Archive for the ‘Book Summaries’ Category
Sunday, March 10th, 2013
The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills by Daniel Coyle (© 2012, Bantam Books: New York, NY) is a bit over 100 pages and offers specific tips for developing talent. Daniel relies on abundant research to help you copy the techniques used by the top performers in many fields. In addition to growing your own talents, this book will help parents, educators, and coaches increase the success rate of their students. Every home should have a copy, so click the icon at the bottom of any page to get yours.
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Monday, May 2nd, 2022
The Man’s Guide to Corporate Culture: A Practical Guide to the New Normal and Relating to Female Co-Workers in the Modern Workplace by Heather Zumarraga explains how the modern workplace has evolved over time and how men (and women) can navigate it while staying out of trouble. Things like accusations of sexual harassment or worse can be real career enders so take Heather’s advice if you want to stay afloat in what can seem at times like a tsunami.
Who is This Book for and How to Read This Book/Introduction
- This book is for men who work with women, corporations, small business employers, human resources departments, college students, and men and women couples. Here we find the chapters intended for men, corporations, and both men and women so you can skip around if you choose.
- Sionce the national discussion of sexual harassment in the workplace has gone to a whole new level, many men have become fearful of the perceived power that women have. The big change is that women are no longer afraid to speak up and are often encouraged to do so. This book is designed to help men learn to collaborate and find synergies with female colleagues so that they can take advantage of the skills and qualities that women offer. You can only do your best if you feel comfortable and this book should help. It’s based on the author’s experience along with hundreds of interviews.
1. It’s a Woman’s World and You Are Just Working In It.
- Women hold more jobs in the US than men and earn more college degrees at every level, which strongly correlates with higher incomes. Heather sites a number of successful female CEOs of some of the country’s largest companies. Yet 60% of male managers are not comfortable participating in normal workplace activities with women, such as mentoring and socializing. This serves to deprive their company of the talent of half of the population. The modern trend is for organizations to forbid romantic relationships in the workplace and even with customers and suppliers employees. Relationships that result in ex-lovers working together can create a hostile working environment. Many top-level executives have lost their jobs for inappropriate behavior and this list includes some women. The trend is finally toward a more ethical corporate governance.
2. How Did We Get Here?
- In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that sexual harassment that was sufficiently severe or pervasive created a hostile or abusive working environment. Prior to that women were limited to lawsuits when the harassment was part of a quid pro quo for promotion. Now the simple act of pervasive harassment is enough to sue in federal court. Derogatory remarks about physical appearances, unwanted flirtation, and touching are possible allegations. Courts use the reasonable person standard when deciding if the behavior amounts to sexual harassment. The genders of the people involved are not relevant.
3. The Pendulum Has Swung Too Far
- As a result of this situation, many men worry about giving negative feedback to women. The media has created a world where some women are comfortable believing men are the enemy. The negative bias against men results from the movement going overboard. There are so many accusations it’s hard to know what to believe. A critical mass of accusations, however, makes it obvious that there is some truth to it as some recent high-profile cases have shown. False accusations or even misplaced suspicions, now have absurdly powerful repercussions. If you ever have to be deposed as part of a legal process, bring an attorney. Unfortunately, almost any behavior such as a shoulder pat can now be stretched into harassment. As a result, many men are reluctant to hire attractive women or hire women for jobs involving close interpersonal interactions. Also, the incarceration rate (90%+), the homicide rate (67%), and the homeless rate (70%) imply that men have a major crisis.
4. Let Mars Be Mars and Venus Be Venus.
- There is an agreement in the literature that men and women are different. Women tend to have better verbal abilities like reading comprehension and writing. They are also better at retrieving information from long-term memory. Men are better at juggling things in working memory and have better visuospatial skills. Men are more visually oriented and have stronger responses to sexual stimuli. The advice here is that you have a frontal lobe so use it to self-regulate. Think of it as the brakes for your brain.
- Women demonstrate more facial expressions than men and are better at reading them. Men will be distracted by bare skin, short dresses, and high heels. The lesson here is look at her face. You can compliment apparel but not physical appearance. Pay attention when women are talking and consider turning off your phone. Maintain eye contact, don’t interrupt, and paraphrase what is said. You really don’t have the luxury of not liking women or other men at work. If you do you will give it away somehow. Demonstrate you care by showing an interest in their personal life.
