Book Short: Wellness Redefined

Well Being: The 5 Essential Elements, by Tom Rath and Jim Harter from the Gallup organization, is a solid read and incredibly short. It’s one of those books that’s really a long article stretched and bound. But it goes beyond the basics of what I expected, which was something like “having healthy employees cuts down on absenteeism” and has a couple great elements of food for thought for leaders looking to build cutting edge and uber-productive organizations. It comes out of the same general body of research as four other very strong books I’ve written about over time — First, Break all the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, 12: The Great Elements of Managing (book, review), and Go Put Your Strengths to Work (book, review).

The authors define well being as having five separate components:  career well being, social well being, physical well being, financial well being, and community well being. Ok, that makes sense, but the three most interesting points the book made from my perspective were:

1. Well being isn’t just about one of these five elements – it’s about all five, and how they interact together, and how the workplace can support all of them
2. Achieving long-term objectives around well being requires finding short-term incentives that drive the same behavior in more obvious and immediate ways, as most long-term well being drivers require short term sacrifice. So figure out how to make eating a salad better for you not just years from now but TODAY (you’ll have more energy after lunch than if you eat that cheeseburger), for example
3. Financial well being isn’t something a lot of companies focus on, and maybe it should be. Particularly in our industry we hire knowledge workers and assume therefore that they’re smart and educated about everything…but maybe there are ways that the company can support financial well being that aren’t necessarily obvious

The book is full of stats from the underlying research, most of which show that most people are shockingly unhappy, and that most workplaces dont do enough to support employee wellness. The book also notes, as is the case with most things, that promoting well being among employees requires more than just setting up programs. Doing it right requires constant vigilance, measurement, and follow up. At Return Path, we do a bunch of programs along the lines suggested by the book (but can and should do more!), but we’ve never been rigorous with follow up. Good food for thought.

Note there is also a free whitepaper on the economics of well being that you can download here.  The white paper is ok…but not nearly as interesting as the book, and note that it does not substitute for the book.  Thanks to my colleague Cathy Hawley for this book!

Book Short:  Required Reading, Part II

Every once in a while, a business book nails it from all levels.  Well written, practical, broadly applicable to any size or type of organization, full of good examples, full of practical tables and checklists.   The Leadership Pipeline, which I wrote about here over six years ago, is one of those books — it lays out in great and clear detail a framework for understanding the transition from one level to another in an organization and how work behaviors must change in order for a person to succeed during and on the other side of that transition.  In an organization like Return Path‘s which is rapidly expanding and promoting people regularly, this is critical.  We liked the book so much that we have adopted a lot of its language and have built training courses around it.

The book’s sequel, The Performance Pipeline (book, Kindle), also by Stephen Drotter but without the co-authors of the original book, is now out — and it’s just as fantastic.  The book looks at the same six level types in an organization (Enterprise Manager, Group Manager, Business Manager, Functional Manager, Manager of Managers, Manager of Others, and Self Managers/Individual Contributors) and focuses on what competencies people at each level must have in order to do their jobs at maximum effectiveness — and more important, in order to enable the levels below them to operate in an optimal way.

This book is as close to a handbook as I’ve ever seen for “how to be a CEO” or “how to be a manager.”  Coupled with its prequel, it covers the transition into the role as well as the role itself, so “how to become a CEO and be a great one.”  As with the prequel, the author also takes good care to note how to apply the book to a smaller organization (from the below list, usually the top three levels are combined in the CEO, and often the next two are combined as well).  No synopsis can do justice to this book, but here’s a bit of a sense of what the book is about:

• Enterprise Manager:  role is to Perpetuate the Enterprise and develop an Enterprise-wide strategic framework – what should we look like in 15-20 years, and how will we get the resources we need to get there?
• Group Manager:  role is to manage a portfolio of businesses and develop people to run them
• Business Manager:  role is to optimize short- and long-term profit and develop business-specific strategies around creating customer and stakeholder value
• Functional Manager:  role is to drive competitive advantage and functional excellence
• Manager of Managers:  role is to drive productivity across a multi-year horizon, and focus
• Manager of Others:  role is to enable delivery through motivation, context setting, and talent acquisition
• Self Managers/Individual Contributors:  role is to deliver and to be a good corporate citizen

I could write more, but there’s too much good stuff in this book to make excerpts particularly useful.  The Performance Pipeline is another one of those rare – “run, don’t walk, to buy” books.  Enjoy.  For many of my colleagues at RP – look out – this one is coming!

