Bob's Books

Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group, along with Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s own version of life during the time described in The Paris Wife.  A few of us also are reading The Sun Also Rises, the novel Hemingway wrote during his initial Paris period, while married to Hadley Richardson.  Yes, a Hemingway extravaganza.

My Impressions: The Paris Wife is essentially a novelized autobiographical account of Hadley Richardson’s courtship and short marriage to Ernest Hemingway, and concludes at the end of their life together in Paris during the 1920s. It is well written and offers a well-articulated interpretation of how Hadley Richardson felt, thought, experienced the world and her relationship with Ernest Hemingway.  We get to know and appreciate her by being inside her perspective, and we get to know and appreciate Ernest Hemingway as she perceived him.   It is usually fascinating and enriching for me to read books written from an intelligent and sensitive woman’s perspective – it is always different from mine, and I appreciate the differences.

It was hard not to like Hadley Richardson.   Paula McLain paints a sympathetic picture of her protagonist, and from what I’ve read about her elsewhere, justifiably so.  I also appreciated that McLain was fair to Ernest Hemingway.  We got to know him through Hadley Richardson’s adoring and ultimately heart broken eyes , but McLain included a few short chapters, written in third person, which offer us a fair and sympathetic view of his perspective on what he was experiencing.

McLain built her novel upon much research into the facts, events, and accounts that are extant surrounding Richardson’s and Hemingway’s real lives and experiences.  And there are numerous resources to draw from – so the story she wrote is probably not too far from the reality. Hadley Richardson had grown up in a sheltered upper-middle class environment and was six years older than Hemingway.  He was in his early 20s, and was recently back from serving in WW1 where he had been injured in the fighting in Italy (his novel Farewell to Arms is semi-autobiographical account of his experiences).  Hemingway courted her aggressively, they fell in love,  and after less than a year they married and moved to Paris.

There he intended to launch his career as a writer. Their circle of friends included such luminaries in American letters as Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, Jon Dos Passos among others.  An interesting part of the book is the picture it paints of a group of fairly well-to-do Americans living in Paris, with a fair amount of freedom, travelling, amusing themselves in different settings in Europe, lots of alcohol and socializing.  After several years, Hadley and Hemingway had a child, and their marriage was happy and thriving, until Hemingway fell in love with another woman who was part of their circle of friends.  He insisted on loving them both, didn’t want a divorce, and saw no reason why he couldn’t love two women simultaneously.  Hadley insisted that that wouldn’t work, at least not for her, and though for a while she tried, she realized she could not share him with the other. In the last quarter of The Paris Wife we experience the sad unraveling of a marriage between two good people who still very much loved each other.

Though McLain is generally sympathetic to Hemingway, many of the women in our reading group really don’t like him.  Most of the men do.  Interesting, eh?

A Moveable Feast did not add much to The Paris Wife – it was published posthumously and is more a collection of loosely connected short stories based on Hemingway’s recollections from when he was much older. These stories just don’t have the energy or pathos that would make them compelling.   The Sun Also Rises was different. Hemingway was writing it through much of the period described in The Paris Wife, and I could get a sense of the man Paula McLain’s Hadley Richardson was describing in The Paris Wife.  in fact, Sun is based on a key piece of The Paris Wife story.  For those interested in knowing more about that connection, I’d recommend a recent article in Vanity Fair  which explains it pretty well. My recommendation would be to read The Sun Also Rises immediately after The Paris Wife, and perhaps read A Moveable Feast a chapter (story) at a time, separately.

Why this book: Suggested by one of the members of my literature reading group, who had read it in college, was intrigued, wanted to read it again, and wanted to discuss it with this group.  Toni Morrison is a very prominent American Author and her book Beloved had won a Pulitzer prize.

My impressions:  Song of Solomon is a different sort of  book.  I just finished it, and am still digesting how it affected me.  It had a lot of parts and sub-plots – it may have been a mistake to read it in increments, rather than in a concentrated couple of sittings, within just a few days.   The prose is wonderful. It is a fascinating, but complex book.

The central character is a black American– before the term “African-American” came into vogue. His name was Macon Dead, same as his father and grandfather, but was knows as Milkman – a nickname he didn’t understand until adulthood –  that came from having been breast fed beyond his toddler years.  Milkman was born in the early thirties and grew up in urban Michigan (Detroit?) in the 30s, 40s and 50s, and the meat of the story takes place in the early 1960s, just before the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King became national phenomena. Lots of inside-the-black-community use of the “n” word. Not many white characters in the book.

Milkman is the youngest of three children, and the only son in a strangely dysfunctional family. The history of both his parents’ families is obscure and confused, a mish-mash of old stories, rumors, and family remembrances. This becomes increasingly important later as Milkman, stumbling through life, begins to search for – or rather create – his identity.   A confusing but influential figure in Milkman’s life is his very eccentric and almost other-worldly Aunt Pilate, his father’s sister, who his overbearing father orders him to not to have anything to do with.  Later we come to understand why.

Milkman matures into a directionless, self-centered young man with no vision for himself beyond going-along-to get-along, looking for the easiest path to immediate gratification. Along the way, a number of things start coming together that help him realize that the uncertain pieces of the puzzle of his family’s past may have more significance to him than he had realized.  The promise of great wealth at the end of this obscure rainbow inspires him to go after his roots, to uncover the confusion of his family’s past.  What he discovers gives him (and the reader) insight, not only into the source of his own personal confusion, but also into the disparate threads of the African-American experience in America, from just after the Civil War until the 1960s.

This book is filled with interesting and eccentric characters. The story seems to meander along with a number of mini-stories and vignettes, which though they do hang together, the theme isn’t readily apparent – and it takes some stepping back from the pieces of this mosaic, to see the picture Ms Morrison is painting.  There were times in reading it when I thought the book was as wayward and unfocused as Milkman’s life, and I wondered if that may have been the point.  It was not.

As I read the last 50 pages or so, I began to get a sense for what it was all leading up to, as Milkman visited the rural South, where things had not changed dramatically since the Jim Crow era, and Milkman got to know the people of his roots, their world, and about his ancestors and relatives. Milkman then returns to urban Michigan. and shares what he has learned with his family– to include his eccentric Aunt Pilate.  He agrees to take her back to rural Virginia, to help her put some closure on a tragic incident in the family’s past, and we are left with a fascinating conclusion, which does NOT tie a nice ribbon around the story.  Many questions are left unanswered.

One of the many disorienting mini-stories within this book is about Milkman’s best friend from childhood who is on a campaign to surreptitiously kill innocent whites, to avenge the deaths at the hands of whites, of innocent blacks. Milkman stays apart from this terrorism, but it affects him. His friend has focus and purpose – albeit evil.   Milkman remains uncommitted to anything in his life, but is confused and unsettled by his friend’s commitment to a cause Milkman finds unjust, even obscene.

