Archive for the ‘Business Books’ Category
Monday, February 5th, 2018
The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip and Dan Heath makes the case that we all experience moments that make a huge difference in our lives and that there are things we can do to make them happen. You need to be aware of moments in your life and look for ways to make them happen again for yourself and those you serve. This is a must-read for any leader.
1. Defining Moments
- We all have defining moments in our lives. This book has two goals. One is to examine defining moments and identify the traits they have in common. Two is to show how to create defining moments by making use of these traits. When we reflect on an experience, we do not average our feelings over time. Rather, we focus on the high and low spots, the peaks, and the pits, along with the beginnings and ends.
- One or more of the following elements are involved. 1. Elevation: Something happens to elevate the experience from those surrounding it. 2. Insight: Here is where you suddenly realize something about yourself or the world that makes a difference. 3. Pride: This is when you accomplish something special. 4. Connections: Defining messages are social. Special moments become more special when you share them with others.
2. Thinking in Moments
- There are three kinds of situations that stand out as moments in our lives. They are transitions, milestones, and pits. The goal is to mark transitions, commemorate milestones, and fill the pits. Here the Heath’s tell some stories of how employers can make transitions like the first day on the job special, how banks can help commemorate savings and mortgage milestones, and how service providers can fill pits as soon as they show up. At the end of this section and each section in the book they include a clinic, which demonstrates how the book’s ideas can be put to use.
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Monday, August 7th, 2017
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth shares her research and the work of others on the subject and explains that what we eventually accomplish depends more on our passion and perseverance than on our innate talent. This work can help you find your own passion and develop it. This is a vital book for parents, teachers, and human beings in general. Make sure your school library has at least one copy for starters.
1. Showing Up
- Angela starts with the story of her visits to West Point’s summer session for incoming freshman known affectionately as Beast Barracks. Due to the high dropout rate of plebs, the question was: what qualities are the best predictors of who makes it and who goes home early? The only metric the Army had was the Whole Candidate Score. It combined SAT/ACT scores, class rank, an expert appraisal of leadership potential, and performance on objective measures of physical fitness. The problem was that this score had no predictive value when it came to surviving the first summer or the full four-year program.
- What candidates needed it seems, was a never give up attitude, which had nothing to do with ability. When Duckworth heard this she decided to create an instrument to measure it. She then created the Grit Scale, which is included on page 55. She found that it was a good predictor for West Point. It also turned out to be a good predictor for other accomplishments such and earning college degrees. She found that there was no relationship between IQ and grit.
2. Distracted By Talent
- As a teacher early in her career Duckworth discovered that talent for math was different from excelling in math. She also found that her weakest students sounded smart when talking about things that interested them. She found that Americans endorse hard work five times more than intelligence. However, teachers are more likely to lavish attention on students they think are talented. Another problem is associated with tests for talent, which like tests for grit are imperfect.
3. Effort Counts Twice
- After being chided by her advisor while working on her PhD in psychology, Duckworth came up with two equations. Talent x Effort = Skill, and Skill x Effort = Achievement. Note that effort is included in both equations. While this theory does have a place for natural ability, it shows how effort is more important. This chapter gives examples of famous people who felt they succeeded thanks to their compulsive effort. In addition to talent and effort, there is also a place for opportunities and luck on the road to success. Encouraging parents with money are a prime example of opportunities.
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Tuesday, January 17th, 2017
Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans offers time-tested advice for becoming the best version of yourself possible. The advice here can help even if you are already fairly happy with your life. Their website also contains useful resources and supplements to the book.
Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
- Bill is the executive director of the Stanford Design Program and co-founder of the Life Design Lab. He is also a former leader of Apple’s PowerBook product line and CEO of a design consultancy. Dave is co-founder of the Life Design Lab, a lecturer in the Stanford Design Program, a management consultant, and formerly a co-founder of Electronic Arts.
Introduction
- Since only 27% of college grads end up in a career related to their jobs, it’s clear that most end up designing their careers and all need to design their non-career life. While this book is for all of us, it’s the two-thirds of workers unhappy with their jobs and the 15% who hate their work that need it the most. Life is full of problems, and solving them is what design is all about. A well-designed life is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. Life then is about designing something that has never existed before. Keep in mind that passion is something you develop after you try something and get good at it. A key point is to never measure yourself against anyone. The five necessary mindsets covered are 1. Be Curious 2. Try Stuff 3. Reframe Problems 4. Know it’s a process and 5. Ask for help.
1. Start Where You Are
- You need to know where you are and what design problems you are trying to solve. In design thinking, the authors put as much emphasis on problem finding as problem solving. Deciding which problems to work on may be the most important decisions you make. The authors define a class of problems known as gravity problems. These are problems like trying to overcome gravity in that they are not actionable and therefore can’t be solved. The key is to not get stuck on something you have no chance of succeeding at.
- At the heart of this chapter is an activity that lets you take stock of your current status. You are asked to rate from 0 to 100 how you feel about the criteria of 1) Your Health, 2) Your Work, 3) Your Play, and 4) Your Love. As far as love is concerned you should consider all the different types of love you experience, not just love from a spouse or significant other. When you complete this task you will have a framework and some data about yourself. Nex,t you are asked to answer these questions. 1) Write a few sentences about how it’s going in each area. 2) Ask yourself if there’s a design problem you’d like to tackle in any area. 3) Ask if your problem(s) is a gravity problem.