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 overcome, just through the force of personality. This ability comes directly from ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts. The normal entropy/chaos of the mind is the enemy. There were a few key moments or takeaways in the book for me.

1. When one’s experience is most positive – when one is achieving Flow – people cite the following conditions in this order of importance:

– Confront tasks we have a chance of completing

– Able to concentrate

– Concentration is possible because the task has clear goals and…

– …provides immediate feedback

– Act with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life

– Exercise a sense of control over actions

– Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the experience is over

2. Becoming more Autotelic – learning how to make experiences ends in and of themselves – coming from the Greek words for “self” and “goal,” this concept is savoring a given activity for its own sake, NOT for its consequences and is a key to achieving Flow. Whether you create a mental construct around beating a personal record, doing math or pattern matching in your head, or something else, being able to focus enough energy on the task at hand and not be distracted by the world around (present or future) is key. It’s a little like what I wrote a few months ago about how achieving mental discipline in the small areas of one’s life can lead to much greater things by building confidence and clearing mental clutter.

3. The concept of the “Flow channel” – as skill increases, challenges must also increase proportionally in order for us to continue learning, growing, and excelling – and achieving Flow.

4. Transformational coping is the ability to cheat chaos – transforming a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled and enjoyed and emerge stronger from…

– Unselfconscious self-assurance – ego absent but confident, not at odds with environment but part of it

– Focusing attention on the world – looking outward, not inward

– The discovery of new solutions – being able to perceive unexpected opportunities as a result

5. How to develop the autotelic self

– Set clear goals

– Become immersed in the activity

– Pay attention to what’s happening

– Learn to enjoy immediate experience

The book reminded me of a couple other things I’ve read, in case any of these resonate with you. First, Tim Gallwey’s “Inner Game” books where he talks about “relaxed concentration,” basically the Flow state, and the inner conflict between focus on the event and focus on the consequences, between mental chaos and mental discipline, personified as Self 1 and Self 2. If you haven’t read these, any are good and give you the general idea, depending on which piques your interest the most: The Inner Game of Golf (book, Kindle), The Inner Game of Tennis (book only), and The Inner Game of Work (book, Kindle). Second, David Allen’s Getting Things Done theory about how a clear, uncluttered mind can do its best work. As Flow says, achieving an ordered mental condition is difficult – unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.

I’m not sure this book short does the book justice. It’s pretty complex and is rich with examples, but Flow (book, Kindle) is well worth a read if you’re into the theory of self control leading to better results and more happiness in life. Thanks to my friend Jonathan Shapiro for this book.

Book Short:  Scrum ptious 

I just finished reading Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland. This reading was in anticipation of an Agile Facilitation training my executive team and I are going through next week, as part of Return Path’s  Agile Everywhere initiative. But it’s a book I should’ve read along time ago, and a book that I enjoyed.

Sutherland gets credit for creating the agile framework and bringing the concept scrum to software development over 20 years ago. The book very clearly lays out not just the color behind the creation of the framework, and the central tenets of practice again, but also clear and simple illustrations of its value and benefits.  And any book that employs the Fibonacci series and includes Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” quote — my all-time favorite — is off to a good start by me.

I’ve always appreciated a lot of the underlying philosophy of Agile, such as regularly checking on projects, course correcting in response to feedback from customers or other stakeholders, and working hard to remove any impediments to progress in real time.

One of the author’s most poignant points is that “multitasking makes you stupid.”  I hadn’t focused in the past how agile allows you to clear away context shifts to focus on one task at a time, but that’s another great take away from the book.

Our Agile Everywhere initiative, which is designed to improve productivity across the organization, as well as increase accountability through transparency, is even more critical in my view after having read this book.