I’d recommend reading Song of Solomon with others, so that as a group, you can help each other sort out the pieces to this interesting story. A few themes that came up in the fascinating discussion in my reading group regarding this book:

-Urban life vs Rural life. The juxtaposition of urban life in the North with rural life in the South . Urban life is quick hurried. People don’t have time to listen, watch, pay attention.  Rural life is much slower and there is time to pay attention and remember. Milkman was challenged in his effort to adjust to the slow pace of life in rural Virginia. But it seemed to mature him.

-Milkman’s life was dramatically affected by events in his family’s past of which he had little or no knowledge. So are we all – and most of us don’t realize the impact on us of things that happened in the obscure past in our families, events of which we are not even aware.

-Toni Morrison threw a LOT of symbology into the book, which we had fun trying to decode: the sudden appearance of a white peacock; Aunt Pilate’s gold box earing, biblical names, flying…

-A lot of occult references – Aunt Pilate’s relationship with the ghost of her father, and other fascinating allusions to an unseen order of things.

– There is a sense of “magical realism” in the book. There were times I wasn’t sure whether what I was reading was meant to be a dream or real, whether I was reading about a “100 years of Solitude” event, or whether it was an event that Ms Morrison wanted us to believe really happened. And maybe it doesn’t matter….

– In the end, all of the characters somehow redeemed themselves as not completely good, or evil. As the book concludes, Milkman seems to be on the threshold of great insight, but we’re left wondering what really happened to him.

Why this book: Bounce was selected by my All American Leadership reading group as a good follow up to our last book, Mindset by Carol Dweck.  Many of us felt that Dweck’s book needed more depth and we decided that Bounce might provide it.

My Impressions: Similar to Mindset, Bounce focuses on extreme high performance -especially in sports and athletics, but sports is a metaphor for high performance in any endeavor. In sports, quality of performance, results, and success are often easier to measure than in other fields.  Syed breaks his book into three sections: The Talent Myth, Paradoxes of the Mind, and Deep Reflections.  For me the most valuable was Paradoxes of the Mind.

The first section, The Talent Myth,  was an effective repackaging of the ideas of Carol Dweck’s Mindset, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code (which I haven’t read, but I think I’m familiar with the message.)   Syed was at one point a world class table tennis player, having been a record 3 time British Commonwealth champion and two time Olympian, so he knows first hand the world of extreme high performance athletics.  Syed brings his personal experience and vignettes into the discussion, reinforcing the point that great performance is the result of mental and acquired abilities, not physical and natural talent.  He also echoes Gladwell in pointing out how extraordinary opportunities provide a trajectory for success – but that those who succeed are those who take advantage of those opportunities with unusual focus, motivation, and dedication to “Purposeful Practice.”   He has a whole section that reinforces the point that QUALITY of practice – what he calls deliberate or purposeful practice, is what counts, not quantity. It’s not 10,000 hours of practice, but 10,000 hours of purposeful practice that is transformative. I recall a sign in my high school wrestling room: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. ”

The most interesting section of this book to me was Paradoxes of the Mind, which included three chapters: The Placebo Effect, The Curse of Choking and How to Avoid it, and finally a chapter on the power of rituals and superstitions.

In The Placebo Effect, he gives examples that reinforce what most of us already know – that belief in one’s self, believing that you can win is fundamental to success.  He writes that  “…the thing that often separates the best from the rest is a capacity to believe things that are not true but which are incredibly effective.” (italics Syed’s).   I include a few more reinforcing quotes from this section below, but he reinforces the belief in the power of the mind to drive success, or at least to perform way above what we and others might expect. At the highest levels, where the margins of victory can be razor thin, this is the real difference-maker.

The chapter on Choking had the one really new insight for me in this book: That we seem to perform with two minds – an automatic mind and a deliberate mind – a reacting and a thinking mind.  True champions give themselves, after incredible amounts of practice, over to the automatic mind.  Hundreds and thousands of hours of practice are designed to develop the automatic mind.  Choking can occur when an expert performer loses confidence and tries to revert to the deliberate mind, which s/he is not used to using. The deliberate mind is not instinctual and performs more slowly.  This reminds me of the story of the centipede who was asked how he walks with all those legs moving at the same time,  and when he tried to figure it out, he fell over on his side and couldn’t get up.  It also is reminiscent of “the Zone” made famous by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and now part of our everyday sports vocabulary.   We perform best, we get into “flow” by getting to where we perform without thinking about what we’re doing, but simply doing it. (The Rise of Superman, by Steven Kotler is a recent excellent update on Mihaly Cs…’s work)  BUT it takes thousands of hours of practice to get to where one can truly find flow.  Amateurs have to be deliberate, to think about what they’re doing.

High performers can choke when they switch from mindless automatic performance, to deliberate performance, thinking about the pieces of what they do, rather than letting it all “flow.”  This too-much focus kills flow and performance.  He spoke of the need to develop a form of “doublethink”:  The extreme high performer must train and prepare believing that great performance is extremely, extremely important, but when it counts, and comes time to perform, to be great,  the performer must relax and perform as if it doesn’t mean anything.  He concludes this chapter with the easy-to-say-hard-to-do advice:  To try  to develop the art of “playing as if it means nothing when it means everything.”

The chapter on rituals and superstition reinforced the concepts in Placebo effect – it is more important that you believe that your rituals or superstitions work, than that they have some independent impact on how you perform.  That rabbit’s foot, that little ritual done before every game reinforces patterns of success in one’s mind that can truly have a performance enhancing impact, and thus effectively lead to greater success.

The final section entitled “Deep Reflections” is a little different. The first chapter fits with the rest of the book, addressing how 10,000 hours of practice changes the way one perceives one’s environment, creating the capacity for great subliminal or intuitive decision making, which distinguishes great performers from the rest of us amateurs.  He references the classic book on decision making in crises, Sources of Power by Klein.  The final two chapters, while interesting, don’t seem to fit. His chapter on performance-enhancing drugs in sports makes some very interesting points – Syed does not support a zero-tolerance approach to performance-enhancing drugs and makes a good case for performance-enhancing drugs and procedures which can ALSO help us lead better and fuller lives.   The final chapter “Are Blacks Superior Runners?”  debunks the myth that racial genetics play a role in performance.  He is not trying to be politically correct, but makes some scientifically based points to show that factors other than race are really at play where it might appear that racial or genetic factors are a key determinant of success.  He says current research in genetics is showing that the whole idea of race and ethnicity is outmoded.  It is interesting stuff, but only marginally related to the theme of his book.

