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Paperback
358 pages
ISBN 9780553383713 Published Sept. 2005
Bantam Books
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Posted Jan. 12, 2012 9:42 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Chip Conley bares his soul in his second book, Emotional Equations, and in doing so helps us understand our own. It is painful at times, as he recounts his own doubts and darker moments in life and business, tells us of four friends that took their own lives in one economically depressed summer, and relates the story of when his own heart literally stopped after a business presentation, landing him in the hospital.
But, as Conley discovered, what doesn’t kill us does indeed make us stronger.
As Winston Churchill advised during World War II, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Today, too, we all need to come to understand that we can use our seasons of darkness as a means to find new reservoirs of strength—strength we didn’t know we had.
One man who went through hell during WWII and made his way through it was psychologist Viktor Frankl, who made it through a Nazi concentration camp and would eventually write Man’s Search for Meaning, a work that greatly influenced Conley and this book. It is from Frankl’s work that Conley distilled the equation that began the journey that resulted in this project: Despair = Suffering – Meaning.
There are six parts of this book, on such issues as Dealing With Difficult Times, Getting the Most Out of Your Work Life, Defining Who You Are, and Finding Contentment. Within those sections are chapters broken up into individual emotional equations, such as Disappointment = Expectations – Reality, Calling = Pleasure/Pain, and Joy = Love – Fear. What the author does in the process is take us beyond the sometimes touchy/feely world of emotional literacy and into a simple emotional mathematics you can flip through like flashcards when your emotions begin to get the best of you. At the end of the book, he even guides you through how to create and use your own equations.
Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, a book we named as one of The 100 Business Books of All Time, showed that emotional intelligence (EQ) accounts for two-thirds of the success of business executives. Developing a true understanding of the people you’re working with or leading is critical for not only your business success, but for your personal happiness. Developing and maintaining a true understanding of your self is an important part of doing so.
This book, the equations it provides, and the ability it gives you to develop your own shorthand will help a great deal toward that end. I can’t sum it up any better than the author: “Emotional Equations provide a new, visual lexicon for mastering our age of uncertainty.”
Doing the Right Thing
Posted Oct. 24, 2011 12:29 p.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
In 2007, we chose a book called Responsibility at Work as the winner of the Personal Development category for that year's Business Book of the Year Awards. It was the first time I'd been exposed to Howard Gardner's work--he is prolific*, so the book we featured was only a small part of his overall catalog--, and I became quite interested in his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I don't recall if I've ever taken an official IQ test but I can tell you I wouldn't have done well on it. I'm one of those people with test anxiety which impairs my ability to perform well on tests. It's a bit like an athlete who doesn't compete well, I suppose. Some athletes are able to turn anxiousness into energy while others get distracted by it. That's how I am in any kind of test that needs a right or wrong answer: is it any wonder why I oriented toward the fine arts and Blue Book tests that I could fill out to my heart's content? So naturally I am drawn to other ways of measuring intelligence. Not only for my own ego, but because most people know full well that human performance is complicated despite our desire to place people in pigeon-holes.
Wikipedia, as always, sums the theory up handily for us, describing the Theory of Multiple Intelligences as "a model of intelligence that differentiates intelligence into various specific (primarily sensory) modalities, rather than seeing it as dominated by a single general ability." Gardner proposed the following as meeting his criteria for what is an intelligence.
- Spatial
- Linguistic
- Logical-mathematical
- Bodily-kinesthetic
- Musical
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
- Naturalistic
Not everyone agrees with Gardner on this list, or even sees a point to the exercise, but Gardner acknowledges that this is truly just a theory, a theory that over time will prove true and/or valuable.
"I've put forth a candidate set of intelligences that are said to have their own characteristic processes and to be reasonably independent of one another. Over time, the particular intelligences nominated, and their degree of dependence or independence of one another, will be more firmly established." HowardGardner.com/FAQ
There are two new books out this month that posit, if indirectly, additions to the above list of intelligences.
Ethical Intelligence: Five Principles for Untangling Your Toughest Problems at Work and Beyond by Bruce Weinstein, aka "The Ethics Guy" on Bloomberg's Businessweek Online.
Weinstein's five principles of ethical intelligence are:
- Do No Harm
- Make Things Better
- Respect Others
- Be Fair
- Be Loving
And this new book will show you how to identify and improve your Ethical Intelligence and "imbue your life with meaning and enrich all of your relationships" by doing the right thing.
Intuitive Compass: Why the Best Decisions Balance Reason and Instinct by Francis Cholle, an international business consultant with a hefty and diverse vitae, including study in theater and clinical psychology.
Cholle begins his book with an Intuitive Compass to help you determine how you make decisions, and then, surprisingly, he leads us into the field of play. There is a lot of good material that extends past play in this book, including how intuition allows agility and creativity, how intuition enables innovation, how you can use your intuitive intelligence; but one of my favorite lines is: "Play open us up to the possibility that we don't need more of anything--time, money, knowledge, and so on--in order to produce more. It is a radical idea, especially in business, where we often hear the argument that budgets are limited and therefore the ability to innovate is limited."