The thing that I am left struggling with, which is still very much a work in progress for us, and hopefully something that we will address more head on in our training next week, is the application of the agile framework to teams that are not involved in the production of a tangible work product, such as executive or other leadership teams.  That is something that our Agile Everywhere deployment team has developed a theory about, but it still hasn’t entirely sunk in for me.

I can’t wait for next week’s training session!  If you have any experience applying the agile framework to different types of teams in your company I’d love to hear more about it in the Comments.

Book (Not So) Short:  Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure

I couldn’t get the catchy jingle from the 80’s commercial for Sure deodorant (you remember, the one with the Statue of Liberty at the end of it – thanks, YouTube) out of my head while I was reading the relatively new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End.  Written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Confidence is one of the few business books I’ve read that’s both long and worth reading in full.

The book has scores of examples of both winning and losing streaks, from sports, business, politics, and other walks of life, and it does a great job of breaking down the core elements that go into creating a winning streak or turnaround (Accountability, Collaboration, Innovation).  Kantor also puts a very fine point on the “doom loop” of losing streaks and just how hard it is to turn them around.  The book also has a good crisp definition of why winning streaks end — arrogange, anyone? — and has consistent, but not preachy recipes for avoiding pitfalls and driving success.  All in all, very inspirational, even if many of the roots of success lie in well-documented leadership qualities like those expressed in Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Good to Great.  The book is good enough that Kantor can even be forgiven for lauding Verizon, probably the most consistently awful customer service company I’ve ever dealt with.

But even more of the roots of success and disappointment around streaks are psychological, and these examples really rang true for me as I reflected back on our acquisition of the troubled NetCreations in 2004.  That company was in the midst of a serious slump, a losing streak dating back to 2000, at the peak of the original Internet boom.  Year over year, the company had lost revenues, profits, customers, and key personnel.  Its parent company saw poor results and set it into the doom loop of starving it for resources and alternating between ignoring it and micromanaging it, and when we acquired the business, we found great assets and some fantastic people (many of whom I’m proud to say are still with us today), but a dispirited, blame-oriented, passive culture that was poised to continue wallowing in decline.

I can hardly claim that we’ve turned the business around in full, or that I personally made happen whatever turnaround there has been, but I do think we did a few things right as far as Kantor and Confidence would see it.  Her formula for a turnaround (Espouse the new message, Exemplify it with leadership actions, Establish programs to systematically drive it home throughout the organization) is right in line with our philosophy here at Return Path.

First, we accelerated the separation and autonomy of a fledgeling NetCreations spin-off unit, now our Authentic Response market research group, and let a culture of collaboration and innovation flourish under an exceptionally talented leader, Jeff Mattes.

But that was the easy part (for me anyway), because that part of the business was actually working well, and we just let it do its thing, with more support from HQ.  The turnaround of the core list rental and lead generation business of NetCreations, the original Postmaster Direct, was much tougher and is still a work in progress.  In the last six months, we’ve finally turned the corner, but it hasn’t been easy.  Even though we knew lots of what had to be done early on, actually doing it is much harder than b-school platitudes or even the best-written books make it seem.

The one thing that Kantor probably gives short shrift to, although she does mention it in passing a couple times, is that frequently turnarounds require massive major amounts of purging of personnel (not just management) to take hold.  As one of my former colleagues from Mercer Management Consulting used to say, “sometimes the only way to effect Change Management is to change management.”  Sometimes even very talented people are just bogged down with baggage — the “ghost of quarters past” — and nothing you do or say can break that psychological barrier.

Boy, have we learned that lesson here at Return Path the hard way.  I’m extremely grateful to our team at Return Path, from the old RP people who’ve seen it all happen, to the old NetCreations people who are thriving in the new environment, to the new blood we’ve brought in to help effect the turnaround, for playing such important roles in our own Confidence-building exercises here.  And I’m super Confident that 2007 will be the year that we officially turn the old NetCreations/Postmaster losing streak into a big, multi-year winning streak.