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Friday, January 6th, 2017
Bull Spotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation by Loren Collins will help you spot and avoid lies in a world with more accessible truth and lies than ever. In the age of fake news you can learn how to use the tools of critical thinking to identify the common features and trends of misinformation campaigns. Loren will help you tell the difference between real conspiracies and conspiracy theories, real science from pseudoscience, and history from fantasy.
Loren Collins
- Loren is and attorney and firm associate with the Law Office of W. Bryant Greene, III, P. C. He is the creator of Barackryphal, a website that debunks the fallacies propounded by birthers regarding the birth and citizenship of President Obama. He has written for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the topics of misinformation and critical thinking.
1. Baloney Detection
- Operating in the world efficiently depends on one’s ability to identify crap, also known as misinformation. Today we are constantly bombarded with information, which makes crap detection more import than ever. We tend to rely on common sense, but recall that there was a time when common sense told our ancestors that the world was flat. It can be helpful, but we need to look to science to uncover the truth.
- Most of us are not conditioned to distinguish between good and bad sources. We favor information from sources we like and visa versa. We accept information that supports our beliefs, and doubt information that doesn’t. This is know as confirmation bias. Other biases include having our thinking impacted by how something is framed, and putting more weight on recent information.
- People evolved to spot patterns even when they don’t exist and to create stories, myths, to explain the patterns. The ancient Greeks, for example, created different Gods to explain how the world worked.
- A common feature of creative misinformation is the reliance of anomalies. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t produce a cohesive alternative theory. The idea is that if you can undermine one detail of the consensus view you have disproved it. If you see this in action, it tends to be a good means of spotting misinformation. Occam’s razor tells us that the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions is most likely to be the correct one.
2. Denialism
- Denialism concerns the rejection of truth accepted by experts. In some cases popular opinion denies scientific facts. For example, a 2010 poll showed that 40% of Americans believe humankind was created in our present form less than ten thousand years ago. The primary tactic is to look for anomalies that can poke holes in established theories. Deniers do not advance a cohesive alternative theory that can be tested.
- When confronted with evidence, deniers will often say it is forged or fake. When evidence can’t be denied they may say that it means something else like the Nazi gas chambers were not used for mass killings. Fake experts are also associated with deniers. While they may have college degrees, the degrees are usually in unrelated fields. Subjective experiences and anecdotes are often treated as solid evidence.
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Monday, December 5th, 2016
Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World by Tony Wagner (© 2012, Scribner: New York, NY) explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. Tony profiles innovators to identify patterns in their childhood that made them what they are. He shows how to apply his findings to education and tells parents how to compensate for poor schools. Keys include collaboration, interdisciplinary problem-solving, and intrinsic motivation. Sixty original videos are included that you can access via a smartphone. Go to Creating Innovators for a trailer.
A Primer on Innovation
- Innovation is about the process by which new things take place. It involves using novel and creative ways to create value via new products, services, business models, or processes. It involves valuable original ideas or insights that you somehow implement. It’s creative problem solving applied to the real world. Incremental innovation significantly improves products, processes, or services. Disruptive innovations create a new or fundamentally different product or service that disrupts markets and displaces dominant technologies.
- Innovations can be technical like Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad. They can also be social like the nonviolent strategies of Gandhi and M. L. King.
Skills of Innovators/Nature of Creativity
- Tony offers the following as the main skills needed: 1) critical thinking and problem solving 2) collaboration across networks and leading by influence 3) agility and adaptability 4) initiative and entrepreneurship 5) accessing and analyzing information 6) effective oral and written communication 7) curiosity and imagination. It is also necessary to imagine the world from multiple perspectives, see all aspects of a problem, be optimistic, experiment to explore problems with a bias towards action, work with others as the day of the lone genius seems to be over. For places like Google and Apple, intellectual curiosity is more important than smarts. They also want people who will take control of a situation rather than waiting to be lead.
What Is Needed
- Creativity is a habit and like any habit, it can be either encouraged or discouraged. Teachers that value the right answer more than provocative questions tend to drum the curiosity out of students early on. Creativity can be encouraged or discouraged.
- Tony cites work of Teresa Amibile’s who says that creativity or innovation has three components. They are expertise, creative thinking skills, and motivation. She believes that motivation is the most important and that intrinsic motivation has more impact than extrinsic motivation. Tony adds that childhood play should lead to adolescent passion and adult purpose. They are the three interrelated elements of intrinsic motivation. He notes that a disproportionate number of innovative people attended Montessori schools where play is an important part of the curriculum.
What Is Needed
- Knowing how to find those things you are interested in and that motivate you is way more important than specific things you study. This implies that you should put a buffet of opportunities in front of children and let them engage in unstructured play. If a child finds an interest, it should be encouraged.
- Tony tells of a course at Stanford where students work in teams to solve open-ended problems. Most high school and college courses that feature individual competition, specific content, and extrinsic incentives like grades and GPA. What is needed are courses that feature teamwork, multidisciplinary approaches, and the intrinsic incentives of exploration, empowerment, and play.
Tags: Creating Innovators, Innovation, Tony Wagner
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