In the case of both books, as well as Gardner's work, the compelling aspect is that the more information we learn about the way we think, the better we get at doing the right thing.
*Perhaps Gardner's top business book is Five Minds for the Future. And for information about his GoodWork Project, visit www.goodworkproject.org.
In the Books - Off to the Printers XII
Posted Jan. 11, 2011 7:53 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
In another installment from the annual review of business books we produced last year, we have an article from friend and former president of the company, Todd Sattersten. In it, he discusses the meta-themes in business thought that he and Jack uncovered as they spent 18 months compiling, reading, choosing and writing The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.
The Five Universal Themes in Business BY TODD SATTERSTEN
What happens when you spend 18 months reading the best in business literature? In our case, two things happened—one expected, the other quite unexpected.
The expected was the creation of a list of the 100 best business books of all time, which led to a book by the same name. The unexpected came as we uncovered a number of meta-themes the books share that exist beyond any predictable grouping by subject matter. For example, Michael Useem’s The Leadership Moment has surprising connections with as Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System and Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition. Ultimately, we found five persistent meta-themes across our selection of the 100 best business books. Each meta-theme appears horizontally across traditional publishing categories, bridging such divisions as sales, management, narrative, and finance. Each meta-theme also scales in a vertical sense, applying to individuals, teams and organizations equally. So profound are these meta-themes, we argue, that these five universal insights act as the foundation for a leader dealing with any aspect of business, whether starting a new job or developing the next year’s corporate strategy.
1. Clarity of Purpose
Purpose provides direction and brings clarity to all work. For the individual in pursuit of purpose, author Po Bronson asks the ultimate question in his book, What Should I Do with My Life? Organizations struggle with the same kind of question when they craft their mission statements and massage their marketing slogans.
2. Wisdom in Decision Making
The process of making decisions is often overly deliberate or completely unconscious. In both cases, we base our decisions on past experience and judge the success of those decisions only on the success rate of the outcomes. In Influence, Robert Cialdini alerts us to how we use unconscious routine to make even the smallest decision, while in The Power of Intuition, Gary Klein provides a map to some of that scripting and shows how we can improve our gut instinct.
3. Bias for Action
Tom Peters and Bob Waterman pointed out in In Search of Excellence that a quality of excellent companies was “the bias for action.” This assertion that action trumps all appears in many great books, so what keeps us from taking action? Author David Allen (Getting Things Done) would say a person’s focus is misplaced on time and priority, rather than action. Authors Jeffery Pfeffer and Bob Sutton (The Knowing-Doing Gap) would say organizations suffer from a gap between knowing and doing.
4. Openness to Change
Understanding change is essential because change affects individuals and organizations constantly. Sales is about change. Marketing is about change. Corporate strategy about is about change. Lou Gerstner says it was changing IBM’s entitlement culture that was his biggest challenge. In The First 90 Days, new job guru Michael Watkins describes the waves of change that new managers must instigate. In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffery Moore shows how products are adopted and what different constituents need to accept change.
5. Giving and Getting
Feedback Imagine throwing a baseball in a dark room. You would miss seeing the trajectory the ball took or where it landed. Our success depends on feed-back. Did we make the right choice? Did the action have the intended effect? Are things changing? Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) says self-reflection is a form of feedback and an essential piece of emotional intelligence. Engineering professor Henry Petroski, author of To Engineer is Human, says failure is a critical part of learning. And in Secrets of Closing the Sale, Zig Ziglar says listening is the most important part of selling.
These themes are likely to persist as business and business literature evolves further, because companies continually fail to absorb the simple lessons: Find a clear purpose. Be aware that past experience and a mass of information can interfere with wise decisions. Maintain a bias toward action. Be open to change. Seek feedback. These behaviors link together: Clarity of purpose provides wisdom in decision making, which informs action, which in turn, creates change, while feedback informs them all.
PREVIOUS POSTS FROM IN THE BOOKS
- I: Financial Markets: Their Promise and Failure (and Promise) BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER
- II: When Ecology and Economy Meet BY KATE MYTTY
- III: Why We Love Business Books More Than Ever BY ERIKA ANDERSEN
- IV: Odd Intersections: Fiction Captures the Complexities of Business BY REBECCA SCHLEI HARTMAN
- V: Explorations Into the Human Psyche BY ROBBIE HARTMAN
- VI: For Women Only? A Look at Trends in Business Books Written by Women BY SALLY HALDORSON
- VII: Real-World Lessons in Leadership BY ROBERT MORRIS
- VIII: We the Internet BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER
- IX: The Shifting Landscape of Moving Ideas: The Art of Publishing in a Socially Empowered World BY JON MUELLER
- X: The Information Age
- XI: Finding Opportunities: Re-examining Personal and Organizational Strength in Challenging Times BY JON MUELLER
Friday Links
Posted April 23, 2010 12:24 p.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ It was Earth Day this week, which prompted some to look at the eBook v. Paper from an environmental angle. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence (one of The 100 Best) and Ecological Intelligence, wrote the most comprehensive analysis, and after crunching the numbers concluded:
With respect to fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.
