Category creativity

The week@work April 27 – May 3  Chief Storytelling Officer & Nancy Drew @ 85

Eileen Kohan 1 Comment

Writing from North Carolina, this week@work has been a transcontinental journey. Observing life along Highway 40 you notice the new urban growth areas and the blight along old Route 66. Booming city centers and suburbs of Oklahoma City, Nashville, Knoxville and Charlotte contrast with graffiti covered, abandoned roadside attractions in a land that time forgot.

Travelling by car is typically reserved for tourists, but it’s worth the trip to reconnect with the reality of the changing economic landscape that’s hard to see from 20,000 feet.

Two stories to share from the past week:

Fast Company magazine reported on a new creative position, the ‘chief storytelling officer’:

“The CSO is a thoroughly modern title, the product of a growing interest in corporate storytelling, a pursuit that has lured other established writers and journalists into the world of corporate hackery.”

Using the example of Pakistani writer, Mohsin Hamid author of ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, we discover the value of novelists in a corporate environment. “He’s now working for the half-century-old creative consultancy Wolff Olins as the company’s first chief storytelling officer.”

“Last year, Wolff Olins—which in 2001 became a subsidiary of the marketing giant Omnicom Group—contacted Hamid to explore how he could contribute to its work; the more he thought about it, the more he recognized, he says, that “storytelling isn’t only for novelists, but CEOs and leaders as well.

More than just a feel-good theme, Hamid says a unifying narrative that all employees can grasp can help them work more creatively and independently—necessities in today’s company structures, which often rely on a distributed leadership approach, rather than the top-down supervision of yesterday.”

This week we celebrated the first national Independent Booksellers Day and the eighty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the first Nancy Drew mystery book. Author and journalist Theodore Jefferson wrote an excellent piece on the influence of the series on book publishing and expanding young women’s aspirations:

“Agency.

It is that which forms the foundation for any hero’s ability to save the day. In America, agency for teenage girls in literature made its debut in 1930 in the person of Nancy Drew.

Scholars Janice Radway and Nan Enstad assert that stories like Nancy Drew’s provide girls a “place to dream.” While they highlight romances and the “dime novels” of the pulp era as prominent examples, that “anything is possible” spirit was not limited to those forms.

It was the imaginative energy of that era that propelled Nancy Drew and characters like her into the kinds of stories nobody had ever seen before.

“…it is what Nancy Drew does in her stories that sets the Drew-niverse apart from what once was. Nancy gets into fights, drives a car, packs a gun and relies on herself to get out of tough situations. She is mechanically inclined and at the same time doesn’t act like most people in the 1930s would have expected a teenage girl to act.”

This week we celebrate storytelling as a way to communicate corporate culture and we recognize a heroine whose stories encouraged young readers to dream.

The other Stanford Commencement Speech – Dana Gioia

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Even if you had not attended the commencement of the Class of 2012 at Stanford, you probably have a faint memory of the speech Steve Jobs delivered, as it played in unending loops on social media.

Why did his words resonate? Because he shared what he believed to be the fundamentals of his success though a multi-disciplinary, non-traditional approach to education.

“… you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Steve Jobs in 2012 was a celebrity. The speaker in 2007 was not, and that caused a stir on ‘The Farm’. A self described working class kid – half Italian, half Mexican from Hawthorne, California, Dana Gioia was serving as the head of the National Endowment for the Arts when he was invited to speak.

In a culture where ‘connecting the dots’, creativity, innovation and curiosity are the current corporate buzz words, we seem to devalue the artists who live these words every day.

Gioia acknowledged the disagreement over his choice and used it to challenge the graduate’s definition of celebrity in his address.

“I know that there was a bit of controversy when my name was announced as the graduation speaker. A few students were especially concerned that I lacked celebrity status. It seemed I wasn’t famous enough. I couldn’t agree more. As I have often told my wife and children, “I’m simply not famous enough.”

And that—in a more general and less personal sense—is the subject I want to address today, the fact that we live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists.”

He then illustrated his point sharing his story:

“I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.

Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.”

Dana Gioia’s work today is poet and university lecturer. But he started his career in the same place, at Stanford. He earned both B.A. and M.B.A. degrees from his alma mater and pursued a business career, eventually serving as a Vice President of General Foods. In between he earned an MA in Comparative Literature from Harvard and in 1992 left the corporate world to be a full time writer.

On that day, at Stanford he was speaking to himself, challenging those who would go off to investment banks and Fortune 500 companies to consider their responsibility to American culture and the arts.

