We’ve all been there at some point in our lives: We tell ourselves, “This really, really needs to happen,” yet in the same breath, we answer ourselves, “But it’s impossible.” Say, we have a boss and a power structure around us that needs to shift. Or an intractable family disagreement with no obvious way forward. In our better moments, we all feel like we’re great leaders that shape history, but at other times, I wonder…
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a timeless classic for many reasons. Twain’s wit and humor surpass almost every other American author. His moral clarity about America’s enduring troubles about race still instruct today. For these reasons, it continues to be taught in American high school classrooms. However, the story is told from the perspective of Huck, a white person, someone with inborn privilege. What would the story look like when told from…
Research and publishing stand as core disciplines in the academic work. Tenure and accolades depend on them. While writing remains central in this task, many academics get carried away in teaching and service-oriented components of a professorial life, and these distract from the solitary pursuit of writing. Outside of one’s institution (and perhaps region), however, reading a scholarly product continues as the main way others interact with research. Even conference presentations rely on good rhetoric…
This book is directed to help sales professionals excel at their job, and it takes an unusual perspective to get there. It teaches modern neuroscience from knowledge emerging from scientific labs and applies it to the art of a customer relationship. …And it does a surprisingly effective job in my estimation. In my scientific education, I know that the brain has been a moving frontier for the first quarter of this century, and research is…
Throughout history, many leaders have approached their task with the desire to hold power over others. Ancient roman rulers epitomized this approach, and literature indicates that other great empires shared this mindset. However, history’s nuances also contain a subtler narrative of empowering others to fulfill their individual aspirations. Aristotle’s phrase of “human flourishing” comes to mind. This book’s authors harken to this humanistic tradition to describe their empowering view on leadership: “Leading through.” Leading through…
Encoding software is a highly technical task, but effective leadership is often anything but technical. Combining the two thus can be supremely difficult, but this pair of skills is necessary to fill roles like Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Unfortunately, advice is hard to come by in the literature since only a few extended books in this space. To better fill these gaps, Will Larson, known for his deep looks at…
Traditionally, companies live and die by a fixed hierarchical approach where power and influence are garnered by climbing to the top of the ladder. However, recent decades have witnessed the rise of digital companies promising an economic disruption. Stereotypically, a smart young kid writes some code to change the way business is done and become rich in the process. We, in the public, then use their software for decades to come. Many companies still have…
This book shares two Chinese tales of romance, placed in the setting of the Boxer Rebellion in the early 1900s. Western concepts of love were just starting to take root then in China’s artistic community, and these novels portray the first attempts to integrate these foreign themes in Chinese society. At the time, marital love, based in centuries of Confucian thought, was grounded in families, not individual feelings, so Western concepts stirred the cultural pot.…
Handling difficult conversations comprises a key element for navigating life successfully, yet most of us have little training about how to accomplish this. We end up listening to mentors or pastors to refine our skillset. Is there any science or education that could lend insight to how to, at the very least, survive these conversations? This set of authors, who penned the famously successful book Crucial Conversations, submit this guide to aid individuals’ journeys. They…
Organizational life in America has grown much flatter and more mobile in recent decades. A lifetime career with one company is now the exception rather than the norm. As such, an individual’s ability to contribute quickly to a team has become more important than their upward mobility. However, much literature about leadership and cultural practices remain fixed on the idea of one all-powerful person at the top commanding legions of followers. To counter this narrative,…