What I will remember from the books I read in 2019

Originally posted on Medium

This year’s recap is thematically focused on my messy as hell quest through the trenches trying to earn the right to be a leader. I can’t claim that I have succeeded, but I can certainly say that I’ve tried. As Mark Welsh states:

“Leadership is a gift given by those who follow.”

Disclosure: linked to each book title is an Amazon link to help you purchase the book should you want to.

Here are the some important lessons I will remember from books I’ve read in 2019:

Atomic Habits by James Clear

• The quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits. The outcomes of your life are just lagging measure of your habits. You get what you repeat, e.g.: Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits, your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits.

• You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.

• “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”

• Three layers of behaviour change when it comes to habits

• Identity: True behaviour changes are in identify changes. When a smoker who is quitting is asked if they want to smoke another cigarette, it’s a shift from saying “I don’t smoke anymore” to “I’m a non-smoker”.

• Processes (system): changing your system, your environment to support the identify change

• Outcomes: the lagging measures of what you want to change

• Habits are modern day solutions to ancient desires: Finding love and reproduction → Tinder, Belonging with others → Facebook, Seeking validation → Instagram, Reducing uncertainty → Google, Achieving status → Video games

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

• When you steal like an artist, you don’t copy the end result, you steal the thinking, you don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like them.

• That there are no truly original thoughts, that much like genetics, every bit of you and humanity builds upon previous generations, from your heroes, mentors and the life experienced you’ve lived.

• To pair “stealing like an artist” with improv theatre’s “yes and” where you build upon the best of what someone else has done, thought, said before you and take it forward to creating your own vision of it.

• To build a tree of my heroes, put them up on a board and ask myself, what would they think in response to obstacles and challenges in my way.

• “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

Great Mondays by Josh Levine

• Small gains in onboarding speed increased productivity, and length of tenure, therefore improve the company’s return on investment in people.

• An organisation is the accumulation of every choice made by every employee.

• Regularly question assumptions about your product, every few months to avoid a presumption rut. Observe market trends and see what it means for the company

• Incentivising employees to directly influence results is like paying a babysitter for how much food they get your kid to eat. You need to reward values-driven choices, make the teammate feel proud for for what they did

• Uncomfortable conversations: throw in personal, family, gather to talk about personal anxieties, frustrations with each other, frustrations with themselves.

• Great rituals are authentic, fosters relationships, recurring, supported by company, scale, priority and has a why that is understood.

Turning the Flywheel by Jim Collins

• Amazon: Lower prices on more offerings, increase customer visits attract third-party sellers, expand the store, extend distribution, grow revenues per fixed costs (back to the beginning)

• Vanguard: offer lower-cost mutual funds, deliver superior long-tern returns for clients, build strong client loyalty, grow assets under management, generate economies of scale (back to the beginning)

• Ojai Music Festival: attract unconventional talent, unleash transcendent creativity, forge immersive 4-day experience, ignite passionate reactions, amplify community support, enhance local and global reputation

• Big winners are ones who take a flywheel from ten turns to billions of turns, rather than crank through ten turns

• Execution across the flywheel needs to be spot on, if you score a 9, 10, 3, 9, 10 across, you need to bring the 3 back to an 8.

• The greatest danger in business and life lies not in outright failure but in achieving success without understanding why you were successful in the first place

• Each component of the flywheel is almost an inevitable consequence of the step that came before.

Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri

• I will remember the story of how Reed Hastings cancelled the Griffon project (Roku) because it didn’t align with the overall mission of the company, and would lead them down suboptimal path.

• Three types of work for product teams: Tactical work → shorter term actions of shipping, daily activities of breaking down and scoping out work for devs and designers. Strategic work → positioning the product and the company to win in the market. Operational work → tying the strategy back to the tactical work.

• Three major gaps that block strategy from being effective in organisations: Knowledge gap → difference between what we would like to know and what we actually know. Alignment gap → difference between what we want people to do and what they actually do. Effects gap → difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what they actually achieve

• I will remember that strategy is both a top down and bottom up effort. Top down in terms of direction but bottom up in terms of communicating what is analysed, tested and learnt to be discovered back to management

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

• Having transitioned into a role that requires me to manage people as well as have face-to-face conversations with up to 20 individuals in a day has made me painfully aware of my introversion.

• Introversion and extroversion having little to do with shyness but more so how an individual derives energy, from solitude or from interacting socially with people.

• Build in sacred time for battery recharging, though the types of conversations I may have throughout a day are quite unpredictable, the schedule is planned and I should be planning in sacred areas of recharging and committing to them as if they were impactful meetings.

