Archive for the ‘Book Summaries’ Category
Monday, August 17th, 2015
Wired to Care: how companies prosper when they create widespread empathy by Dev Patniak with Peter Mortensen ©2009 explains the importance of empathy and how to spread it around. While written for businesses, this is a book that all school leaders should read and act on. Click at the bottom of any page to by copies for leaders you know.
Dev Patniak and Pete Mortensen
- DEV is the CEO of Jump Associates, a strategy and innovation firm. Jump helps companies create new businesses and reinvent existing ones. Jump works with some of the world’s most admired companies, including GE, Nike, Target, and Virgin. Jump has become particularly well-known for its pioneering culture. Dev is a frequent speaker at business forums and his articles have appeared in numerous publications, including BusinessWeek, Forbes, and Fast Company. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford University, where he teaches a course called Needfinding. Contact Dev at dpatnaik@jumpassociates.com and follow him on Twitter at @devpatnaik.
- Pete is the communications lead for Jump Associates. A journalist by training, he has written for and edited numerous monthly, weekly and daily publications, including Spin Magazine, nyou, the Holland Sentinel, the Windsor Times, and Wired News.
Part I: The Case for Empathy Introduction
- As the title says, we are wired to care. Unfortunately, that instinct seems to get short-circuited when we get together in large groups. Real empathy can ensure more ethical behavior in a way that no policies and procedures ever could. The trick is to encourage everyone to walk in other people’s shoes. This book is packed with great stories that demonstrate how some companies strive to really understand their customers and meet their needs. If you want people to be interested in you and what you do, you should be genuinely interested in the people you are dealing with.
2. The Map Is Not the Territory
- Reports are abstractions and often lose touch with reality. A plan is only a map that doesn’t know the territory. In organizations, decision makers often find themselves working with simplified data that lacks context. This makes it easy to digest but can’t tell the whole story. There is a great story here about how Lou Gerstner turned IBM around by sending his people out to meet with customers and develop more empathy. As a result, support and service became a major growth area for the company. His mantra was “what are you hearing from our customers?” Empathy helps people see the world as it really is, not how it looks on a map. (Doug: I have long thought that it is important to view parents and students as customers, listen to them, and try to meet their needs. As a principal, I also viewed teachers and other staff members as my customers.)
3. The Way Things Used to Be
- The longer a team knows each other, the better they tend to do. This is something Dev discovered while teaching at Stanford. For thousands of years people made things for people they knew. Thanks to industrialization, a rift grew between producers and consumers. Is something lost when snowshoes are made by people who have never seen snow? Dev believes that it is much harder to succeed when you create things for people you don’t know. I love the story of the Zildjian Cymbal Company used to reinforce this concept. Their secret was keeping close relationships with drummers. Unfortunately, most companies don’t work this way and lose the ability to meet face to face with ordinary people. Such face to face meetings forms empathic connections.
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Tuesday, March 12th, 2019
Wise Guy: Lessons From a Life by Guy Kawasaki uses his unique experience with Apple and other tech companies along with his life beyond work to distill wisdom he has gathered to date. His stories are engaging and this book can save you a lot of pain as you strive to be a better leader and a better person. It may well help you have a happier life. As a devoted parent, he has created a valuable book for parents. I strongly recommend it.
Preface
- Rather than an autobiography or a memoir, this book is a compilation of the most enlightening stories of Guy’s life. It’s lessons, not history. Perhaps Guy’s stories can help you live a more joyous, productive, and meaningful life. If Wise Guy succeeds, that will be a pretty good story.
1. Immigration
- Guy’s great-grandparents from his father’s side emigrated from Hiroshima, Japan to Hawaii to avoid military service during the Russo-Japanese War. They worked on farms for $1 a day. Guy’s maternal grandfather also immigrated from Japan where he met his wife. Guy got his name from Guy Lombardo, a famous bandleader from Canada who his father knew. While his parents didn’t go to college they read a lot and were very fond of music. After three tries his father was elected to the state senate where he served twenty years.
- Guy grew up in a poor section of Honolulu. His neighborhood was a melting pot at the time, but Japanese-Hawaiians were looked down on. His parents worked hard and placed a high value on education. Guy believes that by living in America, he was able to accomplish a great deal more than if he grew up in Japan, which wasn’t likely in Hiroshima. The wisdom here is to change a losing game or one that is going nowhere. This might require moving like Guy’s family did.
