Book Short: Vive La Difference Brain Sex, by Anne Moir and David Jessell, was a fascinating read that I finished recently. I will caveat this post up front that the book was published in 1989, so one thing I’m not sure of is whether there’s been more recent research that contradicts any of the book’s conclusions. I will also caveat that this is a complex topic with many different schools of thought based on varying research, and this book short should serve as a starting point for a dialog, not an end point. That said, the book was a very interesting read about how our brains develop (a lot happens in utero), and about how men’s and women’s brains are…
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Books
Book Short: Vulnerability Applied to Leadership
Book Short: Vulnerability Applied to Leadership Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty (book, Kindle), is Patrick Lencion’s latest fable-on-the-go book, and it’s as good a read as all of his books (see list of the ones I’ve read and reviewed at the end of the post). The book talks about the power of vulnerability as a character trait for those who provide service to clients in that they are rewarded with levels of client loyalty and intimacy. Besides cringing as I remembered my own personal experience as an overpaid and underqualified 21 year old analyst at how ridiculous some aspects of the management consulting industry are…the book really made me think. The challenge to…
Book Short: Calm in a Crisis, Explained
Book Short: Calm in a Crisis, Explained Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales, is not a business book. Even though the author says a few times “this can be applied to business, too,” the application is left 100% up to the reader. But that’s my only criticism of the book, and it’s not a big one at that. Deep Survival is an unexpected and somewhat odd way to think about how to lead an organization, but it’s very powerful, and incredibly well written. The author essentially has made a career, or at least a hobby, of studying major accidents and delineating the qualities that separate those who survive from those who don’t. Most of his…
Book Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours
Book Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours In Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (post, buy), we are taught, among other things, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, as well as a dash of luck and timing, as opposed to huge amounts of innate and unique talent. In Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, this theory comes to life, with a very clear differentiating point – it’s not just logging the 10,000 hours, it’s HOW the hours are spent. Colvin’s main point is that the hours need to be spent in what he calls “deliberate practice.” The elements of deliberate practice are best explained with his example of Jerry Rice, although you can…
Book Short: Sequel Not Worth It
Book Short: Sequel Not Worth It Mastering the 7 Essentials of High Growth Companies, by David Thomson, was a poor sequel to the solid Blueprint to a Billion [review] [buy]– and not worth reading if you’ve read the original. It was very short for its price and contained mildly interesting examples of “blueprint companies” that augmented the original book but didn’t uncover any new material or add any thinking to the mix. Basically, it was like another couple chapters that should have been part of Blueprint. It is not a bad buy in lieu of the original if you haven’t read either one yet, as Blueprint is a bit longer than necessary, but otherwise, you can skip this one. On…
Managing by Checklist
Managing by Checklist The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, started as an article in The New Yorker a few years ago by Atul Gawande and then turned into a book as well (book, Kindle). I haven’t read the book; the story in the article is about life-and-death issues and how Intensive Care Units in hospitals work most successfully when they “manage by checklist” — they keep thousands of small steps performed by different people in order. The story is very telling for business as well and reminiscent of David Allen’s productivity books, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life. The reality as far as I’m concerned…
Book Short: Multiplying Your Team’s Productivity
Book Short: Multiplying Your Team’s Productivity No matter how frustrated a kids’ soccer coach gets, he never, ever runs onto the field in the middle of a game to step in and play. It’s not just against the rules, it isn’t his or her role. Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown (book, Kindle) takes this concept and drives it home. The book was a great read, one of the better business books I’ve read in a long time. I read a preview of it via an article in a recent Harvard Business Review (walled garden alert – you can only get the first page of the article without buying it), then my…
Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B
Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, by David Thomson (book, Kindle) sounds more formulaic than it is. It’s not a bad book, but you have to dig a little bit for the non-obvious nuggets (yes, I get that growing your company to $1B in sales requires having a great value proposition in a high growth market!). The author looked for commonalities among the 387 American companies that have gone public since 1980 with less than $1B in revenues when they went public and had more than $1B in revenue (and were still in existence) at the time of the book’s writing in 2005. Thompson classifies the blueprint into…
Book Short: Gladwell Lite
Book Short: Gladwell Lite What the Dog Saw, And Other Adventures (book, Kindle) is Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book. Unlike his three other books, which I quite enjoyed: The Tipping Point (about how trends and social movements start and spread) Blink (about how the mind makes judgments) Outliers: The Story of Success (about how talents are genetic, situational, and cultivated) this was not a complete book, but rather a compendium of his New Yorker articles loosely grouped into three themes. If you love Gladwell and don’t read The New Yorker, it’s not a bad read. He’s a fantastic writer, and his vignettes are interesting. There are many “hmmm” moments as we learn why ketchup always tastes the same but mustard doesn’t;…
Book Short: Not About Going With The…
Book Short: Not About Going With The… Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (book, Kindle), was a great read and a nice change from either strictly business books or my regular fiction/non-fiction reading. It’s basically about the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life, but it’s far from a self-help book. It’s almost more of practical psychology deep dive into what brings about happiness and peak performance – a state the author calls Flow but others have called other things over time, like being “in the zone.” The author talks about achieving this control as synonymous with the enviable ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks and transform hopeless situations into challenges to be…
Book Short: Innovation and Discipline
Book Short: Innovation and Discipline The Puritan Gift, by Kenneth and William Hopper, is a bit of a mixed bag. The authors have a wonderful point to make — that American businesses have thrived over the centuries due to a mix of innovation and discipline that descended from the country’s Puritan roots, and that when they lose their way, it’s because they diverge from those roots. The book is also an interesting, if somewhat cursory, history of American industry. And it playfully debunks some great myths of corporate American life over the last 50 years. But the book has a few too many moments where assertions aren’t supported by data — where its theories overreach into explanations of other aspects…