• High monitoring introverts have the ability to turn on extroversion for certain periods of time but require significant downtime to recover.

• Interesting insight around an introverted leader being good at leading more extroverted initiative-takers.

• How media has shifted the lens of leadership towards the ‘Extrovert Ideal’ extroverted and loud leaders, how we need to cultivate an environment that allows for both types of leaders to thrive because they’re both essential. Most effective teams should be a mix of both introverts and extroverts.

The Execution Factor: The One Skill that Drives Success by Kim Reed Perell

• Resilience is knowing that you can’t change the wind but you can change your sail.

• Follow the 40–70 rule: making decisions when they have between 40–70% of the information needed.

• Resilience: Developing a growth mindset: cognitive ability to perceive things differently. Growth heartset: emotional endurance to keep going so that you can thrive in the face of failure, still have the courage to keep going. Practising resilience: build it, similar to the stress gap

• Maintaining relationships: Send a handwritten congratulations note. Remind people that you’re thinking of them and make time to connect. Acknowledge and show appreciation whenever possible

Artemis by Andy Weir(Fiction)

• I want to remember how intricate human life can change by simply shifting the level of gravity on the lunar camp. Everything from muscle development, how to drink, how cars work, how buildings are designed, it’s incredible to think of how different life on another planet would be based on just one dimensional change, now through in hundreds or thousands and it’s hard to imagine what life would look like really on Mars!

Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo

• Leadership is not something that can be bestowed, it must be earned and people must want to follow you.

• Your role as a manager is to improve the purpose, people and process to get as high as a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can. Your job as a manager is to believe in the Mission yourself and repeating/sharing it at every opportunity. People implies developing strong relationships with your team members to know their unique strengths and weaknesses (as well as your own) to make good decisions on who should do what and coaching individuals to be their best. Process mainly govern the principles behind how decisions are made

• 1:1 questions:

• Identify: questions focus on what really matters. What’s top of mind for you right now? What priorities are you thinking about this week?What’s the best use of your time today?

• Understand: getting to the root of a potential problem. What does your ideal outcome look like? What’s hard in getting you to that outcome?What’s the worst case scenario you’re worried about?

• Support: zero in on how you could be of service. How can I help you? What can I do to make you more successful? What was the most useful part our our conversation today?

Footprints on the Moon by Seth Godin

• This is a refresher book that came along with the altMBA program which deserves its own separate posts, but a few key anecdotes:

• Meetings are safe spaces where we hide from taking responsibility and wait for others to lead.

• Tension isn’t something to be avoided. It is, in fact, the entire point. Our ability to dance with fear and to speak out the discomfort is what makes our contribution scarce and valuable.

• Change makers understand: Creative people change the world, you can’t change everyone hence the important of the questions “who’s it for” and you must add intention to everything, therefore ask “what’s it for?”

Be the Greatest Product Manager Ever by Lewis C. Lin 🦊

• Writing is thinking, write write write as a PM. Emotional journaling to keep track of your triggers as well.

• Delegate tasks but never accountability. Regardless of who does the work, you are always responsible. Hence, when the stakes are high, you must step in and do everything in your power to deliver outcomes and behaviours.

• Asking your boss before a new project, “how would you approach it?”

• Tactical awareness for PMs: Understanding what needs to be done. Foreseeing how others will react. Laying out how to achieve the goal. Making correct designs — on the appropriate behaviours, deliverables and allies to get the right outcomes

• Promoting people who are 60% ready for a role leads to extraordinary returns and impact.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

• I will never ever walk into a convenience store and not think of this book ever again. I will remember how intricate even a small convenience store can be and so full of stories and humanity, and how amazing the world is when you perceive all the little worlds around you. I’ll also remember the darker sides of the story, to evaluate what the equivalent of my “convenience store” is and remember to dissociate myself from my work.

Reboot by Jerry Colonna

• I will remember that every time I feel my imposter syndrome creeping up that it is simply my inner child speaking, one that is just trying to make sure that I am loved, feel safe and belong. That instead of trying to push away my thoughts, I should have a conversation with that inner child and reassure them that I got this.

• “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” I will remember to introspect on my past because the ghosts of our pasts typically manifest themselves into ugly narratives and constructs that our brains trick ourselves into following as an identity. To remember Carl Jung’s words: “I am not what has happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

• “We forge our truest identity by putting our heads into the mouths of the scariest demons, the realities of our lives. Only by facing our fears, our prejudices, our passions, can we transform the energy that is the source of our aggression, the source of our confusion, the source of our struggle.”

