The Invisible Mentor

Archive for the ‘Book Review’ Category

This is what we talked about on The Invisible Mentor Blog this week: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwel, Black History Month – Madam C J Walker, Operated the Largest Black-Owned Business in the Early Twentieth Century, and Carol McManus, America’s LinkedIn Lady.

Adventures in Learning

I frequently talk about mentoring occurring in moments, and this was evident at mediabistro’s Socialize Toronto conference last Friday. Profound conversations can take place over seconds and minutes. By watching conference attendees you could tell by the look on their faces that it was worth their time to attend the conference.

Mentoring in Moments at Socialize Toronto 

Booked for Mentoring

I have been reading Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell for over two months, and it’s the first time I have ever taken so long to read a book that I actually enjoyed. I have read at least 20 other books during the two months, but I needed a lot of time to digest and process what I was reading in Outliers. When you hear about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, the first thing that often comes to mind is that it takes 10,000 to master a subject. However the book is so much more than that.

Booked for Mentoring: Review – Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Wisdom of Life Profile

This month is Black History Month and we will start off with Madam C J Walker, and follow up with other profiles of people who contributed to black history. Madam C J Walker took her $1.50 in savings and turned it into a $117,000 business in eight short years – the next year she was a featured speaker at the National Negro Business League Conference. It is worthy to note that Madam Walker was able to send her daughter to college from the money she made as a laundress.

Black History Month – Madam C J Walker, Operated the Largest Black-Owned Business in the Early Twentieth Century 

Interviews for Mentoring

This week we featured Carol McManus, America’s LinkedIn Lady. Some of the biggest messages from the interview are the importance of having sponsors, mentors, and being open to opportunities. Here are Part One and Part Two of Carol McManus’ interview.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Book link is affiliate link.

I have been reading Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell for over two months, and it’s the first time I have ever taken so long to read a book that I actually enjoyed. I have read at least 20 other books during the two months, but I needed a lot of time to digest and process what I was reading in Outliers. When you hear about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, the first thing that often comes to mind is that it takes 10,000 to master a subject. However the book is so much more than that.

According to Gladwell, “This book is about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary….People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn to work hard and make sense of the world in ways others don’t.”

Cover of Outliers: The Story of Success

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates to readers why some people succeed, while others fail even though both may put in 10,000 hours. Other elements are critical for success, it’s simply not only about putting in the hours and working hard. When I just started reading Outliers, I wrote the post Do Big Breaks, Mentoring, and Hard Work Equal to Success? to explore the idea. Gladwell says that to be successful, on top of hard work, you also have to get opportunities. For instance, Bill Gates worked hard writing computer programs, but he also had access to a computer which most people didn’t, which gave him an advantage, and then he also had the opportunity to use those programming skills.

Ingredients of Success

• Passion
• Talent
• Hard Work
• Opportunity
• Arbitrary Advantage

What’s this 10,000 hours that people are talking about?

Researchers have shown time and time again that to become excellent at mastering complex tasks requires 10,000 hours of hard practice. And the most successful people got the opportunity they needed to learn how to become an expert. For instance, The Beatles got numerous opportunities to play in clubs to accrue their 10,000 hours.  They recognized the opportunities and accepted them.

In addition, there were many transformative moments in history that helped to make millionaires, and timing was everything. For example, the industrial era in the United States, which was pre and post the American Civil War in the 1860s and 1870s, people like John D. Rockerfeller, Andrew Carnegie and Marshall Field were able to capitalize on that. Another transformative era was the personal computer revolution, which people Bill Gates and Bill Joy capitalized on.

Given all that has been mentioned, to be successful, work has to be satisfying because you’ll likely put in the necessary hours to gain expertise. There are three elements for satisfying work – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward.

One thing that I had never thought much about, which the book gave prominence to is that “it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parent grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents grew up and great-great-grandparents grew up…” It’s interesting that I have always been able to accept ambiguity, and I learned in Outliers that’s because of my Jamaican heritage.

