These resources literally changed my life and shaped my thinking about subjects such as service, leadership, teamwork, team building, operational excellence, and organizational development. Enjoy!
- Tribal Leadership – this book was recommended to my by a colleague who had also worked in Continuous Improvement. The book looks at how we as humans live and work through the lens of language. As a linguist, I was shocked I hadn’t come across this sooner. It helped me understand how to approach many different types of people as well as the critical importance of Values and Noble Cause in giving people the WHY to their WHAT and HOW.
- Delivering Happiness – Now, full disclosure here. I didn’t love this book. I know it’s on a lot of must-read business book lists, but I struggled with the voice and tone of the book. However, I did garner two critical takeaway from this book:
- The culture of your business is critical to your own experience as well as that of your employees. You will have some kind of culture no matter (where humans are, culture is), so you may as well work to shape it and harness it for the good of everyone.
- A Skillset Pipeline can help you both value your employees appropriately and be prepared for the eventual day of their departure for whatever reason. This is one of the most critical concepts in business: finding the balance between taking good care of employees and not leveraging the business to be caught in a bad position when it’s time for them to move on to bigger and better things.
- The Shingo Model for Operational Excellence – wow. I just LOVE the Shingo Model. Every time I read it, I get inspired all over again. If Tribal Leadership is the high level concepts of business tied to language, the Shingo Model is your boots-on-the-ground, get-things-done practical guide to HOW. The other thing I love about this is that it comes from Lean methodology and follows the concept of finding the right solution for your business – no one size fits all here. Every business is a little different, and I love the opportunity for improvement this resource provides.
- Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail – if you don’t have a lot of time or you just want to get your feet wet in the subject of change in an organization, this article by John Kotter is a fantastic place to start. Kotter has graced our generation with much excellent thought on the subject of change management in books and articles, but this one provides a fantastic 9-point checklist of things that might explain why your organization struggles to execute successful sustained change.
Activity: Think about the last resource you engaged with. This could be a book, a podcast, a video, an article, even a conversation with a colleague. What resonated with you about this resource? What did you do with the information you took away? How did you apply it?*
*Hint for your life: Reading/listening/talking is useless without application. If you are looking to execute sustained change, challenge yourself to apply what you have learned, even in a small measure.