• Leadership is a pathless path and that success is not having the strength surmounting the odds at every obstacle but surmounting the odds despite being broken and human.

• Wisdom is knowing yourself, your own beliefs and living them.

• Looking for turtles, for hints and nudges on what my purpose is, and less so trying to look for a grandiose statement that I can repeat as a mantra.

• Questions to ask myself in my journaling: How did my relationship to money first get formed and how does it influence the way I work as an adult. What was the belief system around money and work that I grew up with? How can I lead with the dignity, courage, and grace that are my birthright? How can I use even the loss of status and the challenge to my self-esteem that are inherent in leadership to grow into the adult I want to be in the world? In what ways have I depleted myself, run myself into the ground? Where am I running from and where to? Why have I allowed myself to be so exhausted? Who is the person I’ve been all my life? What can that person teach me about becoming the leader I want to be? What was the story my family told about being real, being vulnerable, being true? Why do I struggle so much with the folks in my life? Why are relationships so difficult? What am I not saying to my co-founder, my colleagues, my family members, my life partner that needs to be said? What’s my purpose? Why does it feel I’m lost while I struggle to move forward? How do I grow, transform, and find meaning? How has who I am shaped the ways I lead others and myself? What are the unconscious patterns of my character structure that are showing up in my organizations How might I survive my life of heartbreak? How might I live in peace? What kind of leader and adult am I? What is enough? How will I know when my job is done?

Harvard Business Review: Leader’s Handbook

• Last year I read the Manager’s Handbook which was instrumental in getting me up to speed in many of the tactics of people management, I was hoping to get similar value and guidance out of this book but I simply found the leadership handbook way too high level and lacking real depth and insight.

• Regardless, what I will remember from reading this book:

• The mark of a failing strategy is trying to be all things to all people — and not having the courage to focus

• Holding your team accountable: if some people are let off the hook, then everyone expects it. Letting poor performance slide without consequences sends your whole team — and maybe your whole organisation — the message that you are not serious about achieving results.

• Getting the right metrics

• Are we focusing on the right questions?

• Does our data tell a story?

• Does our data help us look forward rather than behind?

15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp.

• The biggest shift that is need is to move from being a “To Me” leader to a “By Me” leader by taking radical responsibility for the circumstances of my life and for my physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. I commit to supporting others to take full responsibility.

• To Me leaders are in the mindset of a victim: I see myself as the effect of, cause of the condition is outside me, it is happening to me, effect of the markets, competitors, team members who don’t “get it”, suppliers, weather, mood, spouse, children, bank account, responsible. I am looking to the past to assign blame to my current existence. Their existence is dominated by “why” questions: “why did this happen to me”, “why don’t they respect me”, why are we losing market share, why are my kids failing at school.

• To me leaders are also heroes, heroes hate conflict, pain and tension, but taking on responsibility without looking inwards leads to burn out, supports others in taking less than their full responsibility and rewards behaviours that ultimately lead to individual and team breakdown.

• Toxic fear drives the victim-hero relationship. Blame and guilt keep it going.

• Toxic fear is a powerful motivator but it leaves negative resides of resentment and bitterness, low learning states, demotivation and eventual demoralisation.

• By me: I am the cause of my experience, the “by me leader chooses to see that everything in the world is unfolding perfectly for their learning and development. Nothing has to be different, htey see that what is happening is for them. A by me leader chooses curiosity and learning over defensiveness and being right. Instead of asking, ”why is this happening to me“ you shift to 1) ”what can I learn from this“ 2)how is this situation for me 3) How am I creating this and keeping this going?

• I commit to learning over being right, I will be defensive at times, but I will need to shift into curiosity.

• The team that sees reality the best wins. If we speak candidly, don’t withhold facts, thoughts, feelings or sensations,

• In order to appreciate and be grateful more genuinely and with intent, I need to deliberately spend more attention on it, thinking of green lights around you for instance, you’ll start noticing it more.

• When giving praise, focus on unarguable appreciation: “that was a great report” → “I appreciate you for the detailed appendices in the report, I noticed how at ease I felt having all the information at my fingertip. Praise needs to be sincere, speak an unarguable truth, be specific and succinct.

• Questions to ask myself if I am truly willing to change:

• Am I willing to take 100% responsibility for the issue? Am I willing to stop blaming and criticising others and myself?

• Am I willing to let go of being right? Am I willing to get more interested in learning than defending my ego?

• Am I willing to feel all your authentic feelings?

• Am I willing to reveal my withholds to others, am I willing to speak unarguably, am I willing to listen consciously to others?

• Am I willing to stop all gossip about others? Am I willing to clear up past gossip using the clearing model?