2. Education
- Guy believes that education is the great catalyst and equalizer. He credits his sixth-grade teacher for telling his parents that he shouldn’t take the typical path through Hawaii’s public schools. This meant great personal financial sacrifice for his parents. Guy found that his best teachers were also the toughest in that they always had high expectations. The advice here is to seek out people who will challenge you. If you are a teacher or the boss, you aren’t doing any favors by lowering your standards. The future cost of short-term kindness is great.
- Guy suggests that you also teach respect for authority and avoid trying to overprotect children. Sometimes being scared can teach an important lesson. Kids should know that people aren’t good or bad. Most of us have done good and bad things. Life offers a lot of contradictions. When it came time to go to college Guy wanted to go to Occidental where he could play football. His father told him no and that if he was going to pay for college Guy was going to Stanford. Guy got into Stanford even though his grades and SATs were not so great because at the time his Asian heritage made him a desirable minority. Guy recommends going away to college so you can meet people from different backgrounds.
3. Inspiration
- Guy was motivated to work hard so he could afford a nice car. He believes that it doesn’t matter what motivates you as long as you are motivated. He also recommends If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence, and Spirit by Brenda Ueland for inspiration even if your goal is to do something other than writing. After getting robbed twice in high school Guy vowed to work hard so he could avoid public transportation and high crime neighborhoods.
- When he told his father that a passerby thought he was a gardener because he looked Japanese his father told him to get over it. Don’t look for insults and don’t let other people get to you. Condoleezza Rice told him “don’t ever see yourself as a victim because then you will start acting like one.” You must believe that you control your own fate. Be sure to read Mindset by Carol Dweck. You can do some unbelievable things, but you have to use the right tool. It’s ok to quit something as long as you reboot and restart. This chapter ends with the text of the speech he gave to the graduates at Menlo College in 2012. It’s full of good advice.
4. Apple
- Guy worked at Apple from 1983 to 1987 and from 1995 to 1997. These two “tours of duty” made him what he is today. When he first saw MacWrite and MacPaint he was dumbfounded by how cool the Macintosh was. His job was to convince software companies to produce products for the Mac. He was an evangelist. Guy felt that the cool aspect of the Mac made his job easy, but he worked hard and was smart enough to succeed. There are no perfect candidates for a job, only successful candidates who make their shortcomings irrelevant. A lot of people get jobs because they know someone. Don’t worry about that, just deliver.
- Working for Steve Jobs required that you prove yourself every day. He demanded excellence and kept you at the top of your game. It was sometimes unpleasant and always scary, but it drove you to do your finest work. Steve demanded honesty and saw it as a test of competence and character. It’s also easier than lying. Trust but document. It’s good to cover your ass when you are bending the rules. Guy recommends Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. Pay and perks are nice but look for a job where you can learn new skills, and work autonomously towards a meaningful goal. This chapter concludes with the top eleven lessons Guy learned at Apple.
Tags: Guy Kawasaki, Wise Guy
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Monday, February 27th, 2017
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson explores how our search for novel experiences and fun has driven many commercial and scientific aftershocks. The process of feeding our senses with pleasure lead to opening up world trade and it had the downside of feeding the slave trade and exploitation. The next time you think slacking off is a waste of time, you just might be in the process of innovation.
1. Introduction
- This book is a history of what we do for fun and how having fun has had a great impact on everything else. One measure of human progress is how much recreational time we have, and the immensely varied ways we have of enjoying it. We see that innovation in one field often sets in motion transformations in other fields, and it’s experiences designed to delight or amaze that often end up transforming society in dramatic ways. Play is often about breaking rules and experimenting with new conventions. Is such, it is often the seedbed for innovations.
- While necessity may be the mother of invention, leisure and play are often involved as well. The pursuit of pleasure also stitches together a global fabric of shared culture. The quest for delight, however, has not always transformed things for the better.
2. Fashion and Shopping
- Start with the story of a purple die from a sea snail. In man’s quest to find more of these snails, the Phoenicians ventured beyond the Mediterranean and unlocked the Atlantic for all time. No one needs the color purple. It just looks nice. As soon as humans became tool makers, they started making jewelry. Since delightful things are valuable, they attract commercial speculation, which funds new technologies, markets, and geographical exploration. The human appetite for surprise, novelty, and beauty dominates in human cultures.
- As people in Europe developed a taste for fine clothing, cotton from the Americas came in demand. To meet this demand, the slave trade boomed and by 1860, half of population of southern states were slaves. Child labor abuse also resulted along with pollution from factories. This also lead to the creation of department stores in the late 1800s where people often went just to shop. Crime among women increased due to shop lifting. More women entered the work force and many were department store clerks. By the 1950s, malls were springing up. They exaggerated suburban sprawl and foreshadowed decline of the inner cities. This chapter ends with a plea to design and build new types of cities.