My Reservation:   While Paradoxes of the Mind did truly open my eyes, if you have read and absorbed other recent works that make the point that practice and hard work rather than “talent” drive  great performance, you will find this book  somewhat redundant -though with great anecdotes and arguments.

I have never been, and never will be, a top-level high-performer in anything.  And indeed, I guess I never REALLY aspired to be.  I never wanted to make the sacrifices and pay the opportunity costs that 10,000 hours of purposeful practice demand.  And that is why I continue to describe myself as the Prince of Mediocrity (see post.) This book does not, nor do the others I refer to, address the many sacrifices and opportunity costs that come with the many, many advantages of being a top level performer, in any discipline, from table tennis, to golf, to football, to business.

A few of my favorite quotes from Bounce (numbers refer to pages in the Harper Perennial paper back edition):

The thing that often separates the best from the rest is a capacity to believe things that are not true but which are incredibly effective.(italics Syed’s)  154

The key point in all this is that the power of the mind is exercised through the medium of belief, and it doesn’t matter whether the belief is true or false or how the delusion is created – so long as it is created successfully. 158

The scientific community was forced to accept the rather astonishing fact that religious belief, in and of itself, confers real and tangible health benefits. (italics Syed’s) 159

What the scriptures seem to be saying is that God does not act in proportion to the worthiness of the intercessor, but in proportion to the intercessor’s belief that God will so act.  (italics Syed’s) 160

..articulating the placebo effect: …saying that it is belief itself, not its content, that matters.

(quoting Anne Harrington) “There is an innate capacity for our bodies to bring into being, to the best of their ability, the optimistic scenarios in which we fervently believe.” 165

Note the difference between a scientist and an athlete. Doubt is a scientist’s stock in trade….But doubt, to an athlete, is poison.  168-9

..to win, one must proportion one’s belief, not to the evidence, but to whatever the mind can usefully get away with.  To win, one must surgically remove doubt – rational and irrational -from the mind. that is how the placebo effect operates.  169

This ability to instill belief in others is a vital facet of leadership -whether in politics or the military – but it can also create a huge advantage in sport through its impact on competitors. 171

Why This Book: I often speak about developing a “tribal culture” as an ideal that leaders should strive for.  I recently assumed the role of president of my Toastmasters Club and have begun referring to our club as  a “tribe,” and wanted to meet with my board and get buy-in to taking steps that would tie our members even more closely each other – more like a tribe.  I thought reading Tribes would give me some ideas.  It did – more so and differently than I expected.  (Numbers below refer to pages in the hardcopy edition published by Portfolio.)

My impressions: I really liked this book. It is short, inspirational, and fun to read – just shy of  150 pages of large print on small pages.  It doesn’t  provide a checklist of how to create or sustain a tribe.  Nor does it offer a lot of analytical perspectives of tribal vs non-tribal cultures, or  the difference between the two, or at what point can one refer to an organizational culture as having crossed the threshold of “tribal”  – whatever that may be. So, it is not an academic book written to appeal to those looking for an analysis of the idea of a “Tribe.”  Nor does it pretend to be.  And that is what I liked about it.

Its message is not new or unique. Very similar messages to Disrupt YOU!  and Innovator’s DNA , and very consistent with Legacy and Turn the Ship Around, but Godin offers up his message in an aphoristic way – fun, powerful, easy to relate to .  Godin’s message is that tribes need to be dynamic and agile to keep up with change.  Anyone can be a leader of a tribe – it just takes courage to take the initiative to do so.  The economy and our culture  are changing rapidly, and those who choose to keep their head down, stay safe,  and stay put, are going to be left out, left behind,  out flanked or run over by those who break away to find other innovative, energetic, and impatient leaders who will connect and form new tribes.

The book is full of interesting ideas. He devotes one whole section to his discussion of fear, faith and religion.  He calls “Fear” the “F” word and demands we acknowledge it,  understand it in ourselves and others, and then overcome it.  He describes religion as representing “a strict set of rules that our fellow humans have overlaid on top of our faith. Religion supports the status quo and encourages us to fit in, not to stand out.” (80)  He says that religion works great when it amplifies our faith, but it is at its worst when it “reinforces the status quo, often at the expense of faith.” (81)  When Godin talks about religion, he is not necessarily referring to “the church” or spiritual practice – but any organized dogma which demands that people conform.  Throughout the book he talks about “faith” outside of the context of religion.  He goes on to talk about the tension between religion and faith, all in the context of his message – Become a Heretic.

He says that, “All you need to know is two things. The first thing …is that individuals have far more power than ever before in history. … The second thing …is that the only thing holding you back from becoming the kind of person who changes things is this: lack of faith. Faith that you can do it. Faith that it’s worth doing. Faith that failure won’t destroy you.”  (71)

Tribes is written in short disconnected sections.  It can be opened at any place and the reader can jump in, go from middle to front, to back, back to middle – each section can be read independently.  You can put it next to the john and be inspired while doing your daily constitutional.   His approach reminded me of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra – unstructured, anecdotal, provocative, inspiring and in some cases simply polemic and disruptive.  Insightful, and incite-ful.  His message is also not dissimilar from Nietzsche’s:  It’s your choice.  It’s all on you, baby!  Go grab life by the throat, fall down, get back up, go for the gusto, take charge of your destiny – and don’t look back.   Leaders use their fear as fuel to take off, rather than as brakes to stop, back up and hide.  Godin’s Leaders (roughly equivalent to Nietzsche ’s “Supermen”) believe in themselves, are filled with passion for what they’re doing and what they stand for, and are not held back by convention or convenience.  Others are drawn to that.  And they form tribes around these leaders and their ideas…

DOWNSIDE? – As I read this book, I was going to give him a down check for being unstructured, disorganized, and non-linear in his approach. But then I decided that this was a strength.  At the very end he says, “I can tell you that I’m going to get a lot of flack from most people about what you’ve just read….it’s too disorganized, or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplish anything.  That’s ok…criticism like that almost always accompanies change.”