• Am I willing to clean up all broken agreements related to this issue? Am I willing to renegotiate all agreements?

• Am I willing to shift from entitlement to appreciation about an issue? Am I able to place my attention on how this issue is here for my learning? Am I willing to let go of all past resentment and replace it with genuine appreciation?

Trillion Dollar Coach by Bill Campbell

• Another strong sentence to reaffirm how important people are: “Bill, your title makes you a manager, your people make you a leader.”

• A reminder to play the gratitude game, also mentioned as the “family prayer” in the book where you have to thank another team member for something that happened last week.

• 1:1 structure: performance, relationship with peer groups, management/leadership.

• Using the rule of two, to work together to get to a solution.

• This is an important lesson I’ve had to learn this year, letting fires burn as well for tactical areas. When you blurt out the answer, you have robbed the team of having a chance to come together. Getting to the right answer is important but having the whole team get there is just as important

• Bringing to focus the emotional component to compensation: its is signaling device for recognition, respect, status and it ties to the deep human needs to be appreciated and safety.

• Be the evangelist for courage. Believe in people more than they believe in themselves, and push them to be more courageous.

• Four characteristics to hire for: smart around making connections, work hard, high integrity and grit.

• To care for people, ask about their lives outside of work, understand their families, and when things get rough, show up.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

• Lots of beautiful passages in this book as I continue to uncover more refugee Writers, especially Vietnamese.

• “It’s true that in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence, and therefore his fear.”

• “A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones — with or without citizenship — aching, toxic and underpaid.”

What You do is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz

• Culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there, it is the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems the face every day. Culture is weird like that, because it’s a consequence of your actions rather than beliefs, it almost never ends up exactly as your intend it. All cultures are aspirational.

• In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

• Writing down operating principles but also detailing permutations of behaviour of potential cultural or ethical dilemmas prevent the culture code from being misinterpreted or deliberately misused. Stamping it with vivid stories make them more memorable as well.

• Asking new hires, “if you were me, how would you improve the culture based on your first week here?” → onboarding should be known as cultural orientation.

• Interview questions to ask

• Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better,

• Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped fix it.

• Cultural Checklist

• Cultural design. Make sure your culture aligns with both your personality and your strategy. Anticipate how it might be weaponised and define it in a way that is unambiguous.

• Cultural orientation. An employee’s first day at work makes a lasting impression. People learn more about what it takes to succeed in your organisation o that day more than any other.

• Shocking rules. Any rule so surprising it makes people ask, why do we have this rule? It will reinforce key cultural elements.

• Incorporate outside leadership: bring in a leader with an aspirational cultural you can learn from.

• Object lessons. What you say means far less than what you do.

• Make ethics explicit.

• Give cultural tenets deep meaning. Make them stand out from the norm, what do your virtues really mean?

• Walk the talk.

• Make decisions that demonstrate priorities.

Essentials Management 2019 by First Round

• Your goal should be to make people feel like “we’re all in this together and have a huge opportunity as a team.”

• People attach emotion to individuals. They love rooting for people. They love experiencing the world through others’ eyes. The more you can tell stories about actual people that connect to the broader purpose, the more your audience will feel and not simply hear what you are trying to tell them.

• Real credibility comes from accepting how hard things really are and providing a roadmap for others to survive and grow stronger from similar challenges. By emphathising and making yourselves vulnerable to criticism, you can build trust and confidence. It feels counterintuitive to let down your guard. You think it will have the opposite effect, but you have to lean into that tension and discomfort.

• Sharing a failure story gives people permission to take bigger risks in their own work. If your team knows about times you tried to do something and failed, they will also see that you recovered and went on to succeed. They won’t feel hard-pressed to be perfect or place smal bets so they always win. When you’re a startup, you can’t afford to play it safe.

• Disagree and commit only works when after a decision is made, each participant must commit support out loud. Pledging support aloud binds you to the greater good.

• When a decision is made is much more important than what decision is made. It’s also important to internalise how irreversible, data or non-fatal a decision can be, very face can’t be undone.

• Influence a decision starts with recognising that you’re really just dealing with other people. Even if it’s with a vendor, it boils down to one person first. Given this view, you need to make a point of understanding this person, what their job is, how their success is measured, what they care about , what all of their other priorities ask and then ask “how can you help them get what they Want while helping you get what you want.

• Ask how you can make other people look good? How can you make meeting your needs a win for them inside their company?

