Category: Books
Barbarians to Bureaucrats – Summary and Potential Application – Part 1
Thriving Organizations Every organization goes through a natural life cycle, initially flourishing and growing, maturing and then calcifying, and then often ending with its decay, and usually, its demise. Lawrence M. Miller wrote about this progression in 1989 in his book “Barbarians to Bureaucrats”. He noted that while this cycle is likely, it is not…
You Set the Tone
In Daniel Coyle’s book the Culture Code he has a chapter called “The Good Apples.”It’s about how an academic experiment was disrupted by some “good apples” – people who were committed to keeping the emotional tone of a meeting in a functional, productive, enjoyable place. You see the goal of this experiment was to see…
Pressure Crystalizes
One of the benefits of being put on the spot is that pressure crystalizes ideas. This is true in nature – diamonds and other crystals are able to form due to the immense pressure and heat that is built up. The analogy carries over (within limits of course!) to us…
Responses to Dangerous Abundance
The best response to an environment of dangerous abundance is to move in a way that is contrary to the normal behaviors seen in that environment. This is a form of scarcity which drives up value. Scarcity compounds, meaning that the when people realize something is rare, and therefore valuable, they scramble to snatch it…
Seneca on Time
Seneca, the Roman stoic philosopher and statesman, certainly had a way with words and a gift of observation. I like to imagine that he was the Mark Twain or Seth Godin of his day. Wry, shrewd, succinct. I’d love to take a writing class from a guy like this, or even a thinking class…
Sparked By Work
There are a lot of personality and work aptitude tests out there, which makes sense. Westerners work a ton, we look to work for a sense of community, accomplishment and self-realization.Stories of work frustration and difficulty which are then overcome and lead to triumphant work self-realization are extremely attractive to us (cue Joseph Campbell’s Hero…
Timely Points from the Little Book of Sideways Markets
I like little books. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (by John Bogle). The Little Book that Beat the Market (by Joel Greenblatt and Andrew Tobias). How to Retire with Enough Money (by Teresa Ghilarducci). In the Little Book of Sideways Markets (by Vitaliy N. Katsenelson) the premise is concise: After an extended bull…
Appreciating Our Limits and the Limits of Others
Patrick Lencioni is has working on a book “The Six Types of Working Genius”. (link here) While I don’t like it when people throw around the word genius, because the reality is that most of us really aren’t and never will be, but marketing, etc etc. I really like the main idea of this book…
Listen to your Expat Spidey-Sense
One of the great parts of being a longer-term expat is that you start to develop what I would call a “Spidey-sense” in your interactions. Different cultures have differing expectations of leaders and patterns of relating that is often more complex than the interactions that take place in the USA. The result is that interactions…
The Lost Art of Reading Deeply
“Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by…