FAVORITE QUOTES:  This book is FILLED with great lines.  I wanted to narrow this down to just a few, but I decided to leave in most of the ones I selected as candidates –just so that I can have them handy to review, and use in remarks, or meetings, or conversation.  Just like the book –  scan the quotes below, jump around, see if any of them resonate with you.  I also found a list of 70 quotes from this book in Good Reads, including many of those I selected.  These are some of the ones I liked most:

The most important tribes are bored with yesterday and demand tomorrow. 31

How many Fans to you have….too many organizations care about numbers, not fans. 33

The Web….and other factors involved in social media mean that everyone…has far more power than ever before. The king and the status quo are in big trouble.  37

By factory…I mean any job where your boss tells you what to do and how to do it…<Most people> want the absence of responsibility that a factory job can give….  39

Organizations are more important than ever before. It’s factories we don’t need…organizations have the scale to care for large tribes. 41

In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn’t necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it. 42

What people are afraid of isn’t failure. It’s blame. Criticism. 46

Heretics are engaged, passionate, and more powerful and happier than everyone else. And they have a tribe that they support and that supports them in turn. 49

Can you imagine Steve Jobs showing up for the paycheck? It’s nice to get paid. It’s essential to believe. 49

Great leaders focus on the Tribe and only the tribe. 50

Great leaders are able to reflect the light onto their teams, their tribes. Great leaders don’t want the attention, but they use it…to unite the tribe and reinforce a sense of purpose. 50

I’m interested in the second kind of marketing, the act of tightening your organization and spreading the word within the tribe. 53

Great leaders don’t water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger. 67

If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader. 55

A leader who backs off is making a commitment to the power of the tribe, and is alert to the right moment to step back in. Someone who is doing nothing is merely hiding.  Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice to not do nothing.  Lean in, back off, but don’t do nothing.  59

Ultimately, people are most easily led where they wanted to go all along. 66

You’re not going to be able to grow your career or your business or feed the tribe by going after most people. Most people are really good at ignoring new trends or great employees or big ideas.  68

The art of leadership is understanding what you can’t compromise on. 79

When you fall in love with the system, you lose the ability to grow.83

The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. The hardest thing is to initiate. 86

It takes guts to acknowledge that perhaps this time, right now, you can’t lead. So get out of the way and take the follow instead. 87

I define sheepwalking as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them brain-dead jobs and enough fear to keep them in line.96

Tribes don’t do what you want; they do what they want. 107

The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success. 108

The secret of leadership is simple: do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there.  People will follow.  108

The safer you play your plan for he future, the riskier it actually is. 111

The timid leave a vacuum….That’s why initiative is such an astonishingly successful tool: because it’s rare. 112

If you hear my idea but don’t believe it, that’s not or fault; it’s mine….If I fail to persuade you to implement a policy that supports my tribe, that’s due to my lack of passion or skill, not your shortsightedness.  117

…real leadership rarely comes from the CEO or the VP of leadership. Instead, it happens out of the corner of your eye, in a place you weren’t watching. 122

Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there….122

Managers are the cynical ones…pessimists. Leaders, on the other hand, have hope. 123

Caring is the key emotion at the center of the tribe.  125

Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance…the force for mediocrity will align to stop you…129

What’s hard now is breaking the rules. What’s hard is finding the faith to become a heretic, to seek out an innovation and then, in the face of huge amounts of resistance, to lead a team and to push the innovation out the door into the world.  130

Tribes grow when people recruit other people…. The tribe doesn’t do it for you, of course.  They do it for each other.  129

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. 132

Managers stamp out deviants…..Great leaders embrace deviants by searching for them and catching them doing something right. 133

On positive deviants: Find leaders (the heretics who are doing things differently and making change) and then amplify their work, give them a platform, and help them find followers – and things get better.  They always get better…<this> might be the most important practical idea in this entire book. 134

Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” … You can’t manage without knowledge.  You can’t lead without imagination. 137

Belief: People don’ t believe what you tell them.  They rarely believe what you show them.  They often believe what their friends tell them.  They always believe what they tell themselves.  What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves.  Stories about the future and about change. 138

Every tribe is different. Every leader is different. The nature of leadership is that you’re not doing what’s been done before. If you were, you’d be following , not leading.   146.

You can choose to lead, or not. You can choose to have faith, or not. You can choose to contribute to the tribe, or not. 146

Once you choose to lead, you’ll be under huge pressure to reconsider your choice, to compromise, to dumb it down, or to give up…. That’s the world’s job to get you to be quiet and follow.  The status quo is the status quo for a reason.  147

Why this book: I attended a workshop on high performance athleticism at the Naval Special Warfare Center and several of the coaches referred to this book and its ideas.  It seemed that most in the room had read it. I hadn’t even heard of it.  When it came time to suggest our next book for the All American Leadership Reading group,  Rob Nielsen (the CEO)  and I both proposed Mindset, and it was selected.

My impressions: In Mindset, Carol Dweck took a simple idea that the reader has certainly heard before, explained it with an extensive catalogue of vignettes in a wide variety of settings, broke the idea down into components, with implications and ramifications, backed it up with research, and convinced me to take it seriously and internalize it.  The simple and familiar idea is this:  It is better to be positive about challenges as opportunities to learn and grow, rather than to resist or avoid challenges out of fear of not excelling or fear of failure.  In most normal settings, it is better to have tried and failed, but thereby to have learned and grown, than not to have tried at all.

Carol Dweck refers to these two opposing approaches to challenge and difficulty as a “Growth mindset”  versus  a “Fixed mindset.” She gives us examples in the worlds of sports, business, school, relationships, and parenting.   The idea is important enough and her book drives it home well enough for me to recommend it.  It has already positively impacted the way I view myself, challenges I face, and the environment in which I live and work.

I felt that chapter 7, entitled: Parents teachers coaches: Where do Mindsets come from? was the most insightful.   In particular the section she writes on “praise” opened my eyes.    She points out that our “mindset” can be so shaped and influenced by how we are rewarded with praise.  She encourages parents, teachers, coaches to praise not qualities, or success or results, but primarily effort, and the willingness to take on challenge.  Praise effort and courage, not ability or success, she insists.

When only talent, ability or success are praised, the student, or child often assumes that being perceived as skilled or successful are what makes them praiseworthy, not the effort it took to get there.  Their sense of self and identity are formed around being perceived as having these abilities, and associated successes.   This assumption can lead to unwillingness to take on a tougher challenge that might put at risk the perception of ability or success.    Where success is what matters, failure, even after great effort, is not praiseworthy.  Dweck’s point is NOT that parents or leaders shouldn’t recognize success or positive results, but that praise should be primarily directed toward effort and persistence, and when they lead to a positive result, that is a nice and satisfying by-product.   By primarily praising success, leaders may inadvertently be discouraging anything that may not lead to the result or condition being praised.

Praising ability instead of effort reinforces the fixed mindset.  In one of the experiments she describes, a group of people were told that they had been selected because they were unusually intelligent, and then were given a test with some tricky questions.   Afterward, many of them misrepresented their test scores to validate the perception of being very intelligent.  She states that the experiment had “turned into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.”

