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Latest Read: Designing Your Life

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Bill Burnett is the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford. He has a BS and MS in product design and has designed numerous products throughout his career. In addition, Dave Evans currently works at the Design Program at Stanford. At a young age Dave worked at Apple where he helped design and market their first mouse. He then joined Electronic Arts as the first VP of Talent.

Above all, this is one of the best books that I have read recently. This is a very insightful. It’s easy to understand why the course taught by Bill and Dave is the most popular course on campus.

There is a simple humanity by having the authors open up about their childhood dreams. Above all, Dave’s dream to be the next Jacques Cousteau, reminds us of initial childhood views of what we wanted to do in life.

In addition, while you may think at first this is just for young kids — think again. Our new covid-19 pandemic has forced millions out of work. This impacts all ages from every walk of life. During this pandemic everyone can benefit from the lessons of designing your health, work, play and love. A quick hint to find job happiness, the trend is to search local job ads.

Bill and Dave strive for us to find holistic happiness in our lives and regarding employment learning how to find the right fit helps you focus better in finding work happiness during such uncertain times.

The focus for their design initially is to understand who you are, what you believe and what you are doing. Easy to see why this is so appealing to students. Bill and Dave brand a Lifeview Reflection. And to no surprise they have discovered many students major in studies defined by their parents – not themselves. They did not provide a percent but clearly the overall number of students who change majors in college start out guided by others’ demands of their future only to realize they are not living their life. This is illustrated in chapter three, Wayfinding.

Similarly, the focus of chapter four Getting Unstuck, will directly appeal to anyone impacted by the covid-19 recession. The one key from Designing Your Lives (chapter five) is taking a chance at resetting your life’s goals. A student was awarded three internships that he really wanted….but how do you accept more than one? Dave and Bill show the way to get the most out of life and show any prospective employer your true character.

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Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: Originals

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant. This was a very relaxing read, not a lot of deep thinking to the book. Adam is a good storyteller. Originals addresses challenges to improve the world by simply being an original thinker willing to defy accepted practices, or wisdom by others.

Originals

Adam shares upfront how he ‘missed the boat’ on investing with the founders of Warby Parker. He was teaching the four at Wharton Business School.

However they did not quit grad school and go for broke to launch their company. They actually landed other internships, which leads one to think they did not truly believe in their idea.

When GQ called them the Netflix of eyewear, we like cheering for the underdog. The Italian company Luxottica, was the ruling king of eyeware and owned LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban, and Oakley, and the licenses for Chanel and Prada. David versus Goliath?

You just needed a well designed visual website, which Adam admits the four left to the very last day before launch. Fair to say luck factored into much of their success.

Adam fails to account for the accepted explosion of eCommerce in society. We all know by now that by 2010 the ‘Amazon-ification’ of just about every product that could be sold online was well accepted. Adam shares the personal compelling story, yet anyone would have been the next Warby Parker.

Originals has good insights to the Segway failure. Dean Kamen’s reputation in medical device success did not translate into a consumer transportation success. Again the failure was attributed to the price-point. The irony has been learning this week (reading this book) the Chinese company that today owns Segway announced it will no longer be manufactured. Forbes article about the demise of the Segway.

Good lessons on how Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr hyped the Segway beyond their known product markets. Jobs spoke about Segway’s development, code named “Ginger” during a MacWorld event that further hyped the machine before the official launch.

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Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: The Power of Habit

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. Charles is a columnist and senior editor at The New York Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for the “iEconomy” series. This story examined the global economy through the lens of Apple.

the power of habit

After finishing Atomic Habits, this was an easy transition. Charles has the skill to tell a compelling story.

The Power of Habit begins with such a compelling story of a young woman at a medical laboratory. Over a period of two years she transformed her entire life. She quit smoking, successfully completed a marathon, and was promoted at work. Researchers observe patterns inside her brain fundamentally changed. How? She divorced and chose to change her life by adopting new habits.

Starbucks’ training programs reveal how personal change through adversity is possible. Companies can achieve new success when they focus on habit patterns.

When Paul O’Neill was hired to run Alcoa, he made waves on Wall Street. His stated top priority: improve the company’s safety profile. This is a great introduction to ‘keystone’ habits, a type of habit creates culture. Aluminum production is certainly not an easy process. O’Neill faced stiff feedback from the company’s Board of Directors. However his keystone habits drove Alcoa’s market value from $3 billion in 1986 to $27.53 billion in 2000.

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Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: Leading Change

Leading Change by John P. Kotter is a much respected book. There are indeed solid points. However there are no case studies or source companies named. Regardless of the lessons, without fully understanding the company or executive this seems somewhat less credible. John is professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School. So, my expectations were extremely high.

The opening chapter set the book’s tone for great potential. There is much to consider when addressing the need for change within any organization. John provides good insights and his lessons are true to form.

In addition, Leading Change provides a foundation for shifts across companies that require tackling pain points. Businesses must shift to remain relevant in a competitive global marketplace.

John proceeds to explain his eight-stage process of creating major change. there is no need for me to lay out the key framework for his process. There are plenty of resources that address his work.

So, each of his eight stages are broken down into three manageable segments. The introductory segment is to create a climate for change. The largest challenge is who the company or organization’s leadership views change as risk. In addition, the second segment requires the strong, powerful engagements with employees to set up success for changes coming across the board. Finally the last segments is implement and sustaining change.

The book seems to favor large, global corporations. There are elements of the book however that seem to be set in a pre-iPhone era. The book was based upon his 1996 article in the Harvard Business Review This includes stage three, developing a vision and strategy.

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Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: Atomic Habits

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. What a surprising and enjoyable read. James starts with a rather tragic event in his life and the steps he took to succeed. This places a good foundation to establishing a framework to form good habits and break the bad ones.

atomic habits

Right away James provides good documentation for the reader to achieve the steps necessary to be successful. He leverages a successful experience in college baseball as the base (pun intended) to reveal insights to establish good habits.

Seeing a reference to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow research felt good to see again on display for us to leverage.

Establishing a habit seems simple, but why do so many of us fail? Life gets in the way. Yet some are too oversimplified.

For example reading a book one page a day. Really? Okay…drop the TV remote and read for 20 minutes – not just one page. Reading one page a day is not really making a concerted effort. So this habit plan could use a tweak.

As a matter of fact, Atomic Habits does move us in the direction towards concerted efforts. This may be somewhat harder to establish (a new brand) around concerted effort vs. atomic habit. You must know your audience.

Atomic Habits in a round about way addresses how technology in fact makes it easy to fail at establishing new habits. James provides good insights about human behavior and technology.

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