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Hardcover
333 pages
ISBN 9780307352149 Published Jan. 2012
Crown Publishing Group (NY)
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Quiet
The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
By Susan Cain 

Related Blog Posts
Bring Your (Emotional) Self to Work
Posted April 2, 2013 8:45 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Listen.

In every office

you hear the threads

of love and joy and fear and guilt,

the cries for celebration and reassurance,

and somehow you know that connecting those threads

is what you are supposed to do

and business takes care of itself.

The words above were written by James A. Autry and are included in Love and Profit: The Art of Caring Leadership, (page 32), published in the early 1990s. Autry's book came out about a decade following In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., the book that we described in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time this way:

In writing In Search of Excellence, Peters and Waterman arrived at a conclusion about the success of an organization that couldn't be more different from those early theories on business organization: people are irrational and the structures that organize them must account for that. This argument was 180 degrees counter to the historical modeling of business organizations after the military approach, in which managers fixated on the control of their homogeneous teams....Instead, Peters and Waterman advocate humanistic values, including meaning, a small amount of control, and positive reinforcement as a postmilitaristic model. The conclusion is that the soft stuff matters. Culture matters. People matter.

Now, it is 2013, and while your mileage may vary regarding the message Sheryl Sandberg is purveying to women via her new book, Lean In, I'm a fan, and many of Sandberg's modern encouragements have stuck with me in the two weeks since I read the book. But none more than her brief section on bringing your whole self to work. In our Jack Covert Selects review, we included this passage from “Seek and Speak Your Truth."

It has been an evolution, but I am now a true believer in bringing our whole selves to work. I no longer think people have a professional self for Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time. That type of separation probably never existed, and in today’s era of individual expression … it makes even less sense.

If Peters and Waterman's work marked the time when organizations became less fearful of loosening the bonds and began creating workplaces that acknowledged and worked 'with' our humanness, and Autry encouraged leaders to get the human stuff right in order to make the business stuff right, then Sandberg challenges each of us personally to integrate all aspects of ourselves.

So what does this mean for us? For all workers (not only women)? Does "bringing our whole selves to work" mean simply conversing about our lives outside of the office while in the office? And to whom? To our peers? To our clients? To our managers? Or does it mean something more visceral like exposing our tattoos and wearing those fishnet tights usually reserved for the weekend? Or does it really mean that we ourselves need to recognize that we are just people, people with emotions, who get angry at slights, cry when frustrated, become distracted when a child is sick, and even if it makes us feel vulnerable, that's the person we bring to work with us every day. Sandberg again:

Sharing emotions builds deeper relationships. Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about. To really care about others, we have to understand them--what they like and dislike, what they feel as well as think. Emotion drives both men and women and influences every decision we make. Recognizing the role emotions play and being willing to discuss them makes us better managers, partners, and peers.

I suppose the point is that whatever it means to us is what it means. But the overall point is that to feel more is to be more. And if that sounds a little Zen, then that's a good opening for recommending these new/current titles that can help you find just what integration means to you.

If you long for, or have to deal with, any of the following emotions that can (and should?) have a direct impact on our work lives, then these next books can help you bring your whole (emotional) selves to work. Below you'll find a link to our site with more information about the book, a brief synopsis from the publisher, and a quote directly from the book that exemplifies both the idea and the style of the writing.

Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life by Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica (Viking Books, May 2013.) The New York Times-bestselling author of The Element gives readers an inspirational and practical guide to self-improvement, happiness, creativity, and personal transformation.

"The gift of being human is that we have deep creative resources and from these we can continuously transform our lives if we choose. Whether you aim to change the whole world or the world within you, the limits are set as much by your imagination as by your current circumstances. This has been true for all people since the beginnings of human history."

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Crown, 2013 pbk.) This extraordinary book has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how introverts see themselves.

"The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers–of persistence, concentration, insight, and sensitivity–to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, think deeply. [...] Figure out what you are meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it. If this requires public speaking or networking or other activities that make you uncomfortable, do them anyway. But accept that they’re difficult, get the training you need to make them easier, and reward yourself when you’re done."

David's Inferno: My Journey through the Dark Wood of Depression by David Blistein (Hatherleigh, 2013.) Author David Blistein, a former ad agency executive, shares his experiences to shed light on the darkness of depression for fellow travelers as well as those who care about them.

"Then I start thinking about writing this little piece. And then about going in the house and getting another cup of tea. And then coming back out and writing something else. And then having breakfast. And then taking a nap! Gee, I'm feeling pretty good. I'm feeling inspired. [...] All pretty trivial. But for someone with a history of depression, there's nothing trivial about it. Because, at least for me, the opposite of being depressed isn't really being happy, it's being inspired. Full, as the etymologists would explain, of divine breath.

