Scientific Ink

Tag: Books

  • Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

    The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Revised and Updated: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too LateI just finished The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Revised and Updated: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late, which details how we are running off of “startup capital” in a resource-draining, non-integrated way. The beginning echoed many environmental books – a depressing litany of all of the ways we are living unsustainably. When I read that sort of thing I get to feeling hopeless, like there’s little I can do that will affect, say, the fact that we may drive chimps, bonobos, and gorillas extinct in the next 100 years (a factoid in a recent New Yorker article), will run out of oil, are destroying forests, losing soil to the oceans, and are causing certain fish populations to collapse. It makes me want to hide in a cave and renounce everything. It makes me want to give up. It makes me feel like the problem is so much larger than my own actions that there is no hope.

    It is refreshing that Thom Hartmann’s calls-to-action for recovery are small and affirming and possible instead of grand:

    • meditate,
    • live intentionally according to your own values, this has immense power and affects others, a positive ripple effect, a dampening of other influences,
    • notice the stories we create and accept about the way the world works and work to get outside them,
    • turn off the tv and talk to your neighbors, your spouse, your family, listen to the wind and see other living things as part of the larger system,
    • involve yourself in your local community.

    He doesn’t list them like this. But I think the main theme of his book is: get connected with yourself (meditate), with others, and with the larger system we all inhabit.

    For my part I’m passing this book onto a few like-minded friends and continuing with some things I’m already doing (meditation, subscribing to a local CSA), and I’ll be looking for other little changes to make to align myself with these ideas and work for positive change.

  • Our food comes from: Tantre Farm

    We are what we eat, and the choices we make about food matter in terms of our personal health, the health of the soil, and energy consumption. So, to act on our good environmental intentions, and to connect ourselves more deeply with our local community, we joined with another couple to purchase a Community Supported Agriculture Share. Together with our friends, we will share in whatever a local organic farm, Tantre Farm, has on offer. Each week we’ll pick up our locally grown organic vegetable goodness from the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market. I’m excited about this.

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  • Letting go II

    While I’m still playing with the idea of ridding myself of my automobile, more angst is coming from wrestling with whether I need to leave my job, or how I can change it so that I can stay.

    It’s funny. I have been reading Go Put Your Strengths to Work, and after the exercises in which the reader diagnoses what is and isn’t working in a week’s worth of work activities, Marcus Buckingham includes a long section counseling the reader not to dump her/his job and rush off in search of the next one. He writes that while the “eject” button is the dramatic solution (a leap into the dark to the next situation, which may or may not be a better fit), we can iteratively move our current job closer to our perfect job through attention and goal-setting. Certainly I have the most negotiating power with the folks who already respect me and depend on me (that is, my current team and employer). It’s annoying to be right where Marcus Buckingham predicts I would be. I’d prefer to be unique.

    So, it is listmaking time for me, figuring out what it is I can’t do without, what I can trade for other things, what it is I can no longer do, what I have to ask others for…

    Things I need: team, writing, collaboration, clients, change, variety, action. I want to have different problems than we did last year, than we did last quarter. I want to be making different mistakes.

    Things that concern me: I don’t want to be the single point of failure or hero. I want to build or participate in a system where I and our clients are supported by a team with overlapping interests and responsibilities. I’d like to be replaceable. I’d like a little slack in the system, a little redundancy. I don’t know how to do that in a small team. I think we simply need to be bigger.

    But, there is an upside. I have shed some tasks and responsibilities that were mine that weren’t right. I removed myself from some email lists (like Perry Marshall’s), re-examined some of my work habits (yes, there are ways I have participated in creating my own angst), and essentially spring cleaned my office and my job description. Yes, whether I’m happy at work really is up to me. Whatever the outcome, this realization is a good, if painful, thing.

  • 12 and Go!

    12: The Elements of Great Managing

    I have been meaning to write a blog entry about 12: The Elements of Great Managing since I finished it in December. I have a few excuses, none of them particularly good. Let’s see:

    • I liked it so much I loaned it to a friend (HSG Consulting’s Principal),
    • I liked it so well that I actually spoke about it with friends instead of writing about it,
    • Or maybe I just needed some time to process.

    Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance
    Well, now I’m partway through yet another Gallup book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance. Go… is more of a workbook on how to make your job fit you better, how to contribute at a higher level, and maybe help others at your workplace do the same. It’s helping me clarify some things, some things that 12 brought to the surface.

    I think I’m a sucker for these Gallup books because they reinforce my belief that we can collaborate to recreate our work so that individuals and teams function at a higher level, so that individuals and teams contribute from their talents and cover each others’ weaknesses. These books capture and evangelize my vision of true diversity – that people with different superpowers (vision, command, strategy, relating, woo…) can come together because they’re stronger as a team than as individuals.

    Well, 12 is valuable because it emphasizes the critical list these same folks described in First Break All the Rules: the twelve items that make great workplaces, the elements that consistently attract and retain high achievers, the Gallup branded magic formula for success.

    12 argues that great managers provide the following twelve things to their teams: clear expectations, sufficient resources and materials, the chance to contribute at a high level, praise, care and nuturing, respect, a feeling of purpose, good colleagues who care about their work, good comerades, and a chance to grow with feedback (paraphrased).

    Now, this same group had explained this very same list in First Break All the Rules, but in 12, they shared stories of people actually doing these things at organizations, turning around places by paying attention to one of the missing elements. So, it is actionable and inspirational, providing at least a sense of the tools required to enact the vision.

  • Another “War Book”

    Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy

    Continuing in the vein of the Art of War, I read Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy on the plane today. I brought it along with me to Florida because it was a thin volume, eminently packable, and because my sister, who gave it to me for Christmas off my Amazon wish list, asked to borrow it.

    The book chronicles Norman Lewis’ year as a British intelligence officer (field service officer) in occupied Italy. I can’t quite tell the backstory, but it seems he was pressed into service there because he knew Spanish, which was deemed close enough to Italian. He must have learned enough to get by because, among other things, he negotiates the finer details of an arrangement between an English officer and his Italian mistress. He tells fantastic stories, such as about his informant/friend who makes a meagre living posing as an uncle in from Rome at local funerals, making the deceased appear more important than he is.

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  • The Art of War

    The Art of War, Special Edition

    I finally got to The Art of War. I had been intrigued by this book for a while. Tony Soprano praised it in one of the first seasons of the Sopranos. Someone else recommended it to me as a book for people interested in management.

    Maybe I’m just unimaginative, but most of The Art of War really is about war, about strategy, spies, misleading your enemy, and obtaining a military advantage. It’s not so much a management primer.

    Sun Tzu advocates burning the boats, breaking the cooking pots, and setting fire to the stores of grain to motivate the troops (Chapter XI, aphorism 23). While effective, these options are typically unavailable to me. He also advocates hiding information from the team (Chapter XI, aphorism 35-36), and using spies (Chapter XIII). Perhaps the opponent’s spies make hiding info from the team a necessity, but I’m hoping I can skip both of those instructions.

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