Mindset argues against excuses, and for personal responsibility. The Fixed Mindset says: ” I am dealt this hand, this is my fate.”  The Growth Mindset says: “It is up to me to be as good as I can be.   The hand I’m dealt is merely a starting point.” This reminds me of the Stoic saying:  What is important is not what happens to you. What is important is what you do with what happens to you.

Mindset asks that the reader redefine success. Success = Learning, getting better, taking something away from an experience that makes you smarter, wiser, stronger, more resilient.  It reminds me of Nietzsche’s famous aphorism: That which does not kill me makes me stronger.

In many settings, there is a one word difference between the Fixed and Growth mindsets. When the Fixed Mindset faces a challenge it will often say I’m not good at this (accounting, music, climbing, math, yoga, whatever.)  The Growth Mindset person faces the same challenge and adds the word “yet.”

Carol Dweck makes the general observation that women seem to be more sensitive to criticism than men, because when they are young, they are so often praised for being cute, pretty, smart, talented, well-behaved, etc.  They may then have a tendency to build their self-image around such praise.  Boys on the other hand, are more frequently challenged and criticized, and often develop a thicker skin.  Their self-image is not as vulnerable to the criticism from others for not being smart, talented, good looking, whatever.  This is obviously a generalization, with of course many exceptions, but with perhaps some validity.  Do we praise our daughters differently and for different things than we do our sons?

Fixed vs growth mindsets have similarities to other paradigms which I list below:

Fixed Mindset                                            Growth Mindset

Risk Aversion                                                Bold action

Glass half empty                                           Glass half full

Scarcity                                                            Abundance

Consolidate our gains                                  Go for the Gusto

What’s the point?                                         What’ve we got to lose?

So much can go wrong.                               How do we make this work?

Let’s rest on our laurels                              Let’s set the bar higher

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.                       Constant improvement

Don’t bite off more than we can chew.    Fortune favors the bold.

Restrained                                                        Unleashed

Defensive                                                         Offensive

Finite                                                                 Infinite

Cautious/Prudent                                          Bold

Paralyzing Fear                                              Reckless abandon

——-

A criticism of her approach. Dweck admits that she simplifies the idea of mindset into the growth vs fixed dichotomy in order to make her point.  Though she says that people may have different mindsets in different aspects of their lives, (p47)  I don’t think she addresses this adequately.

My view:  Though in different settings we may have more of a growth or fixed mindset,  I believe we each have a basic set point in our personality or character on the fixed-growth mindset spectrum. Many of us may want to move our set point farther to the right, or help our charges – children, students, employees in that effort.  But there are certainly times when good judgment tells us that discretion may be the better part of valor, and that context should drive whether we should tend more to a fixed or growth mindset.  Those with perhaps too much growth mindset may dismiss fixed mindset concerns, and make decisions that have great costs to themselves and others.

I didn’t see her address the role of experience and good judgment in decision making, and a growth mindset needs to be tempered with a certain degree of practical prudence to keep from going off the rails.  Edmund Burke’s famous essay “Reflections on the Revolution in France”  argues convincingly for giving respect to tradition, custom, and behaviors that have proven successful in the past, to avoid the tragic excesses of events like the French Revolution, inspired by a growth mindset run amok.   I shared my thoughts on the tension between being bold and being prudent in my essay “A Bias for Bold Action” arguing for a bold, growth mindset, but tempered by good judgment in risk mitigation.  A person more inclined to a fixed mindset is often necessary to put the brakes on too much can-do and over-reach from the growth minded optimist.

I also think there was room for a discussion of balancing the benefits of feeling good about how hard one has tried, while still not accepting  losing.  Her point is that ideally the joy should be in the trying, the journey, not in the outcome.  Got it, but I am not willing to so readily dismiss winning as a goal, though I agree it should not be one’s ultimate goal .   Fine points perhaps- but important for leaders, coaches, parents.  I like the idea of a trophy for the winner, and a trophy for s/he, or the team which lost but showed the most ‘fire in the gut’ while  not winning.  Praising both.    But not a trophy for everyone, for showing up and trying. Come on…. That’s  un-American  🙂

There is also room for debate on the role of genetic pre-dispositions toward Fixed or Growth mindsets – there has been interesting research into how boldness or timidity may  in part (or perhaps large part) be genetically determined.

Also the recent discussion around investing in our strengths and not our weaknesses may be an argument against her thesis. Now Discover your Strengths and Strength Finder and other such books argue that we should primarily invest our energies in where we think we can succeed – in conventional terms.  Comparing that idea with Mindset would be an interesting discussion.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book.  (Numbers are page numbers in the paperback edition:)

This point is crucial: In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. The growth Mindset allows people to value what they are doing regardless of the outcome.  48

Character grows out of mindset. 93

Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way. 244

The fixed mindset…makes other people into judges instead of allies.  67

Becoming is better than being.  25

This is hard. This is fun.  24

Beware of success. It can knock you into a fixed mindset:  I won because I have talent. Therefore I will keep winning. 210

…challenges you at the same time you feel like you are being nurtured. 198

In the fixed mindset, effort is not a cause for pride. It is something that casts doubt upon your talent.  99

Soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success, and instead selected people who had had significant failures and then bounced back from them.  29

When people with the fixed mindset opt for success over growth, what are they really trying to prove?  That they’re special. Even superior.  29

Failure has been transformed from an action (I failed) to an identity (I am a failure).  33

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach , says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame…you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them.  37

Nothing is harder than saying, “I gave it my all and it wasn’t good enough.” 42

Why this book: I was asked to speak at Mark Divine’s Unbeatable Mind Academy Retreat and chose to speak on this topic. I was inspired by that famous scene from the movie City Slickers,  and was intrigued to find that same scene inspired this book. I chose to read the book in order to augment and stimulate my ideas for my presentation. It was very useful and I did use a few things from it, but my presentation was built primarily on my own experience.
My impressions: The One Thing was quite a bit better than I thought it would be. In one way, it is a typical business leadership book, relatively short, easy to read, proposes a simple idea with numerous anecdotes to make the points, with highlighted sections for execs who are too busy to read it fully or carefully. Yes, in these respects, The One Thing does fit that mold, and it is indeed an advantage that it can be read, or skimmed in an airplane ride. That said, it explores The One Thing idea well. There are a number of ideas and perspectives that I found insightful and which were useful to me in my own thought processes, as well as in my One Thing presentation. In my own life and coaching, I’ll use a number of the ideas from this book help me understand and explain new perspectives which should lead to new behaviors.

Below are some ideas I found interesting:

– Multitasking: He debunks the myths about the advantages of multi-tasking. The more things we are trying to do at the same time, the less quality the result of our efforts in any of those endeavors. He reinforces a main theme of his book: To get the best result, focus on one-thing at a time.