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Friday, March 18th, 2011
This book by Frans Johansson looks at breakthrough insights at the intersection of Ideas, concepts, and cultures. He recommends that you expose yourself to a range of cultures, learn differently, reverse your assumptions, and take on multiple perspectives. The tips on brainstorming research are worth the price alone. Johansson is a writer and consultant who lives in New York City.
Cultures Are Different
- How different cultures view a grasshopper? USA – pest, China – pet, N. Thailand – appetizer
- How different cultures view the color yellow? USA – cowardice, Malaysia – royalty, Venezuela – lucky underwear
Why Study Multiple Cultures
- Exposure to multiple cultures gives you more ways to look at an issue. Cultures can be ethnic, class, professional, or organizational in addition to geographic. This promotes open, divergent or even rebellious thinking. One is more likely to question rules, traditions, and boundaries. Languages codify concepts differently. Fluency in another language can promote varied perspectives during the creative process.
Learning Lots on Your Own
- Broad education and self-education are two keys to learning differently. Most fundamental innovations are achieved by people who are either very young or very new to the field. Learning fields on your own increases the chance of approaching them from different perspectives. Darwin: “all that I have learned of any value was self-taught.”
Prepare Your Mind
- Louis Pasteur found a forgotten culture of chicken cholera bacteria. When chickens were injected with it they got sick but recovered. These same chickens when injected with a fresh culture survived. Pasteur realized that the chickens had been immunized and that his old culture served as a vaccine.
Tags: Frans Johansson, Innovation, Medici Effect
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Wednesday, September 7th, 2016
I’m still on the road, so today you get a shortened summary of The Myths of Standardized Tests: Why They Don’t Tell You What You Think They Do by Phillip Harris, Bruce M. Smith, and Joan Harris. If you agree with me that the current state tests imposed by the federal government are harmful to students and teachers, you will find ammunition here to help me fight this battle. If you want the longer summary, click here.
Scores Correlate With Wealth
- The tests rely on items closely linked to socioeconomic status and inherited aptitudes to spread out the scores. As such they tend to measure what students bring to school, rather than what they are taught once they get there.
Just Pass or Just Fail?
- Any student can go from proficient on one version to needing remediation on another. Items are chosen to spread out the scores of the test takers. Time limits spread out scores even more. As students can only sit and focus for so long, the tests can only deal with a small fraction of the domain. Some topics have to be skipped. Timed tests also produce test anxiety.
Who Wants to be Judged by a Snapshot?
- Tests depend on the idea that a small portion of a student’s behavior fairly represents the whole range of possible behavior. To draw valid inferences from a test, it must cover more than a small part of the content domain.
What They Don’t Measure
- They don’t measure goals schools pursue like creativity, critical thinking, motivation, persistence, empathy, leadership, courage, compassion, honesty, and curiosity. Students with high scores may be shallow thinkers. Important items that all students should know are left out at the expense of items that half of the students will miss. There are too many standards to use criterion-referenced tests.
Fuzzy Math
- Test scores are not clean, crisp numbers but fuzzy ranges that extend above and below the score, and 5% of the time the true score isn’t even in the fuzzy range
Are They Really Objective?
- A look at how the tests are made reveals a good deal of subjective human judgement from the people who write, edit, and assemble the test items. Setting the standards also requires judgement that occurs in a political and social context. Achievement levels are, first and foremost, policy statements.
Carrots and Sticks by Mostly Sticks
- There is excessive reliance on rewards and punishments. Research shows how rewards dampen interest in, and enthusiasm for, the activity that is rewarded.
Teachers Cheat
- “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures, and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor.
The Narrowing Effect
- High-stakes tests have narrowed and dumbed down curricula and eliminated time spent on untested subjects by about a third, including recess. Tests also drive instruction towards items with one clear, right answer at the expense of open-ended problem solving.
True Predictors
- Nonacademic accomplishments are better predictors for future accomplishments than grades or test scores. Grades are much better predictors than tests since they often consider more qualities than test scores. The best predictors of future accomplishment are similar accomplishments.
