Book Summary: Accelerate your success in your new role.

November 4, 2023August 8, 2023 by don.tebbe

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

by Michael Watkins

The First 90 Days helps leaders to transition smoothly and make a positive impact early in their new job. The book focuses on the first 90 days because actions during the first few months in a new role determine if a leader succeeds or fails.

Whether you’ve been promoted to a new position within the same organization or you’re joining a different organization, this book covers how to get to the “breakeven point” faster and ultimately be more successful in your new role. (Breakeven is when you start to contribute more to the organization than you consume through learning and integration.) Watkins says this book’s principles can shorten the time to breakeven by 40%.

Book Summary: A master class in making better decisions.

May 16, 2023 by don.tebbe

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts

by Annie Duke

Thinking with Bets promises to help us make better decisions in an uncertain and challenging world.

Written by poker champion and decision strategist Annie Duke, the book’s premise is that poker is a good metaphor for life. Decisions in life are bets on hoped-for outcomes. Like poker bets, these decisions can have significant consequences. And they are made under conditions of uncertainty, with incomplete information, and at least some luck is involved.

Book Summary: How trust and purpose unleash performance.

May 2, 2023 by don.tebbe

Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies

by Paul J. Zak

Stewarding the organization’s culture and operating environment are among the most important leadership functions. And trust is one of the most crucial factors in that environment. Trust profoundly influences everything from employee retention to the organization’s ability to achieve its most crucial goals.

In the Trust Factor, neuroscientist Paul Zak uses his original research to reveal insights for building high-trust organizations. He explains how brain chemicals affect people’s behavior, how trust is undermined, and how you can stimulate it.

Book Summary: Turn goals into accomplishments – systematically.

April 18, 2023 by don.tebbe

The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling, Scott Thele, and Beverly Walker

The premise of this book is that defining a strategy is easy, but executing it is difficult. And execution is made especially hard by what the authors call the “whirlwind” of daily activities necessary to keep the organization running. As always, urgency trumps importance. We need to elevate the importance of what the book calls “WIGs.” The one or two overarching, “wildly important goals” that would make all the difference in the world to your organization’s future and get your departments and teams to develop and focus on supporting WIGs.

Book Summary: Make better decisions.

March 21, 2023 by don.tebbe

Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking

by Jennifer Riel and Roger L. Martin

Conventional wisdom says that trade-offs are inevitable when making hard choices. But settling for the least bad option is a lousy way to make a big decision. This book proposes a “third and better way” to make important choices using proven, repeatable processes to create better answers to problems, sidestep our built-in biases, and avoid trading off one stakeholder group’s needs for another.

Book Summary: Three keys to unlock your influence.

March 7, 2023 by don.tebbe

Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change

by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

The premise of this book is that leaders are agents of change. Whether they’re heading an organization, leading a social change movement, or parenting, genuine leaders are always trying to create something better and more impactful. And to do that, influence is the most critical tool in the leader’s tool belt.

Book Summary: Motivation for the 21st century

February 21, 2023 by don.tebbe

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

The premise of this book is that motivation practices in many organizations have yet to catch up with our expanding understanding of human nature. We’re still using industrial-age management techniques while trying to succeed in a knowledge-age world.

Using psychological research and case studies, Dan Pink outlines three levels of motivation, which he names Motivation 1.0 (based on our survival drive), Motivation 2.0 (based on our drive to seek rewards and avoid punishment), and Motivation 3.0 (our drive to seek autonomy, mastery, and purpose).

Book Summary: Proposals for a TL;DR world.

February 7, 2023 by don.tebbe

The One-Page Proposal: How To Get Your Business Pitch Onto One Persuasive Page

by Patrick G. Riley

Do you have an idea or initiative that you want to get out into the world? A one-page proposal can be a great way to develop and communicate the concept quickly and effectively to potential allies and supporters.

The One-Page Proposal can help ensure that your one-pager hits the mark. Written by longtime entrepreneur Patrick Riley, the book covers the structure of a successful one-page proposal and its development process. It also includes many examples.

Book Summary: Reap the rewards of taking smarter notes.

January 24, 2023 by don.tebbe

***How to Take Smart Notes:* *One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking***

by Sönke Ahrens

Better note-taking leads to better thinking, learning, and writing. That’s the premise of How to Take Smart Notes. But it’s not the disposable notes that most of us take, nor is it the haphazard note-taking process many of us use.

You’ll be introduced to Niklas Luhmann’s slip-box note-taking method. Luhmann, a lawyer/civil servant turned university professor, by the end of his career, had published 58 books and 400+ articles aided by his slip-box. (Some sources say 70 books, including those published posthumously from work in progress.) He wasn’t just prolific but influential. He’s considered one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century and a prominent thinker on systems theory.

Book Summary: Expand your memory. Boost your thinking.

January 10, 2023 by don.tebbe

Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

by Tiago Forte

Every day we face a flood of information. Some of it is useful. Much of it not. Some of us try to hoard as much as we can. Others let the bulk of it slide because they don’t have good filters for what’s useful or they’re too overwhelmed to deal with it. But, embedded in what’s slipping by are bits of information—gems—that could be invaluable for improving our relationships, advancing our careers, or developing our organizations.

The hoarders don’t fare better. Much of what they collect (warehouse) molders out of sight and certainly out of mind. In both cases, the gems are out of reach of the only place they could be useful, our attention. What if we could harness the power of technology to deal with the onslaught, capture the useful stuff, put it to work or organize it for future use, and ultimately benefit from the wealth of information we face every day? That’s the question this book answers.