– Discipline vs Habit: He argues that the need for Discipline to accomplish things we want in life is much over-blown. He argues effectively that it DOES take discipline to create a new habit – but that takes normally (depending on the habit) between 2 and 4 months. After that, it is a habit – one does it automatically. Doesn’t require any discipline or will power. How much discipline does it take to brush your teeth or take a shower every day?

– Multiple ONE Things: Yes we have multiple One Things – in different spheres in our life. But he challenges us to find our One Thing in each sphere and focus on it in that sphere. He asks, what is the most important thing – the thing upon which everything else depends? What is our One Thing in our family life? In our professional life? In our relationship with our parents? Our Spouse? Our kids? In our favorite hobby? What is the One Thing I need to do to get me closer to the really BIG One Thing I’m striving for in my life?

– The Focusing Question: He offers a great question: What is the One Thing, such that by doing that, everything else becomes easier, or unnecessary? This is a great question and it can be modified depending on the context, for example to …that everything else becomes clearer, simpler, easier to understand, etc.

– Will Power is not on “will-call:” He notes that will power is a finite resource and we use it up during the day and as we get tired. He says that, “Will power is like a fast-twitch muscle that gets tired and needs rest.” Research shows how, after a long day of decision making and dealing with stress and issues, focus is difficult. We become impatient, intolerant, and our work is of less quality. Point: Do your important work – your ‘one thing’ work when you are  fresh –don’t postpone it until the end of the day. Do your most important work when your will power is at its strongest. Do the less important stuff, or the less demanding stuff then.

– Balanced Life vs Counter-balanced life: He makes a point that I have made in a previous blog post (HYPERLINK) that successful people don’t have “balanced” lives. They are putting their primary energy into their One Thing which leads to greater success, but clearly some things have to get short shrift. He argues for what he calls the “Counter-balanced” life – one in which one gives at least some effort to areas that demand attention, in order to ‘have a life.’ You can never go too long without counter-balancing your priority work by giving some attention to these other areas – otherwise the costs can be very high (family, health, friends, integrity.)

A possible shortcoming of the book:  As I was reading The ONE Thing, I realized that he didn’t address those of us who choose to be “Pretty good” at a number of things. Many of us choose not to be really good at any one thing, but take the “renaissance man (person)” approach and choose to excel by our diversity of interests and activities.  I have written on that separately in my essay In Praise of Mediocrity, and believe that the authors might have applied the advice and ideas in The ONE Thing to those of us with many “things,” or whose ONE thing might be to be pretty good at many things.

Some good quotes out of the book:
-No one succeeds alone. No one.
-Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.
-When you get your ONE Thing, you begin to see the world differently.
-The things that are most important don’t always scream the loudest.
-A to-do list can easily lead you astray. (drives us to do things that are not important to your One Thing)
-Doing the most important thing is always the most important thing.
-Success is actually a short race – a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.
-Habits require much less energy and effort to maintain than to begin.
-Success is about doing the right things, not about doing everything right.
-The reason we shouldn’t pursue balance is that the magic never happens in the middle; magic happens at the extremes.
-When you focus on what is truly important, something will always be under-served….Leaving some things undone is a necessary tradeoff for extraordinary results.
-Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. (work is the rubber ball –it bounces back. The other four are glass.)
-Life is a question. How we live it is our answer.
-The small focus question: “What is my ONE Thing right now?”
-Happiness happens on the way to fulfillment.
-Resting is as important as working.
-The most productive people, the ones who experience extraordinary results, design their days around doing their ONE Thing. Their most important appointment each day is with themselves, and they never miss it.
-Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.
-There is magic in knocking down your most important domino, day after day.
-Until my ONE Thing is done, everything else is a distraction. (The author wrote this on a sheet of paper and put it on his desk.)
-When you see mastery as a path you go down instead of a destination you arrive at, it starts to feel accessible and attainable.
-A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to extraordinary results. Untidiness. Unrest. Disarray. Disorder. … When you strive for greatness, chaos is guaranteed to show up.

Why this book: Selected by my reading group to be read over Christmas 2015.  Those who had already read it were enthusiastic about reading it again.  One said it was her favorite novel of all time.  I had been carrying a paperback copy around with me for decades, and had never read it. It was about time.

My impressions: This book covers a lot of territory and is truly an ambitious epic.  It begins with a family in Connecticut during the Civil War and follows two sons in their lives through the end of the 19^th century.  We also get to know a young woman who is something of a sociopath, able to use her beauty to manipulate (mostly men) to get what she wants. The path of this young woman crosses that of the two brothers, and tension builds as one brother recognizes the amoral character of the woman, while the other is fully taken in by her wiles, falls in love with her and marries her. The newlyweds head out to Salinas, California, and it is there that the meat of the book begins.

The story is a revision and updated version of the Biblical story of Cain and Abel – and it runs in two generations. We see good and evil, joy and despair, sin and redemption all within a story that, although it wanders a bit, is always interesting and includes some of the most compelling characters in the literature that I’ve read.  Steinbeck takes us inside their heads and hearts to see the world from their perspectives and share in their joys and struggles.   Samuel Hamilton, the wise patriarch of the Hamilton family, somewhat wooly headed, loved and admired by all, but who claimed not to have the courage to be “great”;  Liza, Samuel’s true believing, and stern disciplinarian wife and manager of the Hamilton family and household;  Adam Trask whose life never quite finds its direction, and though confused, is a good man and one of the main characters in the book;  Lee, Adam Trasks low profile Chinese assistant who seems to be the center of wisdom and insight in the story;  Cathy Trask, the disturbed woman and conscience-less master manipulator.     And then there are the twins Caleb and Aron, the modern day and updated Cain and Abel, who we get to know as young boys and watch mature into young men.  They struggle to adapt to a world which doesn’t always make sense.  They struggle with being good and human in an imperfect world. As do we all….

The ending is surprising and provocative. Steinbeck shows how men and women are pushed around by fate and chance, but ultimately they are free and must choose, and own the consequences of their actions.

Steinbeck is a man’s man of the mid 20th century, virile, intelligent and assertive.  This book is mostly about men and how they relate to each other and seek to overcome their weaknesses and master their environment.  There are three interesting women in the book – Cathy the sociopath, Liza the stern matriarch of the Hamilton family, and Abra who we get to know toward the end of the book as a strong and independent young woman, wise beyond her years.  She seems to be Steinbeck’s ideal.