The Back of the Bus
- We expect everyone to learn the same things, to the same level, at the same time? What is the point when everyone is unique? Our obsessive focus on academic achievement measured by tests has pushed other goals to the back of the bus.
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Saturday, February 26th, 2011
The Myths of Standardized Tests: Why They Don’t Tell You What You Think They Do by Phillip Harris, Bruce M. Smith, and Joan Harris (with a little help from ten of their friends) is a MUST read for anyone fighting the current testing system.
Phillip Harris
- Phillip is executive director of the Association for Educational Communications & Technology. He was a faculty member of the faculty of Indiana University for twenty-two years in Psychology and Education.
- Bruce M. Smith was a member of the editorial staff of the Phi Delta Kappan for 27 years and he retired as editor-in-chief in 2008.
- Joan Harris has taught grades one through three for 25 plus years. In 1997 she was recognized by the National Association for the Education of Young Children as the outstanding teacher of the year.
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The Myths They Debunk
- High test scores at a school means it has high achievement. Test scores provide objective achievement information. Rewards and punishments based on tests motivate. Improved test scores imply improved learning. All valuable content is tested. Standardized test scores are the best form of assessment. If you move to a district with high scores you will do better.
It’s An Emergency
- The authors believe that our schools are under attack by the tests that continue to seep into our schools. They sap the energy and enthusiasm of educators and drain the life from children’s learning. Some of the motivation is commercial and some is caused by “the tyranny of good intentions.” In this book they hope to persuade you of their case and arm you with some basic understanding of standardized tests and the mythical assumptions that underlie them that are used to make policy and drive practice. The lives of our children and our future is at stake. Our schools do have problems, but they won’t be fixed by another truckload of test scores.
Tags: Bruce Smith, Joan Harris, NCLB, Obama Blueprint, Phillip Harris, Standardized Testing
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Monday, September 21st, 2015
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert I. Sutton ©2007 & 2010 should help organizations of all kinds make their cultures less toxic and more productive. Click at the bottom of any page to get a copy so you can get started dealing with jerky behavior where you live and work.
Robert I. Sutton
- Robert is Professor of Management Science at the Stanford Engineering School and researcher in the field of evidence-based management. He is a popular speaker and the author of two other best sellers Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be The Best…And Learn From The Worst and Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less with Huggy Rao.
1. Asshole Defined
- With a title like this, it is essential to define what one means by the term asshole. Robert offers two tests we can use to spot this type of person. Test one: After talking to the person, do you feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled? Test two: Does this person aim venom at people who are less powerful rather than at people who are more powerful? He also gives us a list of actions that assholes use. They include personal insults, uninvited contact, threats and intimidation, sarcasm, two-faced attacks, dirty looks, and ignoring people. We are cautioned that there is a difference between a temporary asshole and a certified asshole, as nearly all of us act like one at times.
- Just because you want to avoid hiring assholes, neither do you want to hire spineless wimps. What is needed is for teams to engage in conflict over ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Robert even suggests taking classes in constructive confrontation. When he studied this topic, Robert found that just about everyone he talked to volunteered stories about abuse in their work environment. While every work environment has a significant problem with this, some are worse. It seems that nurses may lead the league when it comes to taking abuse from doctors, along with patients, their families, fellow nurses, and supervisors. Men and women are victimized at about the same rate and the lion’s share of abuse is within gender. What you want are people who are consistently warm toward people who are unknown or of lower status.
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Monday, February 5th, 2018
The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip and Dan Heath makes the case that we all experience moments that make a huge difference in our lives and that there are things we can do to make them happen. You need to be aware of moments in your life and look for ways to make them happen again for yourself and those you serve. This is a must-read for any leader.
1. Defining Moments
- We all have defining moments in our lives. This book has two goals. One is to examine defining moments and identify the traits they have in common. Two is to show how to create defining moments by making use of these traits. When we reflect on an experience, we do not average our feelings over time. Rather, we focus on the high and low spots, the peaks, and the pits, along with the beginnings and ends.
