Category: Books

Book Club

I went to my book club meeting Tuesday night. The book was A Perfect Peace by Amos Oz.  It is the story of a group of people living in a kibbutz  in the mid 60s. In particular it is about Yonaton who was born and raised on the kibbutz but has decided to leave his wife and the kibbutz, run away and start a new life.

Oz is an exceptional writer. The way he develops his characters and their complex relationships made me feel like I knew these people. It made me care about them. He also makes the environment, the weather and the kibbutz  very real. His cast of characters is quirky but you can tell that he has a soft spot in his heart for them. While reading this book it hit me that a lot of writers must not like their characters very much.

Oz has to be one of the best writers alive today and the book is top notch. Despite that, it is not a book that I would necessarily recommend. I set  myself a goal to read 50 pages a day during my vacation and I never felt the urge to go beyond my assignment for the day. In spite of the fact that it didn’t grab me it is an excellent book and I am glad I read it.

Blink and Teams

I finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell today. It is a thought provoking book and worth reading but I found it some what unsatisfying. I am not sure why. He talks about how powerful first impressions can be but he also talks about how prejudices  or adrenaline levels can make snap judgments wrong.  It is definitely worth reading if only because it reinforces how powerful the mind can be.

I once had a boss tell me that I should trust my gut more often. He said I often over think things. His advice was good advice. I had lunch with a friend Friday and we were talking about how one of the advantages of getting older is that more and more you feel confident trusting your instincts.

I spent the rest of the day today  between doing laundry and cleaning the house  reading  The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. It was recommended to me by a friend at Intuit whose opinion I really respect. I started it and finished it today so you know it is an easy read.  I’ve always liked  team related books and I really enjoyed  this one. I think part of why I liked it is that  it resonated with  me and got me thinking about a still painful management failure I had many years ago. Most of the book is what the author calls a management fable and a key part of the fable is very similar to what happened to me.

I was leading a customer support team that included one very smart, very productive manager who was constantly undermining the team. He wouldn’t address issues he had with another team member head on. Instead he would  constantly criticize her behind her back. One of my weaknesses was that I tended to avoid conflict. I should have insisted that he commit to the success of the team. But I didn’t. Instead for months I tried to make us into a team in spite of him. I tried and tried for way too long. Eventually we were faced with a crisis. A significant update to our flagship product shipped with  a lot of bugs. Our team failed to rise to the occasion and eventually I was replaced. There were other contributing factors but I think if I had removed the divisive person months earlier we might have regrouped and overcome the problem. I learned a lot from my failure. I still don’t like conflict but I  don’t avoid it any more and if I ever have a divisive person on a team again and they don’t want to change I will not keep trying to make the impossible happen.  The first two dysfunctions in Lencioni’s team model are absence of trust and avoidance of conflict. I have the scars to prove that they are critical factors.

As I said the Lencioni book is a simple book. Another more complex book about teams that I really like is The Wisdom of  Teams by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith. It has been a while since I read it but I remember that it was very inspiring.

A Community Builder and a Renaissance Woman

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what Tom Peters calls  brand. He says "We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc." So starting a new job and starting a new blog have gotten me thinking. I’m a community builder. In my job at Sun I really enjoyed being a part of the team that was accelerating the change to Java Desktop and Solaris 10 across Sun. I am also a renaissance women. I love having a variety of interests, I enjoy intellectual stimulation and I thoroughly enjoy writing about these subjects in my blog. To be interesting is  important to me. So my goal is to be a community builder and to be a renaissance women.

I’ve just finished reading Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. The book is about community building. It is one of those books that you are almost afraid to be seen reading because if you are building community and making friends for what they can do for you, then you are a schmuck. That isn’t what Ferrazzi advocates and it certainly isn’t me.  Benjamin Franklin is my role model. He had a wide variety of interests. Everything from electricity to creating a new country. He believed strongly in networking.Ferrazzi says  Franklin " believed that a group of like-minded, achievement oriented individuals could dramatically leverage each others success to do things otherwise impossible." I think that if Franklin were alive today he would be a blogger. He not only helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, but he was also a best selling author, ran a very successful newspaper, and was an inveterate writer. I know I would love to read his blog.

If you are interested in Franklin then I highly recommend Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan . I read it several months ago but it is a favorite of mine. Morgan describes Franklin’s insatiable curiosity, the strong value he placed on being useful and his industry and frugality which Franklin saw not as a way to wealth but as a way to contentment. When I pulled the book off my shelf I found that I had written a  couple of Franklin quotes on  a piece of paper and left them in the book. The first quote makes me identify with Franklin: "I find I love company, chat, a laugh, a glass and even a song as well as ever." The second is just very true: "You can always employ time better than in polemics."