East of Eden goes to the top of my list of truly powerful books I have read that are enjoyable to read, thoughtfully written and provocative.  The characters are interesting and well developed, and the setting – early 20th century Salinas Valley California is rural west –  could have been anywhere in the West.  The context, and even the story in many ways, reminded me of Ivan Doig’s Dancing at the Rascal Fair which I read and reviewed six months ago.  In East of Eden, we are treated to some great insights about human nature and how men and women behave and interact with each other in good times and bad.  I’ve read maybe 8 of Steinbeck’s novels, and I agree with Steinbeck’s own assesssment – this is his masterpiece.

Why this book: I stumbled upon this wonderful book in the used books store at the Coronado Library. I recalled being intrigued by a review  I had read several years ago – it was published in 2012.    I have always been fascinated with Greek philosophy and the Homeric epics, and was intrigued by the idea of a condensed and novelized version of The Illiad, told from the perspective of Achilles’ close companion, Patroclus.   It is short – 360 pages– and very readable, written in modern American English very accessible to the contemporary reader.

My impressions: The Song of Achilles is built around the story of The Illiad, but includes much more – Madeline Miller creates a pre-Illiad past for Achilles and Patroclus, and includes pieces of Achilles’ story and the Trojan war that are not in The Illiad, but which are found in other sources such as The Odyssey and The Aeneid.  It is an enjoyable and interesting read – even more so, if one is familiar with the story and general themes of The Illiad.  Madeline Miller clearly knows and loves her subject – she is a classical Greek scholar who has been studying The Illiad since she was a child.

Ms Miller freely uses her creative license to make The Illiad – a testosterone-filled epic of men at war, into a love story between Patroclus and Achilles. The Song of Achilles is built around the events and context of The Illiad, but is told from the first person perspective of Patroclus,  Achilles’ closest friend and aide.  Patroclus tells us of his boyhood growing up with Achilles, and how they mature into young men, and ultimately find themselves fighting for Agamemnon’s army at Troy.

The Illiad never explicitly describes Patroclus and Achilles as lovers; in fact there are many references in The Illiad to their carnal relations with women.  However, given the culture of the time, and the nature of their close friendship described in The Illiad, most scholars accept that Homer meant to imply that they were lovers.  The relationship between Patroclus and Achilles has been debated over the centuries and in fact the issue has its own entry in Wikipedia .

In The Song of Achilles, Achilles is clearly devoted to Patroclus from the time they are boys and has no interest in women.  Patroclus is likewise completely committed to Achilles as a friend and lover.  Patroclus and Achilles are both portrayed as sensitive young men who are forced into the violence of war by fate, the wiles of Odysseus, and Achilles mother, who is almost an archetype of the cold and power-hungry mother, driven by ambition for her son.  In The Song of Achilles, as in The Illiad,  Achilles is the greatest warrior of the Greeks – Aristos Achaien.  Patroclus however is not the warrior he is in The Illiad. In The Song of Achilles he has neither the talent nor the desire to fight, preferring instead to work in the medical tent, gifted at tending to the battle injuries of those who do fight.

I enjoyed how Ms Miller portrayed the classic characters of the Greek expedition – Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus and Ajax. She also gives depth and character to Briseis, the beautiful young woman who ostensibly was the cause of the break between Agamemnon and Achilles.  In The Song of Achilles,  Briseis and Patroclus become very close, in a brother-and-sisterly way.  In The Illiad, Achilles refers to Briseis as his wife, while in The Song of Achilles, he shows no interest in her, except as a point of honor between him and Agamemnon.   Hector, Paris, Andromache, Priam, the principle Trojan players in the drama are only two dimensional players in The Song of Achilles.  Their stories are much more prominent in The Illiad.

I found Ms Miller’s treatment of the romance and affection between Patroclus and Achilles appropriately discrete and easy for me (a confirmed heterosexual), to relate to. After reading The Song of Achilles, I was inspired to take Robert Fagles’ wonderful translation of The Illiad off the shelf to read some of the most famous scenes to better understand how The Song of Achilles diverges from The Illiad in story, style, and intent.  Yes they are different – The Illiad is a story focusing on men at war; The Song of Achilles is a love story, but both describe that epic war that helped define Greek culture for centuries.  While The Illiad is wonderful in the original, Madeline Miller puts this timeless epic into a very readable and engaging story, which I strongly recommend – whether you have read The Illiad or not.

Why this book: Team of Teams continues to be talked about in many of my circles of friends.    This book is retired Army General Stanley McChrystal applying lessons he learned fighting Al Queda in Iraq to leadership in other settings.  Given that much of what I now do is translate lessons learned from my career working with elite military units into useful guidance in the private sector, I knew I would find this book of interest.

My Impressions: The bottom line of Team of Teams as I read it:  McChrystal is advocating that an organization function more as an “organism” than as a “machine.”  He advocates that a great leader behave more like a gardener than a chess master.  He advocates that interactions between teams within an organization be modeled after interaction within great teams. If that is unclear, read on.

Team of Teams is a book for a thoughtful reader – it is very content rich and provocative. McChrystal, his co-writers and the rest of his team researched the evolution of leadership and management philosophies over the last 100 years to provide a background and framework for making his case:  He argues that an organizational culture that is transparent in its goals, objectives and decision making, that shares information extensively,  that has thoughtfully and deliberately pushed decision making authority down to the lowest possible level, is much more agile, creative, and effective than organizations that are led in a traditional top-down, what McChrystal calls a “reductionist management”  manner.  He is advocating a different leadership and organizational model from that which was the hallmark of the 20^th century.  Old-style leadership – focused on faster, cheaper, more efficient –  privileged cost savings and timing over quality. In today’s rapidly changing world, he says, “Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our new central competency.”

The framework for his discussion was how the best counter-terrorism force in the world was getting its butt kicked by Al Queda in Iraq because it was too slow, too traditional, too stove-piped, too control-focused in its command and control.  He likened the US military to a dinosaur struggling to get out of a tarpit.  He said that “This was not a war of planning and discipline; it was one of agility and innovation.” So, as leader of one of the primary task forces fighting Al Queda in Iraq, McChrystal threw out the book on how to run military operations, and created a very different model.

McChrystal recognized what John Boyd postulated decades ago:  If your enemy is able to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act faster than you, you will lose. McChrystal realized that he had to get his team inside of Al Queda’s OODA loop – otherwise, no matter how good his individual operators and staff, no matter how good his intelligence, no matter how extensive his resources, he would always be reacting, always be on the defensive.  He determined that Al Queda was evolving through ongoing adaptation; with more resources and better trained people, he realized he had no option but to seek to better them at their own game.  This book is about how he did that.