Anyway, I realize this may redefine the “short” in book short, but Confidence is without question a good general management and leadership read.

Book Short: Chip Off the Old Block

I have to admit, I was more than a little skeptical when Craig Spiezle handed me a copy of The Speed of Trust, by Stephen M. R. Covey, at the OTA summit last week. The author is the son of THE Stephen Covey, author of the world famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as well as The Eighth Habit (book, post). Would the book have substance and merit or be drafting off the dad’s good name?

I dog-ear pages of books as I read them, noting the pages that are most interesting if I ever want to go back and take a quick pass through the book to remind me about it (and yes, Ezra, I can do this on the Kindle as well via the bookmark feature). If dog-ear quantity is a mark of how impactful a book is, The Speed of Trust is towards the top of the list for me.

The book builds nicely on Seven Habits and The Eighth Habit and almost reads like the work of Stephen the father. The meat of the book is divided into two sections: one on developing what Covey calls “self trust,” a concept not unlike what I blogged about a few months ago, that if you make and keep commitments to yourself, you build a level of self-confidence and discipline that translates directly into better work and a better mental state. The other core section is one on building trust in relationships, where Covey lists out 13 behaviors that all lead to the development of trust.

In fact, we just had a medium-size trust breach a couple weeks ago with one of our key clients. Reading the book just as we are struggling to “right the wrong” was particularly impactful to me and gave me a number of good ideas for how to move past the issue without simply relying on self-flagellation and blunt apologies. This is a book full of practical applications.

It’s not a perfect book (no book is), and in particular its notion of societal trust through contribution is a bit weak relative to the rest of the book, but The Speed of Trust is an excellent read for anyone who wants to understand the fastest way to build — and destroy — a winning culture. It reads like a sequel of Covey senior’s books, but that’s a good thing.

Book Short:  I Wish This Existed 12 Years Ago

Brad Feld has been on my board for over a decade now, and when he and his partner Jason Mendelson told me about a new book they were writing a bunch of months ago called Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, I took note.  I thought, “Hmmm.  I’d like to be smarter than my lawyer or venture capitalist.”

Then I read an advanced copy.  I loved it.  At first, I thought, I would really have benefited from this when I started Return Path way back when.  Then as I finished reading it, I realized it’s just a great reference book even now, all these years and financings later.  But as much as I enjoyed the early read, I felt like something was missing from the book, since its intended audience is entrepreneurs.

Brad and Jason took me up on my offer to participate in the book’s content a little bit, and they are including in the book a series of 50-75 sidebars called “The Entrepreneur’s Perspective” which I wrote and which they and others edited.  For almost every topic and sub-topic in the book, I chime in, either building on, or disagreeing, with Brad and Jason’s view on the subject.

The book is now out.  As Brad noted in his launch post, the book’s table of contents says a lot:

1. The Players
2. How to Raise Money
3. Overview of the Term Sheet
4. Economic Terms of the Term Sheet
5. Control Terms of the Term Sheet
6. Other Terms of the Term Sheet
7. The Capitalization Table
8. How Venture Capital Funds Work
9. Negotiation Tactics
10. Raising Money the Right Way
11. Issues at Different Financing States
12. Letters of Intent – The Other Term Sheet
13. Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know

Fred has posted his review of the book as well.

Bottom line:  if you are an aspiring or actual entrepreneur, buy this book.  Even if you’ve done a couple of financings, this is fantastic reference material, and Brad and Jason’s points of view on things are incredibly insightful beyond the facts.  And I hope my small contributions to the book are useful for entrepreneurs as well.