A big takeaway from Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell is that, say for instance you are a surgeon, you have to understand what it really means to be a good surgeon, “when we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success – then we don’t have to throw up our hands in despair…We have a way to make successes out of the unsuccessful.” And you can learn to remove cultural barriers that prevent you from being successful and living up to your true potential.

Five Great Ideas

1. Success is the result of “accumulative advantages.”
2. Success simple isn’t a function of individual merit, and the world in which we grew up in; and the rules we choose to write as a society does matter.
3. Success is a function of persistence, doggedness and willingness.
4. To become successful you have to master the art of standing up for yourself, and learn how to navigate systems and bureaucracies.
5. Power distance, which is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority, plays a role in professional success.

I recommend world Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. However, to get the most from the book, you have to allocate the time to reflect and contemplate on what you are reading. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Book link is affiliate link.

This is what we talked about on The Invisible Mentor Blog this week: Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli, Wisdom of Life: Susan Brownell Anthony, Women’s Rights Activist and Abolitionist, and Maggie Berry, Women in Technology.

Adventures in Learning

For National Mentoring Month, consider creating your Personal Board of Mentors. Having one mentor is seldom ever enough these days, because no one person can assist you with all your mentoring needs. It is your responsibility to ensure that all your needs are taken care of.

Create Your Board of Mentors – January is National Mentoring Month 

Booked for Mentoring

While I was in my degree program at Haskayne School of Business, the University of Calgary, we had to watch a film, Meetings, Bloody Meetings, starring John Cleese, and that stuck with me. I was reminded of that film as I read, Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli.

Booked for Mentoring – Book Review: Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli 

Wisdom of Life Profile

Wisdom of Life: Susan Brownell Anthony was very outspoken and said what was on her mind, which made her an excellent reformer. While working as a teacher, she discovered that male teachers earned $10 a week while their female counterparts earned a measly $2.50. Anthony raised her objections and subsequently was fired. That did not dampen her spirits though. Over the years, Anthony voiced her objections about many issues such as slavery, women’s inability to manage their own money, and right to vote. It was the tireless work of Anthony and her colleagues that allowed women many rights that they now take for granted.

Wisdom of Life: Susan Brownell Anthony, Women’s Rights Activist and Abolitionist 

Interviews for Mentoring

This week we featured Maggie Berry, Women in Technology in London. One of the biggest messages form Berry is to network, network and network. Here are Part One and Part Two of Maggie Berry’s interview.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

While I was in my degree program at Haskayne School of Business, the University of Calgary, we had to watch a film, Meetings, Bloody Meetings, starring John Cleese, and that stuck with me. I was reminded of that film as I read, Read This Before Our Next Meetingby Al Pittampalli.

Image via Wikipedia

However, meetings are vital to ensure that critical decisions get made in organizations, and teams are working effectively on complex projects. Therefore, the word meeting should be reserved for decision-making.  There should be no meetings to dispense information; instead, the organization should create a culture where its people read memos. There should be no working meetings, however, teams that need to work together, should do exactly that. A meeting is not for conversations. And when you have a meeting, only those who really need to be there should attend.Read This Before Our Next Meeting is one of the books in Seth Godin’s Domino Project, that I received for free, and finally got around to reading it – sure glad I did. It can be read in an hour, and it’s a little book packed with a lot of punch because it gives you a lot to think about. And if you take it to heart, you will literally not look at meetings the same way again. The author suggests that we should redefine our definition of a meeting because there are too many meetings, and most of them are bad.

Although brainstorming is important to create many options for decision-making, you do not call a meeting for it. Instead, you have a brainstorming session where people free themselves to let their minds roam, leading to breakthrough thinking.

Pittampalli offers ten ground rules for brainstorming. I particularly like ground rule number seven – “Let’s have a clear focus. Make sure the brainstorm is free, but not a free-for-all. The ideas should be targeted in the direction of the problem at hand. Create a problem statement and make sure people are on task.” And I would add that to create a clear problem statement you have to know the difference between cause and effect to get to the root of the problem.