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Thursday, August 16th, 2012
World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Learners by Yong Zhao (© 2012, Corwin: Thousand Oaks, CA) provides a vision of what schools should look like. He draws on examples for what real innovative schools are currently doing to help make his case. Every educator and parent should read this and do what they can to help realize this vision. As you read my summary, please consider clicking on the icon at the bottom of each page to purchase your copy from Amazon.
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Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture, is a must read for all educators. In this book, Kirsten Olson draws on her extensive research to help us understand the types of wounds suffered by students in school. The second part helps us understand how students can heal and how to avoid wounds altogether. If all teachers read and acted on this advice, schools would be better places overnight. Parents of wounded students and students themselves should also get this book.
Click here to see my summary of Wounded by School.
Tags: Kirsten Olson, Wounded by School
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Friday, May 8th, 2026
Writing to Learn by William Zinsser explains the power of writing for learning and promoting clear thinking. He takes us on a tour of the disciplines, showing that writing should not be left to English teachers. It’s clear that creating written explanations of your knowledge will not only help you internalize it, but it will also reveal the holes in your knowledge. This book contains delightful examples of excellent writing from many disciplines. It was a joy to read.
Preface
- Writing is a form of thinking. It’s not necessary to be a writer to write well. Clear writing is the logical arrangement of thoughts. We write to find out what we know and what we want to say. This is a book full of great ideas for writers.
Part I: 1. Hermes and the Periodic Table
- This chapter tells how William used Latin, which transported him back to the classical world, rather than chemistry, to get into Princeton. He found Latin to be anything but dead, as thousands of its roots are alive and well in English. He then tells of his time at Princeton during World War II, where he took the fast track through courses and was only a few credits short when he joined the Army and headed to Europe. A few courses he took in Florence earned him his Princeton degree.
- After the war, he began his career trying to write clearly at The New York Herald Tribune. He also became a logic nut. Writing is a basic skill for getting through life, yet many adults are terrified of the prospect. Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly. That is what this book is about.
2. Writing Across the Curriculum
- The key concept is that teaching writing should not be left only to English teachers. This may be the most difficult pedagogical task. Motivation is crucial to writing, but assigned tasks in most schools don’t offer much. Writing is learned by imitation, but we eventually move on to our own style. William stresses the idea that once you dash off a draft, it will need a lot of editing to polish it into a respectable finished product.
- Teachers of other subjects need to find exemplars of literature in their fields to share with students. Everyone loves a good story and every discipline should have some. Even in technical subjects, the best writers are good at writing for the lay person and every subject can be made interesting.
3. A Liberal Education
- After 13 years at the and 11 more as a freelance writer, William ended up at Yale, where he edited the Yale Alumni Magazine with a circulation of 100,000 Yale undergraduates and graduate alumni. During that time he drew on two sources of energy, confidence and ego. If you don’t have confidence in what you are doing, you might as well not do it.
- There is no subject that can’t be made accessible in good English with careful writing and editing. Write good, clean sentences and organize them into a coherent shape. You need to write, rewrite, and prune to hammer out a clear and simple product. Clear writing is a corollary to clear thinking, and therefore a key to learning. You will learn a lot about a subject writing about it that you can’t learn any other way. There are examples of good writing here.
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Friday, September 27th, 2019
You Are Awesome: 9 Secrets to Getting Stronger and Living an Intentional Life by Neil Pasricha offers excellent advice that we can all use to have a more fulfilled and productive life. The advice here is appropriate for people in business, educators, and students alike. In short, everyone. Be sure to get some copies for your professional development library and get one for yourself.
Introduction: You Need to be More Resilient
- It starts with a very cool fable that demonstrates the notion of resilience. The key is to not let defeats define who you are. Every end is a beginning. Resilience seems to be in short supply, which is why Neil wrote this book. He offers nine research-backed secrets, shared through personal stories on how we can move from shattering to strengthening. If you find yourself off course, this book is for you.
Secret #1 – Add a Dot Dot Dot
- The dot dot dot here is known as an ellipsis which marks incomplete utterances in plays. Compare this to a period known as a full stop, which marks a finished sentence. Neil uses the ellipsis as a metaphor for life were everything is unfinished until you die. He uses the inspirational story of his mother, born the fifth girl in Kenya to a family who wanted a fourth boy. She was self-taught and got the highest score in the nation’s standardized test, which earned her a full scholarship to a white prep school. She just kept going like an ellipsis and looked past the periods.