This book makes many points – these are the ones that resonated most with me:

• The best organizations seek to enculturate adaptability, teamwork, and commitment more so than individual specialization. That doesn’t say that it isn’t important to have people with specialized skill sets – it just isn’t as important as adaptability, and the willingness to subordinate individual self-interest to group goals and purpose.
• The 20^th century was very much about leaders seeking to have their organizations run like machines – efficient, predictable, and scalable. The 21^st century will be about the best organizations functioning more like organisms – adaptable, self-regulating, and inter-connected.
• He made an interesting distinction between “complicated” and “complex,” noting that traditional organizational models (including the US military) deal well with the complicated, but are poor at dealing with the complex.  Complicated: Lots of discrete pieces interacting in a predictable manner – like a machine.  Complex: the number and nature of interactions and interdependencies between components yield consequences that are unpredictable.   He argues convincingly that the world is becoming increasingly complex.
• Leaders must develop “shared consciousness” of context and purpose within their teams. He argues that a leader’s primary responsibility is to create a culture of shared consciousness, and that this is a pre-requisite to what he calls “empowered execution” –  empowering subordinates to make and execute decisions.
• Regarding empowerment, he emphasizes that “…simply taking off constraints is a dangerous move. It should be done only if the recipients of newfound authority have the necessary sense of perspective to act on it wisely.”
• Developing this “shared consciousness” requires transparency and extensive information sharing – and this requires assuming risk by trusting others, way beyond what most leaders and organizations are willing to do.  This information sharing must take place within the leader’s team, and between teams in the “Team of Teams.”
• In the organization he describes, he turns the traditional leadership model on its head. Traditionally, organizations provide their leaders with information so that the leader can make decisions. In McChrystal’s organization, the leader provides the organization with information (context, transparency, big picture perspective, commander’s intent, the “vision” ) and then empowers the organization to make decisions.
• Throughout the book, he repeatedly stresses the importance of information sharing. It demonstrates trust, and taps into what James Surowieki has called The Wisdom of Crowds.  It brings all the minds in the organization, including those closest to the problem, to bear in solving problems and improving operations.
• Extensive information sharing  enabled what MIT professor Sandy Pentland called “idea flow.”   Idea flow he noted, has two major determinants: “engagement” within a small group or team, and “exploration” – frequent contact with other units. “The teams that had the highest levels of internal engagement and external exploration had much higher levels of creative output….” This describes McChrystal’s Team of Teams.
• McChrystal argued that his task was to reverse the normal results of the prisoner’s dilemma. In the classic prisoner’s dilemma, people don’t collaborate, simply because there is less risk in pursuing one’s personal self-interest. Not the case in the Team-of-Teams-world McChrystal created.
• I loved the chapter in which he describes the leader as a gardener more than a chess master.  As gardener, the leader’s primary purpose is tending the garden, pruning, watering, even fertilizing. “The gardener cannot actually ‘grow’ tomatoes, squash, or beans – she can only foster an environement in which the plants do so….Tending the garden –creating the culture – became my primary responsibilty. Without my constantly pruning and shaping our network…our success would wither.”
• In building his Team of Teams, he said it was a struggle to overcome tribal boundaries, where elite teams were comfortable working in parallel, but not in collaboration with each other. Through trust-building, great liaison officers, and extensive information sharing, he was able to overcome much of the traditional tension that existed between loyalty to one’s “small team,” and a loyalty to what is good for the cause, the “big team,”  the Team of Teams.

What I see as a shortcoming to the book. McChrystal makes a strong case for information sharing, developing shared consciousness and and an execution empowered team, and then ultimately, a very collaborative “Team of Teams.”  But if it works so well, why isn’t more the norm?  Because leaders are people, and I’ve seen damn few people OR leaders who are as confident, as willing to assume risk, as engaged with their people, as dedicated to a larger purpose as Stan McChrystal was.  It must also be noted that he was working with the very best of the best in the US Special Operations community -he and his team had nearly complete hire/fire authority and the the most experienced operators with the strongest reputations gravitated to his task force and its mission.  This level of selectivity is seldom available to most leaders.  Also, McChrystal wasn’t randomly selected to lead such an elite team – he was extremely well prepared and personally selected for his unique talent.   In the “real world,” we seldom find such confident, insightful, and innovative leaders, able to effectively share information to build shared consciousness, able to judge when people adequately understand the leaders perspective, and are sufficiently engaged with the purpose of the organization to be empowered with execution authority.  Will this model work for most leaders? In most organizations?  I wonder.

I recently read a pretty amazing study by Gallup  which makes the case that only 1 in 10 people have the high talent to effectively manage others, and only another 2 in 10 have functioning managerial talent. Of those 3 in 10, I wonder how many have the experience, confidence, and belief in themselves, their people and their larger purpose to assume the risk necessary to push execution authority down as McChrstal describes in Team of Teams.   I am normally an optimist, but here, I’m wondering if the bar he sets may be too high for most leaders, and most organizations.

That said, I’m really glad he provided this model that the best leaders in the best organizations can strive to achieve.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book (with page numbers, refering to the 2015 hardback edition):

“Management systems can be efficient, but not adaptable….Many of the practices that are most efficient directly limited adaptability.” 82

“Team members tackling complex environments must all grasp the team’s situation and overarching purpose.”  99

“On a team of teams, every individual does not have to have a relartionship with every other individual; instead, the relationships between the constituent teams need to resemble those between individuals on a given team.” 128

<To defeat AL Queda> “…would involve a complete reversal of the conventioanl approach to information sharing, delineation of roles, decison-making authority, and leadership.” 131

“Most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.” 141

“…whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of ‘interface failures.’” 151

“We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise…. We dubbed this goal – this state of emergent, adaptive organizational intelligence – shared consciousness. And it became the cornerstone of our transformation.” 153

“Our standing guidance was ‘Share information until you’re afraid it’s illegal.’” 162

“We decentralized until it made us uncomfortable, and it was right there- on the brink of instability – that we found our sweet spot.” 214

”..we found that, even as speed increased and we pushed authority futher down, the quality of decisions actually went up….We had decentralized in the belief that the 70 percent solution today would be better than the 90 % solution tomorrow. But we found our estimates were backward – we were getting the 90 percent solution today instead of the 70% solution tomorrow. “ 214

“An individual who makes a decision becomes more invested in its outcome.” 215

“Experience had told me that nothing is heard until it has been said several times.” 226

“The risks of acting too slowly were higher than the risks of letting competent people make judgment calls.” 209

“We had become not a well-oiled machine, but an adaptable, complex organism, constantly twisting, turning, and learning to overwhelm our protean adversary.” 243

“Shared concisousnesss is a carefully maintained set of centralizd forums for bringing people together. Empowered excecution is a radically decentralized system for pushing authority out to the edges of the organizations.….the union of shared consciousness and empowered execution is greater than the sum of their parts. “  245