Ideas. Relationships. Adventure.
Warren Bennis says, “If I were restricted to three words in any commencement speech, they would be: Ideas, Relationships, and Adventure.”
All posts filed under: Recommended Readings
New Perspectives
In his book The Next Level, Scott Eblin warns against being too myopic, which can lead to silos in organizations or businesses. We all understand our organization or business, but often only from one seat or perspective. I bring this up because of a conversation I had last week with one of our senior staff leaders in my organization, the National Trust. We were discussing ways in which we could help individuals on our team who become too closely identified with one program, their work in one city or region, or expertise in saving one type of historic resource. It reminded me of my own experience. Several years ago I was working with an executive coach. After receiving 360 degree feedback on my work, she asked to see my resume, which listed my various preservation jobs since I entered the field. Once she reviewed the resume, my coach had me undertake what I thought at the time was an unusual task. I was to rewrite my vita without using the words “historic preservation” or …
Beware the Asides of Summer
When I write I often fall in love with my own asides. (Aside: a remark that is not directly related to the main topic of discussion.) I believe that what I want to say is so fascinating that it doesn’t matter if it fits the topic. Nope, I’m going to interject it simply because I can. I’ve just read a book that may—if not cure me—get me to think more deeply before heading down some rabbit hole. Terry McDermott’s Off Speed: Baseball, Pitching, and the Art of Deception comes close to being a wonderful book. Using the framework of Felix Hernandez’s 2012 perfect game, Seattle Mariners fan McDermott takes the reader through a nine-inning/chapter history of pitching, pitches, and—naturally, given the subject—deception. Hernandez is one of the best in the game and a terrific subject for this fan’s dive into the deep end of baseball. McDermott is a life-long lover of baseball, having been reared in the rural Midwest in “Field of Dreams” country. And that is where the trouble begins. McDermott finds his upbringing …
Circle of concern/Circle of influence
Every Saturday morning we’re in town, my wife and I do two things without fail: we buy our weekly groceries at the local farmers market, and then we spend an hour at the French pastry shop Tout de Sweet drinking coffee, eating scones, and talking. I call it my Candice time, and it is the one extended period during the week we have to focus on the week ahead and—more importantly—on bigger issues that are on our minds. When it comes to Saturday mornings, empty nesting has its privileges.* This past Saturday as we discussed the impact of stress on our lives, Candice asked me what was on mind. I realized (with her help) that I had begun to focus on things I couldn’t control. Reflecting later on that conversation took me back to a book I first read in the early 1990s, Stephen R. Covey’s classic The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. “Be Proactive” is the very first habit, and early in the book Covey notes that we each have a wide range …
Places teach us, if we let them
I have just finished reading two books about the American West that were written in 1987 and 1994. As I finished the second one on a rainy Sunday afternoon I thought, “I hope I age as well.” The older of the two—which I actually read second—was the first book cited by the author of the 1994 work in her “Sources” chapter. Both are written by women I greatly admire as writers and thinkers. So enough of the cat and mouse games. Rebecca Solnit‘s Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Hidden Wars of the American West, was republished in a 20th anniversary edition in 2014, with a new preface by the author. I’ve been on something of a Solnit kick lately, as she is one of the most thoughtful of writers exploring a wide variety of issues across the American landscape. This early work is often hailed as a foundational work of environmental thinking. However, I saw this more as a book about place and unacknowledged history, and the title of the post comes from her …
Intimacy
I’ve mentioned before how much I have learned from the book Leadership is an Art by Max DePree. Events in my life are leading me back to reference this work. I want to share some thoughts from this book, beginning with DePree’s writings on intimacy and work. The former CEO and Chairman of Herman Miller, Inc. begins his chapter on the subject by saying, “Intimacy is at the heart of competence. It has to do with understanding, with believing, and with practice. It has to do with the relationship to one’s work…intimacy with one’s work leads to solid competence.” Intimacy—in DePree’s view—is the “experience of ownership.” One arrives at intimacy with one’s work out of “difficulty or questions or exasperation, or even survival.” And this intimacy “affects our accountability and results in personal authenticity in the work process. A key component of intimacy is passion.” Working through difficult situations to reach a sense of ownership of one’s work—and life—is something to which we can all relate. “Superficiality in a special way is an enemy of …
The Blessing of Silence
Madeleine L’Engle – the well-known author of A Wrinkle in Time and many other works of both fiction and nonfiction – is a writer I return to again-and-again when I’m looking for wisdom from a different perspective. As Candice and I took time off this past weekend to celebrate our anniversary, I found time to re-read L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, which is the one book both of us included several years ago on a list of influential readings. Reading that book made me think of L’Engle’s other writings, selections of which became the basis for a collection of daily readings entitled Glimpses of Grace. Over the weekend I looked at the reading for March 20th. It was titled “The Blessing of Silence” and while the references to transistors and records are dated, it is still worth a read. “Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV …
Two unexpected books for these times
It wasn’t until I was well into the second of two books I’ve devoured in the past few weeks that the timeliness of these very different works dawned on me. Nothing in either the biography or novel – both released in 2016 – would have suggested that they were important books for our time, much less that there would be common threads. And as a bonus, both are terrific reads. Timothy Egan has produced a page-turning biography that captures the incredible saga of Thomas Francis Meagher (pronounced Mar), one of the most famous Irish Americans of all time. Egan – one of my favorite writers (see the “Writers I Enjoy” list on the side of my blog page) – has previously written highly readable and well-researched histories on the Dust Bowl (The Worst Hard Time) and the founding of the U.S. Forest Service (The Big Burn). In The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero, Egan bring Francis Meagher’s time and story to life. Meagher was born to comfort in Ireland, but …
It all depends on the objectives we choose
Cathy O’Neil shows how our lives are being increasingly decided by mathematical models that substitute proxies for hard-to-quantify factors. Like worth.
Each of Us is Needed
In his wonderful 1987 book Leadership is an Art, retired Herman Miller CEO Max DePree tells a story about diversity. He notes that one of the key people in the 1920 furniture business founded by his father was the millwright, who oversaw the steam engine that powered the enterprise. One day the millwright died. DePree’s father went to visit the family, and after some awkward conversation the widow asked if it would be all right if she read aloud some poetry. DePree continues with his story. “Naturally, he agreed. She went into another room, came back with a bound book, and for many minutes read selected pieces of beautiful poetry. When she finished, my father commented on how beautiful the poetry was and asked who wrote it. She replied that her husband, the millwright, was the poet. It is now sixty years since the millwright died, and my father and many of us at Herman Miller continue to wonder: Was he a poet who did millwright’s work, or was he a millwright who wrote poetry?” …
MORE TO COME... 