How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind by Pema Chodron (SoundsTrue, May 2013.) More and more people are beginning to recognize a profound inner longing for authenticity, connection, compassion, and aliveness. Meditation, Pema explains, gives us a golden key to address this yearning.

"So perhaps you only have ten minutes that you can commit to meditation. Just ten minutes can help you come to your senses or slow down enough that your natural intelligence, or your basic goodness--the part of you that knows what the right action at any given time might be--can click in."

Yoga Wisdom at Work: Finding Sanity Off the Mat and On the Job by Maren Showkeir and Jamie Showkeir (Berrett-Kohler, May 2013.) The Showkeirs know firsthand how yoga’s wisdom can make work—and life—more rewarding and worthwhile.

"The sheer amount of stuff we are asked to attend to in our daily lives can be overwhelming. But when people say they lack the physicality to put their bodies into yoga poses, they are not taking into account that it is the practice that develops flexibility, balance, and a quiet mind. [...] In any case, yoga on the mat is only one part of the practice--one-eighth to be exact. [T]he physical practice, or asana, doesn't represent the spectrum of yoga any more than looking through a knothole in a fence and seeing a pitcher throw and catch a ball gives you a complete picture of a baseball game's nine innings.

The Happiness Choice: The 5 Decisions That Will Take You From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Marilyn Tam (Wiley, 2013.) Discover the path to a happy life, from a woman who overcame the odds and achieved a joyful life.

"You wake before the alarm, turn over, and then it hits you--you are already behind on what you have to do today. Out of bed you rush to get ready, grab something to eat, gulp down some coffee and zoom your nerves are already vibrating at hyper speed. At the end of the long and exhausting day, you fall into bed bone-tired and weary, feeling that you didn't accomplish many of the things you had to do, much less the ones that you wanted to do. Sigh, is this the life I was born to live, you wonder. [...] No! You have a choice; you can live the life that you've dreamed of living. You can choose happiness."

The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't; What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does by Sonja Lyubonirsky (Penguin Press, 2013.) Sonja Lyubomirsky turns an empirical eye to the biggest, messiest moments, providing readers with the clear-eyed vision they need to build the healthiest, most satisfying life.

"I cannot stress enough how unfortunate and needless are these deleterious consequences of believing in the happiness myths. We must stop waiting for happiness, and we must stop being terrified of the potential for unhappiness."



Our 'Favorite' Business Books of 2012
Posted Dec. 28, 2012 5:53 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Last week, we released our picks for the Best Business Book of 2012 as well as the eight category winners. Following in the footsteps of the New York Times, if we may, who asked a few of their esteemed book reviewers to reveal a list of their favorite books of 2012 ("Favorite is not synonymous with best, so this process can be painful. Brutal honesty is required. We pick what we actually liked, not what we only admired, although ideally our favorites fit both descriptions" writes Janet Maslin. And also, "In the midnight hour these 10 Favorites — not 10 Bests — call for a gut check. Bottom line, for each of us: Is this a book I’d give to a friend?"), we've decided to also share with you a list of our 'favorite' business books. For us, we decided this list should consist of books that are square pegs that don't quite fit into the business book genre's round holes. Books that are valuable and interesting to the business and/or nonfiction reader, but might have more universal application than the books that were picked for our annual awards. And so...our editorial staff's favorite books of the year:

Sally - Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain from Crown Business

The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers--of persistence, concentration, insight, and sensitivity--to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, think deeply. [...] Figure out what you are meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it. If this requires public speaking or networking or other activities that make you uncomfortable, do them anyway. But accept that they're difficult, get the training you need to make them easier, and reward yourself when you're done.

Dylan - The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use 'Plain English' to Rob You Blind by David Cay Johnston from Penguin Portfolio

How the promise of cheap, competitive and unlimited telecommunications service has been turned into a reality of expensive, monopolistic and limited service is just one part of the larger transformation in the American economy since the late 1970s. A host of large industries, including banks, credit card lenders, electric utilities, health care, oil pipelines, Hollywood studios, property insurance, railroads and water companies, all have worked quietly to rewrite America’s economic playbook in their favor. [...] In The Fine Print, we’ll look at how legislatures have rewritten basic business laws, some whose principles date back thousands of years.