“To compete successfully, this country needs continued creativity, ingenuity, and innovation.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world—equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.

Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, “It is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget.” Art awakens, enlarges, refines, and restores our humanity. You don’t outgrow art. The same work can mean something different at each stage of your life. A good book changes as you change.”

Steve Jobs and Dana Gioia gave the same speech five years apart. It’s about curiosity, creativity and innovation. How can we connect the dots if our world view has only one?

The week@work – April 20 – 26 CEO pay, women@work & a yellow hairdryer

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This week the conversation continued about Gravity Payments CEO’s decision to cut his salary and raise the minimum wage of his employees. Women@work were the topic of a viral gender equality spoof and Meryl Streep announced plans for a screenwriting lab for women over 40. And for those of you budding entrepreneurs comes the story of Dry Bar and those yellow hairdryers.

Dan Price, the CEO of Gravity Payments announced in mid April that he would be ‘sharing the wealth’ with his employees. His plan is to raise the minimum salary for all his employees to $70K within the next three years. Business professors and cable TV pundits criticized his idea, suggesting he was crazy, going so far as to cite research that happy workers are not necessarily productive workers.

This is what you get for being innovative. How will you know unless you try it?

Conceding on MSNBC that he might be crazy, “he dismissed the back-seat business advice as misguided. Proudly calling himself a capitalist, Mr. Price…argued that the new salary structure would benefit his firm in the long run even as it would help, more broadly, to highlight the corrosive effects of income inequality in American society.”

He is building a corporate culture founded on values of fairness that he believes will benefit his company in the long run.

At the Tribeca Film Festival actor Meryl Streep announced plans to fund a screenwriting lab for women over 40.

As reported in Variety, “The retreat will be run by New York Women in Film and Television and IRIS, a collective of women filmmakers.  

“Called the Writers Lab, the screenplay development program aims to increase opportunities for female screenwriters over the age of 40. This year the initiative will accept submissions May 1-June 1, with eight winning scribes named Aug. 1.

Among the mentors to participate in the Lab’s inaugural year are writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood (“Beyond the Lights”), producer Caroline Kaplan (“Boyhood”), and writers Kirsten Smith (“Legally Blonde”) and Jessica Bendinger (“Bring It On”).

Citing current statistics, Forbes Magazine reported : “As of 2014, women constituted only 17% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 (domestic) grossing films. Shockingly, this is the same percentage of women working in these roles in 1998. The needle hasn’t moved.”

Which leads us to ‘Its Only Fair That Men Should Have It All’ a video spoof of gender inequality. The video, created by Patricia Noonan, Nadia Quinn, and Emily Tarver used an all-female cast and crew of 70 to comment on a serious topic, with humor in words and music.

The last story of the week is a profile in The New York Times of the Drybar founder, Alli Webb.

“In just five years, Ms. Webb’s business has grown to a $50 million-a-year enterprise. (That was in 2014; the company says it is on track to generate $70 million in revenue in 2015.) This was not what she imagined growing up in South Florida. Back then, a young Ms. Webb (nee Landau), was forced to contend daily with her hair, which was wavy, and in humid Florida, very frizzy.”

What is Drybar? A visit to the website defines the product:

“Drybar is a brand new “blow dry bar” concept created around a very simple idea:
No cuts. No color. Just blowouts for only $40. You see, we believe that everyone (even us pros) prefers having someone else blow out their hair. Why? It just looks better! We also believe there has to be a better option than paying $60+ at a traditional salon, or going to a less-than-desirable discount chain. But there’s not. So, we decided to make one.”

Here is a simple business idea that originated with a basic beauty need and a woman who created a market for a product we didn’t know we needed until it arrived.

From the NY Times story: “Drybar now has 3,000 employees. There is a line of styling products, hot tools and brushes, sold in the Drybar shops and at Sephora. The company has about 50 investors, many of whom began as clients, like the actress Rose McGowan, and Alexander von Furstenberg, who got in touch about investing after he picked up his teenage daughter from a Drybar shop where she was getting a blowout. “I was like, wow, this place is so well run, just the execution, you know, everything,” Mr. von Furstenberg said.”

Most days you have to create your own success. Mr. Price of Gravity Payments is redefining employee compensation. Meryl Streep is recognizing the value of storytellers over 40. The creators of #makeitfair are reminding employers of the equal contribution of all workers. And Alli Webb has built her business based on 10 core values and a bright yellow hairdryer.