• The secret of people who are really successful at fast-growing companies is how rapidly they’re able to adapt tot he chaos and uncertainty of adding new people. They become adept at redefining their jobs on a regular basis, and they become comfortable with the large uncomfortable emotions that naturally happens when a team doubles or even triples in a short period of time.

• You should bake your operating principles into both your hiring and performance review process to make them useful and keep them top of mind.

• Ways to measure employee experience:

• I can see the relationship between what I do and the overall goals and objectives of the company

• I have enough autonomy to perform my job effectively

• I am appropriately involved in decision that affect my work

• I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day

• I have opportunities at work to learn and grow

• I can recommend _____ as a great place to work

• Career action plan: Develop their role by making adjustments in their current role to move them in the direction that motivates them. Enhance their network, by helping them identify the people who can inform and influence where they’re trying to go. Define the immediate next step. Enlist others to help hone their skills

The Displaced by Viet Thanh Nguyen

• Former refugees think they were good refugees, the special refugees, when in all likelihood they were simply the lucky ones, the refugees whose fates aligned with the politics of the host country.

• Central irony of my life that my parents emigrated to try to save our family, but by doing so, they destroyed it. I know my experience isn’t unique. Eighty percent of immigrant children in U.S. schools have been separated from their families during th process of migration. Complicated family dynamics add to the burden these children are already carrying, and schools that serve these children need to consider the trauma created by separation.

• Isn’t glorifying refugees according to Western standards just another way to endorse gratitude politics? Isn’t it akin to holding up the most acquiescent as examples of what a refugee should be, instead of offering each person the same options that are granted to the native-born citizen?

Rituals for Work by Kursat Ozenc

• Culture spans from visible to invisible

• Artifacts, behaviours and metrics are visible

• Beliefs, values and assumptions are not.

• Rituals give order and meaning

• Rituals give people a safe space to experiment

• Ritual principles: Rituals have a magical je-ne-Sais Quoi factor. Rituals are done with intentionality with the person tuned into this being a special moment. A ritual carries a symbolic value, that gives a sense of purpose and is beyond practical. A ritual evolves over time to better suit the people and the situation

Artificial Intelligence in Practice by Bernard Marr

• Three use cases for AI in business: 1) change the way they understand and interact with customers, 2) offer more intelligent products and service, 3) improve and automate business processes.

• Businesses that lead AI, are not just focused on use cases but is seen to impact the company throughout the value chain.

• Companies with the best data will quickly gain an advantage over their rivals. Data is a vital business asset, they have access to data, intellectual property rights as well as legal and privacy rights.

• Example use cases of AI:

• Amazon for recommendations as part of their flywheel.

• Facebook’s ability to deploy AI into any part of the product without an engineer (FB Learner flow), creating ways to retain users on engagement across all its products.

• IBM’s Watson is used by thousands of companies, particularly in customer interactions, chatbots and medicine. By focusing on NLP, IBM’s strategy is to break down communication barriers between people and machines.

• JD.com is using AI to drive efficiency to reduce human workforce and automate warehouses, delivery networks and retail outlets.

• Microsoft uses AI throughout its cloud infra, as well as in mainstream office products, also competes with Microsoft through its acquisition of Bonsai.

• Tencent is using AI in NLP and image recognition, particularly in games and med tech.

• Starbucks is using it for retention of users through their loyalty program

• Stitch Fix uses CV to measure humans and gain a data-set that is unmatched for fashion and then pairing it to recommendation systems.

• HireVue uses AI for recognising patterns within recruitment

• Disney uses it to centralised the customer experience across all channels and routing traffic across the site for optimising wait times and purchases.

• Instagram uses AI for recommendations as well as bully filtering.

• Netflix uses AI for recommendations

• Spotify uses it to create new playlists

• Harley Davidson uses it to segment customers and identify new products.

• John Deer used it to reduce the use of pesticides and increase yield in crop growth

• GE’s IoT become the internet of energy for industrial applications

Finding Chika by Mitch Albom

• “The most precious thing you can give someone is your time Chika, because you can never get it back. When you don’t think about getting it back, you’ve given it in love.”

• “If I could change anything from those moments, Chika , it would be to stay in them a little Ong her. Immerse ourselves so we never forget. I rarely use the word rejoice in daily life, but it is the world I am looking for her here. Rejoice. Revel in the funny business.”

• “Families are like pieces of art, they can be made from many materials. Sometimes they are from birth, sometimes they are melded, sometimes they are merely time and circumstance mixing together, like eggs being scrambled in a Michigan kitchen.”

• A bit from Tuesdays with Morrie, “pretending each day to have a bird on your shoulder, a bird that you ask, is Today the day I die — and to live each day is if the answer were yes