The Gift of Feedback, Part IV

I wrote a few weeks ago about my live 360 – the first time I’ve ever been in the room for my own review discussion.  I now have a development plan drafted coming out of the session, and having cycled it through the contributors to the review, I’m ready to go with it.  As I did in 2008, 2009, and 2011, I’m posting it here publicly.  This time around, there are three development items:

1. Continue to spend enough time in-market.  In particular, look for opportunities to spend more time with direct clients.  There was a lot of discussion about this at my review.  One director suggested I should spend at least 20% of my time in-market, thinking I was spending less than that.  We track my time to the minute each quarter, and I spend roughly 1/3 of my time in-market.  The problem is the definition of in-market.  We have a lot of large partners (ESPs, ISPs, etc.) with whom I spend a lot of time at senior levels.  Where I spend very little time is with direct clients, either as prospects or as existing clients.  Even though, given our ASP, there isn’t as much leverage in any individual client relationship, I will work harder to engage with both our sales team and a couple of larger accounts to more deeply understand our individual client experience.
2. Strengthen the Executive Committee as a team as well as using the EC as the primary platform for driving accountability throughout the organization.  On the surface, this sounds like “duh,” isn’t that the CEO’s job in the first place?  But there are some important tactical items underneath this, especially given that we’ve changed over half of our executive team in the last 12 months.  I need to keep my foot on the accelerator in a few specific ways:  using our new goals and metrics process and our system of record (7Geese) rigorously with each team member every week or two; being more authoritative about the goals that end up in the system in the first place to make sure my top priorities for the organization are being met; finishing our new team development plan, which will have an emphasis on organizational accountability; and finding the next opportiunity for our EC to go through a management training program as a team.
3. Help stakeholders connect with the inherent complexity of the business.  This is an interesting one.  It started out as “make the business less complex,” until I realized that much of the competitive advantage and inherent value from our business comes fom the fact that we’ve built a series of overlapping, complex, data machines that drive unique insights for clients.  So reducing complexity may not make sense.  But helping everyone in and around the business connect with, and understand the complexity, is key.  To execute this item, there are specifics for each major stakeholder.  For the Board, I am going to experiment with a radically simpler format of our Board Book.  For Investors, Customers, and Partners, we are hard at work revising our corporate positioning and messaging.  Internally, there are few things to work on — speaking at more team/department meetings, looking for other opportunities to streamline the organization, and contemplating a single theme or priority for 2015 instead of our usual 3-5 major priorities.

Again, I want to thank everyone who participated in my 360 this year – my board, my team, a few “lucky” skip-levels, and my coach Marc Maltz.  The feedback was rich, the experience of observing the conversation was very powerful, and I hope you like where the development plan came out!

Boards That Lead, by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem, was recommended to me by a CEO Coach in the Bolster network, Tim Porthouse, who said he’s been referring it to his clients alongside Startup Boards. I don’t exactly belong in the company of Ram Charan (Brad and Mahendra probably do!), so I was excited to read it. While it’s definitely the “big company” version to Startup Boards, there are some good lessons for startup CEOs and founder to take away from it.

The best part about the book as it relates to ALL boards is the framework of Partner, Take Charge, Stay out of the Way, and Monitor. You can probably lump all potential board activities into these four buckets. If you look at it that way…these are pretty logical:

• Monitor – what you’d expect any board to do
• Stay out of the Way – basic execution/operations
• Partner – strategy, goals, risk, budget, leadership talent development
• Take Charge – CEO hiring/firing, Exec compensation, Ethics, and Board Governance itself.

There was an interesting nugget in the book as well called the Central Idea that I hadn’t seen articulated quite this way before. It’s basically a statement of what the business is and how it’s going to win. It’s about a page long, 8-10 bullet points, and it includes things like mission, strategy, key goals, and key operating pillars that underlie the goals. It basically wraps up all of Lencioni’s key questions in one page with a little more meat on the bones. I like it and may adopt it. The authors put the creation of the Central Idea into the Take Charge bucket, but I’d put it squarely in the Partner bucket.

Other than that, the book is what you’d expect and does have a lot of overlap with the world of startups. Its criteria for director selection are very similar to what we use at Bolster, as is its director evaluation framework. The book has a ton of handy checklists as well, some of which are more applicable than others to startups, for example Dealing with Nonperforming Directors and Spotting a Failing CEO.

All in, a good read if you’re a student of Boards.

Half the Benefit is in the Preparation

This past week, we had what has become an annual tradition for us – a two-day Board meeting that’s Board and senior management (usually offsite, not this year to keep costs down) and geared to recapping the prior year and planning out 2009 together.  Since we are now two companies, we did two of them back-to-back, one for Authentic Response and the other for Return Path.