How big is your dream?

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What is your dream? Alexa von Tobel the CEO of LearnVest believes “you have to dream big because no one else can dream for you.” Her dream to build a financial planning company led her to take a leave from Harvard Business School. In the heart of a recession with no salary and no income she started with an idea of a website.

Explaining her vision in a December, 2014 interview with Time Magazine:

“You go to a mom and pop certified financial planning firm,” she says, “you’re paying for that overhead, for that parking lot, for that mahogany desk, for that receptionist at the front,” she says. LearnVest, on the other hand, is just a website. It shifts the data entry onto users and the number crunching onto automated software. As a result, her staff can focus on dispensing advice in unprecedented volumes. Von Tobel says LearnVest is aiming to have a single financial advisor serve upwards of 1,000 customers, a ten-fold increase over the typical small firm.”

Two weeks ago, her interview with Adam Bryant was published in the Corner Office column in The New York Times.

“Sometimes when I’m mentoring people, I’ll say, “What’s your biggest dream?” and it will be something small and I’ll say: “Dream bigger. Just give yourself the ability to say, ‘I want something bigger,’ because who cares if you fail? Truly, who cares? So dream bigger because no one else is going to do it for you.”

Which brings me to Jeff Lee and Ann Martin and the Rocky Mountain Land Library. In the early 1990s they visited The Gladstone Library in Wales and their vision began to take shape. A residential library founded by the former prime minister with his own collection, the website describes a mission “dedicated to dialogue, debate and learning for open-minded individuals and groups, who are looking to explore pressing questions and to pursue study and research in an age of distraction and easy solutions.”

The story of Jeff and Ann’s dream was told by NY Times reporter, Julie Turkewitz in ‘A Haven for Readers Nestled Amid Mountains of Books’.

For more than 20 years Jeff and Ann have been investing in books as they worked at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, building toward their dream: “a rural, live-in library where visitors will be able to connect with two increasingly endangered elements — the printed word and untamed nature.” 

Anticipating a broad range of audiences, the venue will connect visitors with literature of the west and nature.

How big is your dream? Use this summary of the Rocky Mountain Land Library from the NY Times as a model:

“The project is striking in its ambition: a sprawling research institution situated on a ranch at 10,000 feet above sea level, outfitted with 32,000 volumes, many of them about the Rocky Mountain region, plus artists’ studios, dormitories and a dining hall — a place for academics, birders, hikers and others to study and savor the West.”

Dream bigger.

The week@work April 13 – 19 Apollo 13, Brian Grazer & Adderall in the workplace

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The week@work celebrated authors and their books at the LA Times Festival of Books in Los Angeles, commemorated the courage of the astronauts on Apollo 13 and explored the growing abuse of attention deficit disorder drugs in the workplace.

It’s interesting how the dots connect. Yesterday I was sitting in a large auditorium at the University of Southern California listening to an interview with Brian Grazer, producer and now writer, describe a self-improvement process he has utilized since graduating from college. Each week he identifies at least one person, a stranger, he would like to meet and have a ‘curiosity conversation’. It’s a practice he continues to energize and expand his capabilities. Speaking earlier this year at SXSW he emphasized “Curiosity is the source of all my success.”

In 1995 he produced the film Apollo 13, recounting the story of the astronaut’s survival. The key word is survival. His process in selecting this project connected back to a woman, Veronica Denegra, who had been tortured for 18 months in Chile for her opposition to the government. It wasn’t his interest in space, but his memory of Ms. Denegra’s story of survival that connected him to Apollo 13.

“You can never know how the dots will connect; how opportunities will come alive when you never knew they existed.”

The talented professionals at NASA who brainstormed their way through to a successful conclusion of the Apollo 13 mission were honored this week at the San Diego Air and Space Museum on the 45th anniversary of the mission. The story of the ‘real life’ events led by mission commander Jim Lovell and flight director Gene Kranz remains a model case study of problem solving, teamwork and creativity in an extremely high risk work environment.

In the December, 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review three authors described their findings on how CEO’s innovate. In ‘The Innovator’s DNA’ Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen identified “five “discovery skills” that distinguish the most creative executives: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking. We found that innovative entrepreneurs (who are also CEOs) spend 50% more time on these discovery activities than do CEOs with no track record for innovation. Together, these skills make up what we call the innovator’s DNA. And the good news is, if you’re not born with it, you can cultivate it.”

