The first day of my career began with 1,000 people being laid off citing “post-merger efficiencies.” I was the young whippersnapper walking in as many more were walking out, boxes in hand. I saw, firsthand, the impact of uncertainty, lack of clear and transparent communications, and leadership, not just on performance, but also on the health and well-being of the colleagues around me. In that first job I became fascinated and obsessed with how work can be something we enjoy and find meaning in. Since then, I’ve devoted my career to making work more inspiring, engaging, and fulfilling. This became my passion and cause because I felt the very opposite.
As a budding professional I was told not to be so kind to others, so I wasn’t taken advantage of.
Changing who I was and wanted to be didn’t seem like the right recipe for my success. Grant’s debut book has likely had the most impact on how I show up in my career and in life – that being a giver can be the key to our success and fulfillment. A must read for anyone who wants to do well while doing good.
A groundbreaking look at why our interactions with others hold the key to success, from the bestselling author of Think Again and Originals
For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today's dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton's highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate…
We’re told to hire the most skilled and experienced folks and that couldn’t be worse advice.
Ret. Navy SEAL Commander Rich Diviney teaches us that when we hire, build teams, and promote folks not only considering their skills, but focusing on their attributes, we can truly create teams where one plus one equals infinity. Diviney examines the categories of attributes for optimal individual and team performance – Grit, Situational Awareness, Drive, Leadership, and Teamability.
A must read for anyone who wants to make the most of their life, career, and relationships around them.
'So much of what I know about trust I learned from Rich Diviney'- Simon Sinek 'Incredible... explains why some people thrive - even when things get hard' - Charles Duhigg 'If you care about getting better, you need to buy this book' Daniel Coyle
Learn the secret to being your best
During his twenty years as a Navy officer and SEAL, Rich Diviney was intimately involved in specialized SEAL selection, whittling hundreds of extraordinary candidates down to a handful of elite performers. But Diviney was often surprised by who succeeded. Those with the right skills sometimes failed, while others he…
The two most powerful forces in our human experience are hope and each other.
In the direst of circumstance, Frankl describes how hope – a belief that tomorrow can be better – and each other can give us the energy, inspiration, and meaning to persevere when the going gets toughest.
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
As we learn in another classic, Primed to Perform by Doshi and McGregor, play is the most motivating activity there is.
I read this book for the first time during a dark period early in my career – where I did not feel inspired, engagement nor fulfilled. This book provided me with the framework to find meaningful activities – those where I was both skilled yet challenged to improve. Those activities where I would lose myself – where time would stand still.
Better yet, this book, framework, and philosophy have better helped me coach others to find play, engagement, and meaning in their activities at work and in life.
Part psychological study, part self-help book, Finding Flow is a prescriptive guide that helps us reclaim ownership of our lives. Based on a far-reaching study of thousands of individuals, Finding Flow contends that we often walk through our days unaware and out of touch with our emotional lives. Our inattention makes us constantly bounce between two extremes: during much of the day we live filled with the anxiety and pressures of our work and obligations, while during our leisure moments, we tend to live in passive boredom. The key, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is to challenge ourselves with tasks requiring a…
I have a bias here as I’ve spent 12 years working alongside Simon Sinek and his team.
I view Sinek’s latest thinky thinky book as his best yet. I view The Infinite Game as his greatest hits album plus some solid bonus tracks. Sinek draws up the established framework of Game Theory – Finite and Infinite Games – authored by Dr. James Carse.
Sinek points out that we’re all players in infinite games – games that may have mile markers, but no finish line. These games – like life, business, career, and relationships – can’t be won, though we can succeed if we approach them with an infinite mindset.
Proposing a compelling case for the responsibility of business – to advance a purpose, protect people, and then generate profit – Sinek casts a compelling set of practices for how capitalism ought to be sustainably led.
The New York Times-bestselling author of Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, and Together Is Better offers a bold new approach to business strategy by asking one question: are you playing the finite game or the infinite game?
In The Infinite Game, Sinek applies game theory to explore how great businesses achieve long-lasting success. He finds that building long-term value and healthy, enduring growth - that playing the infinite game - is the only thing that matters to your business.
We know the impacts of poor leadership: lackluster performance, missed opportunities, deleterious cultures, and, in some cases, disaster. While these issues are all too common, leaders also possess an immense opportunity. They can create a speak-up culture, one in which people feel it is both safe and worth it to share their ideas, feedback, concerns, disagreements, and even mistakes—all for the betterment of the team & organization.
Speak-Up Culture is for leaders at all levels who share a common desire to know a better way to lead. They want to operate in a team and culture where people are engaged and willingly speak up, for the success of the whole organization. The bottom line is that organizations with speak-up cultures are safer, more innovative, more engaged, and better-performing than their peers.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
