useful to see the true opportunities and opportunity costs, of doing or not achieving this goal. One of my favourite exercises in the book is the idea of defining You2.0, which really hones in on what you want yourself to look like when you’re operating at your very best, versus operating at 85%. It’s such a great way of thinking back to situations where you really thrive, and what that looks like, to give yourself the boost that you can rekindle that again. Big idea #3 — Set yourself up to succeed As with any good goal setting book, there’s a big emphasis on setting yourself up for success. This includes having the right people around you; the people who are going to nurture you and you need a bit of nurturing, give you a bit of a kick or a nudge when you need it, or who you can aspire to and who can teach you. Ultimately the people who can both support and challenge you along the way. The other piece is around awareness. There’s a lot of activities in here around really knowing thyself, understanding where you’re likely to trip yourself up, and where you’re likely to not be as effective as you could be in reaching your worthy goal. Finally, thinking about experiments and practices. Michael talks a lot about how to take small first steps. Which isn’t necessarily a new idea, but a nice one to think about in terms of getting this worthy goal moving in the right direction, especially if it’s a bit daunting (as it should be).
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| What you should read in 2022 | 09 janv. 2022 | 00:10:24 | |
This week we're taking a gentle start to the year talking about the books on my reading list for this year, and how I'm rethinking my reading habits and goals. Here's some of the books I mention in the episode;
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| How We Read: Claire Hatton on royalty, leadership, and changing reading tastes | 19 déc. 2021 | 00:24:41 | |
It's a December special with this bonus mini-series called How We Read, featuring conversations about the books that have stuck with us.
In this episode of How We Read I'm talking to Claire Hatton about her top books of 2021, how she reads, and why 2021 has spurred some different genres of reading for her. Plus, honourable mentions of Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister by Jung Chang, and Phosphorescence by Julia Baird.
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