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Book Notes: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Book Notes: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

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This is the first of what will be an ongoing series of notes about books I’m reading. I read about fifty books a year, mostly related to leadership, organizational change, and adult development. Rather than write book reviews, I want to experiment with sharing what I do naturally when I read, which is to take notes about insights and questions that are relevant for my clients, colleagues, and friends. So rather than construct tidy and elegant reviews, I’ll present my reflections in raw form, unfiltered and unplugged.

We’ll call this Book Notes in homage to Brian Lamb’s long-running interview series on C-SPAN.

Key: My comments are in italics.

So Good They Can't Ignore YouSo Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Question for Work You Love by Cal Newport (2012)

The Passion Hypothesis: The key to occupational happiness is to first find out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion. [Read more…] about Book Notes: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

The day top executives nap on the job

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My last post argued why most people reading this blog need more sleep and how to get it.  A few days later, Tony Schwartz made a related case for naps. Research shows that naps improve performance, particularly for people who didn’t sleep enough the night before. For example:

In one study, subjects who had slept five to six the previous night were told to take naps of five, 10, 20 and 30 minutes. The five-minute nap didn’t have much impact. But the subjects who took 10-, 20- and 30-minute naps consistently improved their performance on cognitive tests of memory and vigilance conducted in the subsequent two and a half hours.

Schwartz has introduced energy practices into enough companies to know that “a vast percentage of employers don’t sanction naps.” So this is a difficult row to hoe. In fact, the opposition to napping is so woven into the cultural DNA of organizations that I wonder how much of an impact policy changes alone can make. For example, Google has nap pods, but how many employees actually use them, and how often?

Here’s why I’d like to see: top executives and high performing talent taking naps during the day and telling others that they did it and how it helped them. Not just once but over and over again over weeks and months. That’s when employees will start to take it seriously and take the risk of doing it themselves.

Why you need more sleep and how to get it

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“Like a drunk, a person who is sleep-deprived has no idea how functionally impaired he or she truly is.”

—Charles Czeisler, Harvard Medical School

According to the National Sleep Foundation, 95 percent of us need 7-8 hours per night. Think you need only 5? Maybe you are superhuman. However, research shows that superhuman performers in many fields get more sleep than everyone else. A more likely explanation is that you are deceiving yourself. Has it been so long since you got a good night’s sleep that you forgot how it actually feels to be fully rested?

I’ve never been an outstanding sleeper. In fact, it takes concerted effort for me just to sleep adequately. As a result, I’ve invested a fair amount of time learning about what keeps me from sleeping well and how to remedy the situation. Here is what I learned: [Read more…] about Why you need more sleep and how to get it

Skills that are easy and effortless

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What skills come easily and effortlessly to you? Are you currently getting paid to use them? These questions don’t only matter to consultants like me who choose what services to offer and how to price them. They are also relevant to people within organizations. Indeed, the strengths-based movement in talent development (Gallup, Marcus Buckingham, etc.) is based precisely on this premise. 

Below is a post I wrote earlier this year for my personal blog. It describes my discovery of what may be my greatest strength and my astonishment that I hadn’t thought of it during a two month period of trying to identify my greatest strengths. Go figure!

May this story entice you to explore your deepest strengths, particularly those you may be overlooking precisely because they involve so little effort. [Read more…] about Skills that are easy and effortless

Learning to lead

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The challenge lies in making use of on-the-job experiences. This means finding better ways to identify developmentally significant jobs, to move the right people to them and to help talented people learn from them. How well these things are done is far more important than how formal or elegant the procedures are.

—The Lessons of Experience by McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison, 1988

In 1988, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) published an important study. Important because of the insights it contained, and important because it has largely been ignored for the past 25 years. CCL interviewed successful executives to better understand how they got better at leading. These were in-depth interviews, the kind that allow participants to tell stories about their experiences and reveal what they had learned.

The researchers found that the primary way successful executives learned was from on-the-job experience. Not training, not books, but the work itself. Hence the title of their book, The Lessons of Experience. [Read more…] about Learning to lead

The race of our lives

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The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.
—Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance Company

We’re in the race of our lives. It’s not between the “good guys” and “bad guys” but between the complexity of our world and the capacity of our minds to manage this complexity.

Jim Collins’s survey of 1400 companies showed that transforming from “good to great” requires Level 5 leadership: a paradoxical blend of professional ambition and personal humility. We also know from longitudinal research of small- and mid-sized organizations that companies’ capacity to transform is directly related to top executives’ own capacities. In particular their ability to integrate different perspectives, use a broad repertoire of power approaches, and self-correct. [Read more…] about The race of our lives

Toward 12% body fat

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Two years ago, I was shocked to learn that my body fat percentage was nearly 25%. This led quickly to a series of changes in what I eat, how I work out, and how I schedule my day. I set an audacious goal of achieving 10% body fat at 165 pounds. This goal–and the vision of lean strength it represented–infused me with positive energy that would not have come from a more modest target. It launched a bold new set of practices and allowed me to “return to form” after breaking my arm in March 2012 and losing many hours of sleep from having an infant in the house.

Two weeks ago, after the body fat measured 18% at 148 pounds, I decide to recommitted to a new goal of 12% body fat at 155 pounds. Still audacious yet easier to maintain once reached, and the weight is more appropriate for my frame size.

As a way to fill you in, here is the post that launched things: [Read more…] about Toward 12% body fat