One of my bad habits is obsessing about my deficiency of good habits. I know that good habits are important because the nuns and monks were relentless in telling me so; decades later their ambivalence about my academic success without suitable discipline still lingers. I’m not devoid of good habits. Lately, I’ve had some success […]

Review: Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life I think my father made decent money, although I don’t have any concrete numbers. But, if you have seven children to feed, clothe, and educate stretching every dollar is sound practice. My mother did this with sometimes frightening skill. She would drive […]

Wambach, Abby. 2019. WOLFPACK: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game. Celadon Books. I am not the ostensible target audience for this book. Abby Wambach, one of the all-time best soccer players in the world, wrote Wolfpack following her commencement address at Barnard College in 2018; She’s talking to women about […]

MacKenzie, Gordon. 1997. Orbiting the Giant Hairball : A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving With Grace. US: Viking Pr. I first encountered Gordon MacKenzie’s Orbiting the Giant Hairball during my time growing Diamond Technology Partners. I decided to revisit it recently. I’ve picked it up from time to time over the intervening 23 years (we’ll return […]

Morville, Peter. 2014. Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything. US: Semantic Studios. Intertwingled is not a practical book. It is not intended to be. Unfortunately, that will discourage those who could most benefit from its message and perspective. It’s an extended reflection by its author, Peter Morville, on the deep challenges of making information more easily accessible […]

Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done . Charlie Gilkey I suspect that diet books are the only non-fiction category with more titles than time management and productivity. Perhaps I would be better served if I shifted to reading diet books. Like diet books, I once read these books in quest of the […]

Monteiro, Mike. Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It. Mule Books. We live in an artificial world; most everything we interact with has been designed by another human. In Ruined by Design, Monteiro explores this territory from the perspective of a professional designer. His quest is […]

The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together. Twyla Tharp. 2009. T Collaboration is fundamentally an artistic process. That is easy to lose sight of in the organizational exhortations to be more collaborative and the mass of marketing literature touting the collaborative goodness of some new piece of software. If you agree that attacking today’s […]

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating. Alan Alda I’ve been working through a line of thought about the growing importance of improv thinking to dealing with organizations and innovations in the current environment. In this book, Alda lays […]