Here we have Brian Grazer, producer, who appears to be the poster boy for the innovator’s DNA, telling the story of another illustration of innovation, in the story of the Apollo13 crew and the folks on the ground at NASA who brought them home, 45 years ago this week.

“The conversations are the artistic fertilizer of what comes up on the screen. It enriches everything that lives in your mind in terms of exploring possibilities.”

The third story this week appears on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, ‘Abuse of Attention Deficit Pills Graduates Into the Workplace’. A generation that employed attention disorder drugs to stay up late to study for a final or complete a paper has now continued the practice, ordering ‘pills on demand’ to complete work assignments.

“Doctors and medical ethicists expressed concern for misusers’ health, as stimulants can cause anxiety, addiction and hallucinations when taken in high doses. But they also worried about added pressure in the workplace — where the use by some pressures more to join the trend.”

Young professionals believe they need these drugs to get hired. And once hired, believe they need chemical support to sustain their productivity, to be competitive.

We are only at the beginning of this story, but leaders should be paying attention and consider the effects of an organizational culture that facilitates this behavior. A dose of management emotional intelligence and creativity might go a long way to building an alternative workplace, a place where productivity is fueled by ‘curiosity conversations’, not drugs.

Mr. Grazer believes “Curiosity is the solution to every problem that you’ve got.” And he may be right.

Poetry in Music – ‘Fly’ – Maddie Marlow, Taylor Dye & Tiffany Vartanyan

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There’s another country music awards show this weekend. The duo of Maddie and Tae challenged the traditional role of women in country lyrics with their debut single, ‘Girl in a Country Song’. Their second release, ‘Fly’ describes their road to success, leaving Texas for Nashville at 17. In an interview for the CBS Morning News, they described ‘Fly’ as “an uplifting song that encourages people to hold on through the tough times.”

And their approach to songwriting: “For us, it’s mainly about just getting to tell our stories. And if we can release a song that’s true to us and our fans relate and then maybe it doesn’t get high on the charts, that’s really not important to us. And as long as we get to say what we want to say and we’re very passionate about it, that’s all that matters.”

This ‘Friday Poem In Music’ is for all of you trying to tell your stories.

Fly

Baby blue staring in the window pane
Just counting drops of rain
Wondering if she’s got the guts to take it
Running down her dreams in a dirty dress,
Now her heart’s a mess
Praying she will find a way to make it

So keep on climbing, though the ground might shake
Just keep on reaching though the limb might break
We’ve come this far, don’t you be scared now
‘Cause you can learn to fly on the way down

Searching for a sign in the night even like a lonely string of lights
That’ll burn just long enough for you to see it
The road’s been long and lonely and you feel like giving up
There’s more to this than just the breath you’re breathing

So keep on climbing, though the ground might shake
Just keep on reaching though the limb might break
We’ve come this far, don’t you be scared now
‘Cause you can learn to fly on the way down

On the way down

You won’t forget the heavy steps it took to let it go
Close your eyes, count to ten, hold your breath and fly

Keep on climbing, though the ground might shake
Just keep on reaching though the limb might break
We’ve come this far, don’t you be scared now
‘Cause you can learn to fly on the way down

Fly
Fly

Songwriters
Maddie Marlow, Taylor Dye, Tiffany Vartanyan

The Saturday Read – ‘Shop Class As Soulcraft’ – Matthew Crawford

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What can you do with a degree in philosophy? Matthew Crawford received his PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2000. After a series of jobs as a ‘knowledge worker’ he created a career that combined philosophy, writing and custom motorcycle maintenance. Drawing from his personal journey, he wrote about the value of work and producing tangible results. His book, ‘Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value of Work’, was published in 2009.

In a New York Times Magazine essay he argued ‘The Case for Working With Your Hands’.

“A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.”

He provides the historical context to explain how we got to where we are today.

“High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.”

Contrasting his experience at a policy organization with his part-time experience tearing down an old Honda motorcycle under the guidance of an experienced tradesman: “As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun.”

He then considers the broader implications to our society when the best and the brightest are channeled into elite institutions bypassing an apprenticeship in problem solving in the world of grease and dirt.

“The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?”

He remains optimistic as he concludes the essay: “The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels… For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.”

Enjoy the Saturday read, ‘Shop Class As Soulcraft’.

Buona notte da terra @AstroSamantha

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When she left earth on November 23, 2014 for the International Space Station, astronaut Samantha Christoforetti had 143,000 Twitter followers who had tracked her training to launch day. Today, a month before she returns to earth, her followers have grown to 430,000. How can you not explore space with the first female Italian astronaut, who brought a specially designed espresso machine to the ISS?