- The other key lesson here is that like Neil’s mom, the one word you should use over and over at the end of your sentence is yet. As is “I don’t have any better options…yet.”
Secret #2 – Shift the Spotlight
- It’s egotistical to think that “it’s all about you.” It’s foolish to think that people are constantly looking and you and judging you. It’s folly to think the spotlight is on you because it isn’t. Stop caring with other people who are self-absorbed think of you. There is so much beyond your control that you need to simply learn from your failures and move on. Share your failures with others as it will help you seem more human. You will seem more normal, real, and relatable, which will help improve your relationships. If you make self-harming statements you are likely to believe them. Also, avoid exaggerating the size of your problems.
Secret #3 – See It as a Step
- If you think of life as a long stairway you need to realize that you can see the steps taken but the upcoming steps are invisible. Also, realize that we are all really bad a predicting the future. People think that they have changed a lot in the past, but won’t change much in the future. This is probably wrong. When people are down, they often think they will probably stay there. This is the wrong way to think. See failure as a step towards a future that you will be happy with. Neil also recommends that you avoid the endless reports of bad news that our modern media doles out. It’s largely a machine-gun barrage of superficial negativity. He also found that writing a blog was cathartic as it helped him swap dark thoughts for lighter ones. For him, it was the dot dot dot, a shift of the spotlight, and the next step. When you fail, just prepare for this next step, which might be positive.
Secret #4 – Tell Yourself a Different Story
- Shame is an intensely painful feeling or experience that we are flawed and unworthy of love or belonging. It plays a role in how we think of ourselves. Your problem is the story you are telling yourself and you can choose another story like you can choose your attitude. Three questions can help. 1. Will this matter on my death bed? 2. Can I do something about this? 3. Is this a story I am telling myself?
Secret #5 – Lose More to Win More
- Some good things just take time. They take lots of failure, lots of loss, and lots of experience. Wanting to get better is a real gift. It means you keep trying, failing, and learning. If your number of failures exceed those of most people you should be proud of that. Cy Young had the most wins and the most losses. Nolan Ryan had the most strikeouts and the most walks. The more times you step to the mound the more chances you have to win. Go to parties where you don’t know people. Have a failure budget. Can you afford to lose hundreds on something that fails? How about thousands or more? More losses give you more chances to win. If you want good pictures, take more pictures.
Secret #6 – Reveal to Heal
- Physical releases are easier than mental releases. Take time to let go of something and take time to feel grateful and write down at least five gratitudes a week.
Secret #7 – Find Small Ponds
- Would you rather be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? If you choose the former your self-esteem will go up and stay up. Neil got this advice from a dean so instead of applying to a top company he looked for ones that were broken in some way. He got a job where he was a big deal and could make a difference. This concept applies to life. Rather than chase the hot person on the beach, look for the nerd in the library. Just don’t be arrogant or act boastfully while you are in the small pond.
Secret #8 – Go Untouchable
- It seems that every day there are more distractions in our lives. Cellphones are a big culprit while things like meetings at work and a barrage of emails also contribute. When Neil quit Walmart to become a full-time writer he found that he didn’t have the amount of time he anticipated to do creative work. His solution was to create weekly UNTOUCHABLE days where he unplugged and just focused on creative activity. He found his productivity skyrocketed so he now schedules two such days a week sixteen weeks into the future. If he has to shift one of these days he keeps it in the same week.
Secret #9 – Never, Never Stop
- This chapter could have been called “what I learned from my dad.” He emigrated from India to Canada, worked hard, and never gave up. He kept things simple and when he made a decision he didn’t waste time rethinking it. The big idea is that you can only go forward so start going that way and never stop. Thanks, Neil.
Neil Pasricha
- Neil is a New York Times bestselling author of six books including The Book of Awesome and The Happiness Equation. His podcast 3 Books is his quest to uncover the most formative books in the world. He gives 50+ speeches a year including TED Talks and SXSW. He has degrees from Queen’s University and Harvard Business School and lives in Toronto. Reach him on Twitter as @nielpasricha, visit his blog at Neil.Blog, and drop him a line at neil@globalhappiness.org.
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Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen is a must for anyone who can identify with either gender. If you want to improve your ability to communicate with members of the opposite sex, get this book. Tannen draws on her considerable research and that of many others in the field to explain the differences in how women and men communicate. While my summary hits the main points, the details I left out are fascinating.
Click here to see my summary of You Just Don’t Understand.