- One or more of the following elements are involved. 1. Elevation: Something happens to elevate the experience from those surrounding it. 2. Insight: Here is where you suddenly realize something about yourself or the world that makes a difference. 3. Pride: This is when you accomplish something special. 4. Connections: Defining messages are social. Special moments become more special when you share them with others.
2. Thinking in Moments
- There are three kinds of situations that stand out as moments in our lives. They are transitions, milestones, and pits. The goal is to mark transitions, commemorate milestones, and fill the pits. Here the Heath’s tell some stories of how employers can make transitions like the first day on the job special, how banks can help commemorate savings and mortgage milestones, and how service providers can fill pits as soon as they show up. At the end of this section and each section in the book they include a clinic, which demonstrates how the book’s ideas can be put to use.
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Saturday, April 23rd, 2022
The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel Pink deals with the power we can draw from dealing with our regrets in a thoughtful manner. Regrets deal with things you can control so you need to take action when possible to make things better and move on from things that can’t be fixed. Research shows that people who do this are healthier and happer. Thanks, Dan for this vital life lesson.
Part One. Regret Reclaimed – 1. The Life-Thwarting Nonsense of No Regrets
- Fron popular songs to literature to advice columns we hear over and over again about how successful people supposedly have no regrets. In this book, Pink shows not only that this is wrong-headed thinking, but when properly used, analysis of your regrets can serve to improve your life. We all have a portfolio of emotions and most of us try to have a bias in our lives for positive ones. That makes sense, but we also need to deal with negative emotions to help us avoid harm, be it physical or emotional. The purpose of this book is to show you how to use regret’s many strengths to make better decisions, perform better at work, and bring greater meaning to your life. Pink draws on his analysis of two massive surveys to accomplish this goal.
2. Why Regret is Human
- Regret is the unpleasant feeling associated with some action or inaction a person has taken which has led to a state of affairs that the person wishes were different. It is more understood as a process than a thing. As we mature, our brains naturally develop to experience regret. It is associated with the orbitofrontal cortex. People with lesions in this area typically do not experience regret. The same is true for people with Huntington’s and Parkinson’s disease. Reget is the most common negative emotion as things you regret are your own fault. They are things where you had control and constantly involve some comparison.
3. At Least’s and If Only’s
- These are two types of counterfactuals. When you think at least, you are thinking about how things could have been worse. When you think if only, you are thinking that an outcome could have been better if you had done something different. Most people engage in if only thinking much more than at least thinking. If only thinking degrades our feelings now, but it can improve our lives later. This is one way regret can help us do better tomorrow.
4. Why Regret Makes Us Better
- If you actively regret something you are not likely to do it again. A central finding is that regret can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance. Even thinking about other people’s regrets may confer a performance boost. Regret, however, does not always elevate performance. Lingering on regret for too long can have the opposite effect. Setbacks can supply fuel for future performance. Making mistakes and learning from them via regret is a path to growth.
- When it comes to things you regret it is key that you not wallow in them or dodge them altogether. Doing so will just make things worse. These feelings should result in thinking that results in future action that makes things better or avoids further pain. Think of this action as an evaluation that can be instructive. In short, if you make a mistake you need to ask yourself “what can I learn from it.” (Doug: This is a guiding principle for me.)
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Wednesday, September 19th, 2012
The Principal as Instructional Leader: A Practical Handbook, 3rd ed. (©2013, Eye On Education: Larchmont, NY) by Sally J. Zepeda offers savvy advice, practical tools, and examples from real schools to help both new and experienced principals and their assistants improve teacher effectiveness and boost student achievement. The focus is on improving observations, assessing school culture and climate, addressing marginal teaching, and supporting adult learning. Practicing principals and principals-in-training should read this book. Be sure to click the icon at the bottom of any page to purchase.
Tags: Sally Zepeda
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Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (©2011, Harvard Business Review Press: Cambridge, MA) by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer is based on an extensive study that tried to find out what it takes to be highly productive. What they found was that most of what matters is below the surface and not well understood by most of today’s managers. You can find a summary of their secrets here, and get the entire picture in this must have book. While it is not an education book, I find that the principles they have discovered apply well in school settings for use by teachers and administrators.
Tags: Harvard Business Review, Inner Work Life, Motivation, Progress Principle, Steven Kramer, Teresa Amabile
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