Michael - Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World by Paul Laudicina from John Wiley & Sons

Today's leaders and citizens have to accept a world fraught with volatility and disruptive change, and they have to realize that inaction is not a good option. It's not all bad: This unprecedented volatility is accompanied by an equally unprecedented and compelling convergence of doing well with doing good--a blending of the pursuit of enlightened self-interest with the pursuit of the common good....By leveraging new technological capabilities and employing more dynamic ways of thinking and inspiring the future, we can beat the global odds.

Jon - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb from Random House

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, and risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it anti-fragile. [So...] The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without certainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risk.

Jack - Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer by William Knoedelseder from HarperBusiness

Thanks to their beer, the Busch family had tasted all that America ever promised the immigrant class from which they sprang --wealth almost beyond comprehension, political power that provided access to presidents, and a lifestyle rivaling that of history's most extravagant royals. Along with that, of course, came a king-sized portion of heartbreak, scandal, tragedy, and untimely death. But they had endured.... Of the brewing giants that boomed after Prohibition...only Anheuser-Busch remained as a free-standing, independent company, still operated by the family that founded it.



The Best Books of 2012, Amazon Edition
Posted Nov. 28, 2012 2:50 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Amazon's editors have come up with another fine list of books this year. Their choices in the Business and Investing category are:

But, as always, the books that would interest a business book reader aren't confined to the Business and Investing list. Private Empire is also listed in the History category, as is one of Jack's favorite books of the year, Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer by William Knoedelseder, published by HarperBusiness.

In the general Nonfiction category, The Signal and the Noise and The Power of Habit both made the list along with Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain (published by Crown).

The Signal and the Noise also made the Politics and Social Science list—along with Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, and also published by Crown— and the Science list (it's been a very good year for Nate Silver). One final Science title that may interest some business readers is Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are by Sebastian Seung, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.



The Best Books of 2012, A Season of Lists
Posted Nov. 26, 2012 5:24 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

The season of lists is upon us. The first ornament up on the tree was Steve Coll's Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, published by The Penguin Press, which took home the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year earlier this month. And there was another large nonfiction title related to economics—Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson and published by Crown Business—on a list of The 10 best books of 2012 from the Washington Post.

CNNMoney put up a list of The 5 must-read business books of the year two weeks ago that included:

Late last month (unnoticed by us until searching for the list we know they put out every year this morning), Hudson Booksellers announced their Best Books of 2012. Being an airport bookstore, they always stock and sell a lot of business titles, and always include a Business Interest section of their yearly list. This year's included:

And, finishing up this morning's round up, we have a list from Fast Company put out today, which includes the following 12 titles:

We'll have two of the larger, more comprehensive lists—and two of our yearly favorites—up on the blog for you this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

We've also picked our own extensive shortlist here at 800-CEO-READ, and will begin announcing that on December 10th, so be sure to keep an eye out for that, as well.



Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Posted Nov. 13, 2012 7:55 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

This morning I perused the Amazon Top 100 for 2012. A few of our favorite books that made the top 20: Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise; Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit (our JCS review here); and Susan Cain's Quiet (our take here.) Rounding out the top 40 is a book that's been sitting on my desk for awhile, daring me to crack it open: Nassim Nicolas Taleb's Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.

Over the weekend, I took that dare.

Why is reading and summarizing Antifragile such a nervy challenge? Practically, because it is a 544-page tome (with a labyrinthian Table of Contents) that already hints in its title its level of complexity. "Antifragile"--what exactly does that mean? The opposite of fragile? Unbreakable? Solid? And "Things That Gain From Disorder"--advantages to be had from chaos? Circling back around to the title: So, chaos can create solidity? Seems an oxymoron that isn't going to be easy to get my head around.

Then, there is the author to consider, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is most famous for introducing "black swans" to our common lexicon and has since put out many books, including The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, that aim to rejigger our understanding of the world and our attempts to make sense of things. The theory of black swan events is that there are rare, highly 'impactful' events that happen that cannot be predicted, and should not be thought to be able to be predicted just because hindsight lends us some understanding of the event once it has passed. Antifragile aims to take the black swan theory and apply it more broadly to teach how to live peaceably with random events that may have no explanation but contribute to a greater strength as a whole.

Let's take a look at the book.

Taleb begins his Prologue with a surprisingly clear and streamlined explanation of the very oxymoron that I touched on above. In the opening section titled, "How to Love the Wind," Taleb writes:

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

Ah, now we see very clearly what we're dealing with here. While most people fear that change will put out our flame, we have a choice to use change to fan that flame.

Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author's nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

We just don't want to just survive uncertainty, just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition--like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics--have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable. How?

