What Are You Reading This Year?

by | Feb 6, 2016 | Corporate Communications, Leadership, Learning

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Reading is all the rage among many business leaders.

As a lifelong bookworm, this is welcome news. Something I’ve always loved to do has (finally) become on trend.

The lesson? If you do things you like long enough, they might become popular at some point. Then you can say you were ahead of the curve.

The benefits of reading are vast – there’s focusing your mind and calming your soul. There’s learning new information relevant to your career. There’s exposing yourself to a diversity of viewpoints to understand how different groups of people think and act.

In the year since I posted News Rituals of a Communicator, my own reading habits have evolved and changed.

New on the scene are 3 daily digests pushed to my email.

  • theSkimm. This filters news through the eyes of Millennials. It’s a fun read with a fresh take on the world, with quotes of the day, a main story and things to know.

Thanks to colleague Lauren Brown for the recommendation, during a meeting of our company’s employee resource group for women.

It starts with today’s agenda, moves into the world in brief and wraps up with market activity.

  • L.A. Business Journal. This is the local look at what’s going on in the Los Angeles business world. It aggregates sources with news that impacts Southern California.

And since I work for a Dallas-based company, I’ve become an avid follower of The Dallas Morning News.

Isn’t this a lot to read? Not really. Similar to other news sources, I scan the headlines in each digest and choose at least one story to read in full.

That’s why I focus so much on the importance of headlines in any corporate communication. Often it’s all people will read. The main point has to be captured in it. If someone read nothing else, would they get the key point? Is it something that could be easily found later in a search?

Beyond news, there are blogs for a variety of viewpoints. And what about books? There’s less of a method to my madness here in creating a reading list.

I keep an eye out in Harvard Business Review posts for upcoming books. Sometimes I’ll discover books through TED talks. Other times it’ll be on best business books lists.

Usually I discover books before their publishing date. So I pre-order on my Kindle app. It’s a fun surprise the day they download. This week’s gift is Adam Grant‘s Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.

Because I’m such a book lover, I haunt my local library‘s new releases section. It’s like browsing the latest titles and taking all the best ones home for free. Even better, they get returned after 2 weeks and don’t clutter my home or office. There’s also an option to borrow electronic books.

How is there time for all these books? They’re always available on my smartphone or tablet. That way I can read on the go whenever I have a few minutes. It makes time fly when you’re standing in line or waiting for an appointment to begin.

When time is tight, I’ll read the first chapter, last chapter and any other chapters in the table of contents that catch my eye. There are plenty of book summaries out there. And you can listen to books in the car.

And I’m endlessly inspired by Claire Diaz-Ortiz and her reading habit. Her post on How I Read 200 Books a Year gives great tips for how to fit more reading into your life.

What are you reading and how do you make time for it?

What Will You Learn This Year?

by | Jan 30, 2016 | Change, Learning, Work/Life

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With the torrential pace of change in our world, how will you decide what you need to learn this year?

Even if you’re not tackling a new job as I am, every field is changing rapidly. This makes lifelong learning an imperative for all of us.

Richard Bolles had an early inkling of this. While he’s better known as the bestselling author of the annually updated What Color is Your Parachute?, he also wrote The Three Boxes of Life.

In it he argued that we should not think about our lives in a linear fashion of education followed by work followed by retirement.

Instead, he advocated that all 3 boxes of life should be woven through every stage of our lives. This has never been more true than today, nearly four decades after the book was published.

Our education has to continue in parallel with our careers. For those who loved formal schooling, as I did, this is welcome news.

And for those who didn’t, there are many new ways of learning – by online courses, by doing and by observing, to name a few – that can make it more fun and intuitive.

And weaving in elements of retirement with its passion projects, travel and leisure refreshes and inspires us. This is why what we do on weekends is so important.

Thinking about all the things I need to learn in my new role, a Harvard Business Review post by Erika Andersen caught my eye this week.

How to Decide What Skill to Work On Next gives a great framework to focus your learning efforts. Andersen links the framework of Jim Collins‘ hedgehog concept from Good to Great with learning.

Collins found that great organizations have 3 areas of focus:

  1. What drives their economic engine
  2. What they can be the best in the world at, and
  3. What they’re most passionate about.

Linking that with learning, Andersen advocates asking yourself these questions:

  1. How can you learn and grow in a way that will help your company succeed? What will drive the bottom line?
  2. Of those areas, which ones could you become excellent at? If you’re good at similar things, those are ideal starting points.
  3. How passionate are you about those areas? And she shows that passion can be learned by looking at the benefits to learning and how it will create a better future for you.

This is not only a manageable and efficient way of making a personal learning plan, but it’s also inspiring and exciting.

It’s helping me narrow my focus and pick the highest-impact areas in my learning project. And it’s reassuring to know that I don’t have to learn everything, right away.

Like so many things in life, it’s about identifying the highest priority areas, taking initial actions, assessing progress and course correcting. It’s taking steps forward, day after day.