The thinking behind the book is that with fewer meetings, people have more uninterrupted blocks of time to do important work that will make a difference to the organization, causing a much bigger impact. More serious work is what propels an organization forward. For the modern meeting to work effectively, the author offers seven principles.

Seven Principles of the Modern Meeting

1. Supports a decision that has already been made
2. Moves fast and ends on schedule
3. Limits the number of attendees
4. Rejects the unprepared
5. Produces committed action plans
6. Refuses to be informational. Reading memos is mandatory
7. Works only alongside a culture of brainstorming

What the seven principles translate to, is that the decision-maker who calls the meeting has to actually make a decision before the meeting, but be ready to discuss it. If she needs input before the meeting, she calls the appropriate people and gets the information she needs. If she needs buy-in because her decision is controversial, she does that before the meeting takes place by way of one-to-one conversations. At the meeting, she is prepared for a discussion and ready to make changes if necessary, and for a final resolution.

Before the meeting she spends a considerable amount of time thinking about the agenda before creating it. And the agenda created includes what will be covered. Attendees must know before hand what is expected from them, and each meeting should conclude with committed action plans, where each attendee knows what the next steps are – what actions they need to take and when. If the agenda is well thought out, the meeting will move quickly and end on time. This will occur only if the people who really need to be there are present. And all attendees must prepare before the meeting, reading all the memos and related documents.

For those who are not prepared they are not allowed to participate, and could be asked to leave. Meetings start on time, even if all attendees are not present. The modern style of meeting forces people to take action and be accountable. People will have to find the balance between gathering information and making decisions. When people face deadlines, they make decisions faster, even the most difficult ones.

To make sure that the right people attend each meeting, each member should ask themselves four questions:

1. Will I be able to function if I read about it after it’s over?
2. If I’m given the decision we’re discussing in advance, can I give you my opinion in advance?
3. Will I add value without participating?
4. Am I attending symbolically, or as a way to demonstrate my power?

I really appreciated Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli, and I recommend it because if more people practiced the modern way of meetings, it would revolutionize the way we approach our work and more would get done in less time.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

This is what we talked about on The Invisible Mentor Blog this week: The Flinch by Julien Smith, Wisdom of Life: Hannah Arendt, Philosopher, Writer and Refugee from Adolph Hitler, and Director, intercultures, Stefan Meister.

Adventures in Learning

The Invisible Mentor blog is an educational one, so with that in mind, I’m inviting my readers on an adventure in learning, which is taking place all of 2012. You do not have to read 200 books – I read a lot for my consulting business – but I would like you to read one book a week, so at the end of 2012, you would have read 52 books. It’s a couple of weeks into the new year, so you have to play a little bit of catch-up.

Adventures in Learning: Books to Read in 2012 

Booked for Mentoring

The Flinch is a great book for mentoring because it teaches us to step outside our comfort zone, and it assures us that we are not our mistakes. Because we have failed before, doesn’t mean we will not succeed. Failure is feedback, inventor Thomas Edison said, “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

Booked for Mentoring: Review of The Flinch by Julien Smith 

Wisdom of Life Profile

A political theorist, Hannah Arendt’s most important and influential work was The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this seminal work, the first of its kind, Arendt emphasized the parallels between Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1975, Arendt became the first woman, and the first U.S. citizen, to be awarded Denmark’s Sonning Prizefor contributions to European civilization.

Image via Wikipedia

Wisdom of Life: Hannah Arendt, Philosopher, Writer and Refugee from Adolph Hitler 

Interviews for Mentoring

This week we featured Stefan Meister, Director, intercultures. One of the biggest messages that Meister gave us is to always remain curious, open, excited, authentic and modest. Here are Part One and Part Two of Stefan Meister’s interview.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Related articles

• Wisdom of Life: Hannah Arendt, Philosopher, Writer and Refugee from Adolph Hitler (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Interview With Invisible Mentor Stefan Meister, Director, intercultures, Part Two (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Interview With Invisible Mentor Stefan Meister, Director, intercultures (theinvisiblementor.com)