It’s a little exhausting to do these meetings, and it’s exhausting to attend them, but they’re well worth it.  The intensity of the sessions, discussion, and even social time in between meetings is great for everyone to get on the same page and remember what’s working, what’s not, and what the world around us looks like as we dive off the high dive for another year.

The most exhausting part is probably the preparation for the meetings.  We probably send out over 400 pages of material in advance – binders, tabs, the works.  It’s the only eco-unfriendly Board packet of the year.  It feels like the old days in management consulting.  It takes days of intense preparation — meetings, spreadsheets, powerpoints, occasionally even some soul searching — to get the books right.  And then, once those are out (the week before the meeting), we spend almost as much time getting the presentations down for the actual meeting, since presenting 400 pages of material that people have already read is completely useless.

By the end of the meetings, we’re in good shape for the next year.  But before the meetings have even started, we’ve gotten a huge percentage of the benefit out of the process.  Pulling materials together is one thing, but figuring out how to craft the overall story (then each piece of it in 10-15 minutes or less) for a semi-external audience is something entirely different.  That’s where the rubber meets the road and where good executives are able to step back; remember what the core drivers and critical success factors are; separate the laundry list of tactics from the kernel that includes strategy, development of competitive advantage, and value creation; and then articulate it quickly, crisply, and convincingly. 

I’m incredibly proud of how both management teams drove the process this year – and I’m charged up for a great 2009 (economy be damned!).

Triple Book Short: For Parents

People who know me know that I am a voracious reader.  Among other things, I probably read about 25-30 books per year — and I wish I had time for more.  I probably read about 50% business books, which I blog about.  Most of my other reading is in a couple specific topical areas that interest me like American History and Evolutionary Biology.  Over the last few years, Mariquita and I have discovered and read a handful of books about parenting that have been foundational for us as we work deliberately at raising our three kids, and two of them have roots in some of the same philosophies, psychologies, and research as a lot of contemporary business literature.  So for parents everywhere, I thought I’d devote a book short to these three books.

The first one is Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, by Marc Weissbluth.  Having kids who sleep long and well has been the foundation for us to have a well functioning household.  Well rested kids are much easier than tired ones.  Well rested parents are more effective.  We have found that the principles in this book have consistently served us well on this front.  All three of our kids more or less slept through the night starting at 6-8 weeks and have been great sleepers since then.

Unconditional Parenting, by Alfie Kohn is basically, for those in the HR/OD field, “Action/Design” for parenting.  The principles in this book have applied to kids as young as 1 year old, and the examples in the book go through the teenage years.  Our main learnings from this book have been around moving away from more traditional forms of reward, punishment, and control and towards helping our kids make decisions as opposed to follow directions by understanding our kids perspective on things, working to help them articulate their own understanding of a situation, and helping them see the perspective of others.

Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, by John Gottman, builds on a lot of the same underlying work that Daniel Goleman writes about in articles and business books around Emotional Intelligence (in fact, Goleman wrote the forward to this book as well).  The book lays out a process the author calls Emotional Coaching to help kids learn empathy and problem solving by showing kids empathy, teaching them to understand and label their own emotions, and working with them to craft solutions on their own, but doing the whole process in a very calm and 1:1 manner.  One of my favorite parts of the book, which is so unusual in business books and any kind of self-help book, is that the author has a whole section devoted to when NOT to use this process.

Parenting is a very personal thing, and there isn’t a right or wrong way to go about it.  I have a friend who is fond of saying that parenting is a little bit like the way comedian George Carlin used to describe “other drivers” on the highway.  People who are going slower than you are “a**holes” and people who are going faster than you are “crazy.”  Only you drive the “right way.”  So true, but if you’re a parent, there’s no more important thing to be deliberate about practicing than parenting, and these books have been a good practice guide for us.  We have found a full read of these three books to be very helpful to us in our work with our kids, and we have been very lucky that our main babysitter has been aligned with us on philosophy (and has been willing to read these books with us).