The 37 year old, Milan born captain in the Italian Air Force is single-handedly dragging us back into the wonder of space exploration.

Forget the AT&T U-verse commercial that imagines a day when we finally walk on Mars, Captain Christoforetti captures the imagination with her tweets and photos. Most evenings her followers are wished “Buona notte dallo spazio.” (Good night from space.) It’s like getting an answer to ‘Goodnight, Moon’.

Her breathtaking photos remind us of our global interconnection. On Sunday she sent ‘colors of the earth’ in lieu of easter eggs. Monday, the UK at night, challenging followers to identify the city centers. Tuesday, Sri Lanka and India. And yesterday, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

How many girls of a certain age imagined themselves as a young Amelia Earhart? Who in the current astronaut corps found their first role model in Sally Ride? Where is the 5th grader who is following Samantha and planning her dream career?

There was a time when we could name all the astronauts. We remembered where we were at those moments of great discovery and great tragedy in the space program. We were inspired, knowing there was a frontier beyond the bounds of our atmosphere.

We need more Samanthas and Sallys and Amelias. We need to reimagine a workplace of exploration and innovation circling earth and traveling to galaxies ‘where no man or woman has gone before’.

Tonight, join me in wishing ‘Buona notte da terra @AstroSamantha’.

What your surroundings tell you about what you really want to do with your life.

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You go to work every day. You engage in the work, interact with colleagues, manage your social network and maybe check your ranking in your NCAA bracket. At the end of the day you head to the gym, a class or home for dinner. You are so immersed in the dance of work/life balance that you may be ignoring clues ‘close to home’ that hint at your next career move.

I was following one of those compulsive tangents the other day, you know the one where you read a classic novel and then you check IMDB to see if there was a film and then you are looking at trailers and watching interviews with directors and cast. Before you know it, time has passed, but you really have come away with a nugget of valuable information.

The book I was reading was ‘A Passage to India’ written by EM Forster in 1924 and I found that the movie had been released in 1984, which then brought me to an interview broadcast on the TODAY show in the early 90s with the film’s director, David Lean.

He describes his father’s ambitions for him to be an accountant. But a visit from an aunt and her observations changed his life. “I went back to visit my mother and an aunt who was visiting commented,”I see heaps of film books here, but no accountancy books. Why doesn’t he go in for the movies?” Why not? It was a tremendous barrier broken. And I went to my father and I said, “I’d like to go into the movies.”He was shocked. I just wasn’t done in those days.”

David Lean viewed his career in film as “a secret magic place”. It took an outside observer to connect the dots to his dream career. And it provided him with the courage to overcome his father’s objections.

Look around. Invite a guest in to describe what they see in your home or office.

Allow yourself time to follow a tangent and pay attention to your surroundings. Here lies the hint of your future.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Year of Reading Dangerously

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Most of us have given up on our New Year’s resolution as the calendar turns to spring. But Mark Zuckerberg is well on his way to keep his promise to read a book every two weeks with the announcement of the sixth book in ‘A Year of Books’: ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ by Thomas Kuhn. This is not Oprah’s Book Club. Aspiring entrepreneurs who one day hope to achieve Mr. Zuckerberg’s success are quickly learning that the content of his choices is not for the faint of heart.

Professor Kuhn argues in his book “that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of normal science.” 

Disruption? Didn’t a couple of Harvard professors invent that idea a few years ago? This is why we read books written 53 years ago. It humbles us with the realization that we are not the inventors, but actors in a greater historical narrative.

The other books picks have been published more recently and are thoughtful meditations on our humanity, creativity and change. I’m sure many are attempting to decode a pattern in the book selection rather than accepting that Mr. Zuckerberg is seeking a better understanding, as a reader, of the challenges we face, and as a leader, understanding the broader context of the global community that is his customer.

The first five books selected:

‘Creativity’  Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace

‘On Immunity’  Eula Bliss

‘Gang Leader for a Day’  Sudhir Venkatesh

‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’  Steven Pinker

‘The End of Power’  Moises Naim

Why do we read books recommended by leaders and celebrities? Maybe to get a sense of how their reading habits led to their success. That’s where we start. But it’s where we go from there that personalizes a reading list to expand our understanding of the world beyond our community.

Follow the tangents, the annotations you make in the margins to discover both the old and new in your world and your profession.