Tags: Deborah Tannen, sex, Women and Men
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Monday, January 26th, 2015
You’ve Gotta Connect: Building Relationships that Lead to Engaged Students, Productive Classrooms, and Higher Achievement by James Alan Sturtevant makes the case that the most important thing teachers can do is connect with and accept their students. It may not always be easy, but once you do connect, students will behave better and learn more. This book is packed with great advice and belongs in every teachers professional development library. Click at the bottom on any page to purchase copies for teachers you know.
James Alan Sturtevant
- James has worked as a high school social studies teacher since 1985. He see it as a wonderful activity but his job by no means defines him. Since the early 1990s he has taught at Big Walnut High School located in Sunbury, Ohio. He earned a BA in history and Political Science from Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio, and an MA in history from the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He has been married to Penny Sturtevant since 1991. Penny is the principal at Big Walnut Middle School. They have three children that they love dearly.
1. Commitment: Don’t Start Class Without It.
- When a visiting professor asked him how he created such a wonderful atmosphere in his classroom, James gave it much thought and came up with the following. Connections have improved as his career has progressed. Connection is not automatic as he had to work at it. You don’t have to have his personality type to connect. You need to be willing to try new approaches and gauge their effectiveness. As a result of this pondering, this book was born.
- To begin, you have to make a commitment to connect, even with students who have annoying attitudes. You also need to be prepared to work hard on connecting with some students. Humans need connection and when they connect, they are more likely to be happy and productive. Connected students will be more engaged in learning and more creative as well. They will retain more, have fewer behavior issues, feel better about themselves, get along with other students, achieve at higher levels, and not drop out. Keep in mind that you can care for a student and still have high expectations.
- James suggests that you make a poster for yourself that contains what effective communication is and is not. (See page 22) In short, you need to be: available, caring, respectful, trustworthy, warn, welcoming, compassionate, loving, interested in students, a great listener, and accepting. What you shouldn’t do is: act like a peer, try too hard to be liked, gossip, have vague boundaries and expectations, be sarcastic, pamper students, be phony, demand respect rather than earn it, and pretend to care. Like the other chapters in this book, this one ends with a number of activities that you can do by yourself or with others to help internalize the key concepts.
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Monday, May 21st, 2018
You, Your Child, and School: Navigate Your Way to the Best Education by Sir Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica will help parents get the education their children need to live productive, fulfilled lives. If you or anyone you know has children in or approaching school, this is a must-read. Be sure to get a copy and perhaps some gift copies for parents you know. This is a sequel to Creative Schools. See my summary here.
1. Get Your Bearings
- As a parent your worry list includes too much testing, a narrow curriculum, individual attention, learning problems, medication, possible bullying, college costs, and finding a good job. Schools also might not value a child’s strength as they magnify their weaknesses, and make grades so important that students lose a sense of self. Children love to learn and are natural learners. For most of human history, children educated themselves as they learned from others. With today’s focus on test scores, children are more likely to dislike learning as they become less healthy and more sedentary.
- A focus on things like STEM is often done to the detriment of other subjects that are none the less important to our economy and society. Ken argues for ditching the acronyms. Current reforms have not budged achievement levels as they cause enormous stress and loss of enjoyment. Businesses want employees who are adaptable creative team players as the support reforms that suppress these very attributes. Vocational courses are also squeezed out as too many college graduates can’t find appropriate work.
2. Know Your Role
- Regardless of your family structure, the adults in a child’s life are responsible for meeting a variety of needs. Here Ken uses Maslow’s hierarchy, which includes physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. The final need means becoming meaningfully fulfilled as a person. As for esteem, children need praise, but it shouldn’t be endless and it should be tempered with constructive criticism. Children know when they have worked hard. Parents should set boundaries and provide moral education. Help them learn how to make decisions and to find a sense of direction and purpose. This shows why one-size-fits-all education is wrong.
- Ken defines five parenting styles. It seems that the authoritative style is usually the best as it involves setting rules that can be justified to the child and the willingness to alter the rules it conditions permit. Students should be allowed to struggle at times so as to work to solve their own problems. Such rules are more like guidelines that are a work in progress, and they tend to produce the happiest children.
3. Know Your Child
- Research indicates the one’s genes and one’s environment have about the same impact on what one becomes. This means that parents have about half of the responsibility. The culture surrounding a child has a huge impact. Usually, money has a big role as poverty brings with it a great deal of stress for many reasons. Poor kids are six times more likely to be neglected or abused, live in neighborhoods that are less safe, have lower birth weight, learning disabilities, and emotional and behavioral problems. There is no single definition of intelligence and each child’s potential needs to be unlocked if they are to be successful.
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