All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library.
If you'd like to see how he came to that conclusion, you can check his Eco-Math.
➻ Bob Sutton likes his iPad, but he doesn't love it. After discussing why he doesn't like it for watching movies due to the glare and weight (He was watching Blade Runner, so you know it wasn't the movie's fault) he moves onto reading books on the device, writing:
It especially sucks for that—if reading books is important to you, do it the old fashioned way or buy a Kindle.
➻ Ken Auletta at the New Yorker, in the meantime, wonders whether the iPad can topple the Kindle, and save the book business, writing:
The industry’s great hope was that the iPad would bring electronic books to the masses—and help make them profitable. E-books are booming. Although they account for only an estimated three to five per cent of the market, their sales increased a hundred and seventy-seven per cent in 2009, and it was projected that they would eventually account for between twenty-five and fifty per cent of all books sold.
➻ Giving credit to Peter Waldock of North 49 Books, Andy Ross posted a very insightful bulletin on a New Book Technology, the *BOOK:*
*BOOK* is a revolutionary breakthrough in technology: no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It’s so easy to use, even a child can operate it. ... *BOOK* is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. The pages are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence.
➻ Andrew Altschul, the Books editor at The Rumpus, spoke with Critical Mass about the love of books and why reviewers contribute to the online literary magazine:
It's definitely not money--we don't pay our reviewers. We would love to pay reviewers. We really wish we could. But we can't. They get the book, of course, and whatever benefits come from having published in The Rumpus. But as far as I can tell, the main reason they're doing it is because they love books, and they want to contribute to the conversation about books. It's the same reason things like Goodreads and Shelfari are so popular--people still love books, and they can't help but talking about books.
This is what's so frustrating when you talk to people in the mainstream publishing industry. They're so sure no one loves books anymore--because the corporate accountants are telling them they can't hit a 15% profit margin. And so they're bending over backwards to find the magic bullet: Is it e-books? Can the iPad save us? What if we get Sarah Palin to write a vampire novel? But people still love books. Period. And they want to talk about them. They want to be a part of that conversation. And it's a much more important, healthier conversation for us to be having as a society than talking about stock options or Grand Theft Auto or America's Next Top Model all the time.
➻ Breaking Down the Mojo, Diane Sawyer sat down with on of our favorite folks this week—Marshall Goldsmith, author of Mojo. Marshall says "You have two choices in life: I can change me, or I can change it."
➻ Michael Lewis granted The Christian Science Monitor an interview for their recent Books podcast.
➻ Flashlight Worthy posted the 10 most "challenged" books of 2009 this week, and by challenged, they mean "someone requested the book be removed from their public library because of its offensive nature (and usually that means 'offensive to children')." Those books were:
- ttyl (series) by Lauren Myracle
- And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson, Peter Parnell
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
- The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
I'm rather surprised nobody challenged Spointra, which is very graphic in nature.
➻ Alison Leigh Cowan of The New York Times reported this week that Mark Twain wrote in the margins of the books he was reading, following one of Todd Sattersten's rules for How to Read a Business Book. Being rather curmudgeonly as he was, however, Twain's marginalia was not generally of the useful sort Todd encourages, but of a more critical, acerbic nature.
➻ My favorite book, Voltaire'd Candide is turning 250 years old, and I'm missing it's birthday party.
➻ Scientists are now speculating that last week's volcano eruption can be traced to Iceland's Jonsi, and the recent release of his Go Quiet.
Friday Links
Posted Jan. 29, 2010 11:49 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
I will not be mentioning the iPad in the links below. Moving on...
➻ Umair Haque's The Generation M Manifesto on the Harvard Business Review website is rather old, but I hadn't seen it, so maybe you haven't either. Tip of the Hat to Tiny Gigantic for pointing me to it.
➻ If you've read Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, you probably remember The Marshmallow Test. The experiment tests a person's impulse control as a child and how it can predict future success, such as a significantly higher SAT scores. Sally tracked down an NPR video of the test, and then also a New Yorker article explaining the science.
➻ The Paper Cuts Book Review Podcast interviewed Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto.
➻ The Daily Beast picked I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay and The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives as two of this week's "hot reads." Find the reviews here: I.O.U. | The Hidden Brain
➻ The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) has come up with a great idea to help relief efforts in Haiti: Font Aid IV, a project uniting the typographic and design communities to design a collaborative font. To learn more or get involved, check Typophile.
➻ Hyper Modern Writing discussed virtual book signings with Jenny Greenleaf.
➻ Todd Sattersten reminds us That Ideas Need Air.
➻ GalleyCat did a good job of rounding up material Remembering Howard Zinn, Louis Auchincloss, and J.D. Salinger.
➻ The video below is great, and this one from Daytrotter is mindfeckingly fantastic.