There is a lot to learn already about this book in that small section. Taleb has a strong voice and a strong opinion and a certain tendency to reference unfamiliar things (Roman Stoics particularly versus other kinds of stoics, anyone?) that will prompt you to have Wikipedia open on your nearest device as you read. ("Later Roman Stoics focused on promoting a life in harmony within the universe, over which one has no direct control.") But he is also digging at something that intrigues all of us, so much so that we've constructed religions and philosophies around the fear of uncertainty. And as a result, we would all prefer, I think, to become "antifragile" which Taleb defines this way:

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder and stressors and love adventure, and risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it anti-fragile.

And what is the cost of tending too much to the fragile, of wrapping ourselves in a kind of risk-averse bubble wrap? "We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything...by suppressing randomness and volatility." Taleb reveals, it seems, his interest in the topic, his motivation for writing this book, and the lesson he hopes to bestow on readers (perhaps especially the neurotic ones) in this emphatic line: "I want to live happily in a world I don't understand."

Don't we all? Wouldn't that be quite a bit easier than trying to understand and be happy in a world that at times defies explanation? But control is seductive. "Black swans hijack our brains, making us feel we "sort-of" or "almost" predicted them, because they are retrospectively explainable." For example, it's common for people to respond to a wrench in their plans by saying, with both resignation and purpose, "Ah well, everything happens for a reason." Taleb is decidedly and emphatically saying the opposite, "No, there is not always a reason for everything: and that's ok."

With Antifragile, Taleb is offering us a 500+ page manual to achieve antifragility. He himself admits that here he has become a "practitioner" of his cumulative theories ("I eat my own cooking."), and this book is "a main corpus focused on uncertainty, randomness, probability, disorder, and what to do in a world we don't understand, a world with unseen elements and properties, the random and the complex; that is, decision making under opacity." And throughout, Antifragile is crammed with Taleb's unique and aggressive style of mixing the scholarly, the historical, the modern, the profound, and even the minutia, amounting to a mountain of thought that Taleb intends will "revive the not well known philosophical notion of doxastic commitment, a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which we are committed enough to take personal risks." In other words, Taleb wants us to do, not just think about doing.

If I attempted to cover all the ground in Antifragile, this post would be much too lengthy, so let's jump to Chapter 13: Lecturing Birds on How to Fly. Taleb opens the chapter reflecting on the wheeled suitcase. The wheel was invented some six thousand years ago, and yet, until four decades ago no one thought to put wheels directly on the bottom of a suitcase! What does it take, he seems to be asking, for us to get smarter--practically smarter--faster?

All those brilliant minds, usually disheveled and rumpled, who go to faraway conferences to discuss Gödel, Shmodel, Riemann's Conjecture, quarks, shmarks, had to carry their suitcases through airport terminals without thinking about applying their brain to such an insignificant transportation problem....And even if these brilliant minds had applied their supposedly overdeveloped brains to such an obvious and trivial problem, they probably would not have gotten anywhere.

I included this quote above because it encapsulates both Taleb's voice, somewhat haughty and bemused, but also because it reveals a truth made both complex and simple by his explanation. Ingenuity is not the property of the intellectually rich, and sometimes complexity impairs us from creating simple solutions for common problems. Taleb, of course, puts it differently, within the lines of his thesis:

This tells us something about the way we map the future. We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things look like. We use randomness to spoon-feed us with discoveries--which is why antifragility is necessary.

And from the wheeled suitcase, Taleb takes us through the "sneaky...process of discovery and implementation" in medicine and technology, and his deduction that "both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discoveries, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase." And so, he concludes: "antifragility...supersedes intelligence." And the risk of believing that all invention comes from great minds (not simple necessity) is that we are hindered by the belief that these great minds can take credit for "lecturing birds on how to fly" when the birds knew how to fly all along.

Antifragile is not an easy book. But, despite its length and breadth of reference, it is a readable book. The constant feed of wisdom--or perhaps awareness is a better word--that generates instant inner reflection ("Hey, I do that!") is intoxicating, page-turning. It's a great trip landing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's planet, a planet displaying such big and rangy ideas, a topographical map could be constructed as a model for the snaking rivers, the breath-robbing mountains, and the dusty valleys, of his knowledge. Like any adventure, you may be taxed from the constant rough esoteric terrain, but that mirrors what Taleb is advocating in Antifragile. Embrace the volatility "to live in a world that does not want us to understand it, a world whose charm comes from our inability to truly understand it."

Put another way:

The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without certainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risk.

(All quotations taken from advanced copy; Hardcover available November 27th, 2012)






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