In 2010, Seth Godin asked people to make a list of what they shipped. I have been doing this exercise each year since then. You can see my past #YearInReview posts here. I continue to believe this reflection is one of the most important exercises I do all year.
Launched the 2023 Bard Press title When Everyone Leads by Ed O’Malley and Julia Fabris McBride
Hired a new operations manager for Bard Press
Helped lead a week long trip to visit 12 Buddhist temples in Oregon and California
Wrote a seven essay series about the pilgrimage
Our two sons left for college at Oregon State and Washington State
Created a five year class to study the entire Shobogenzo by Dogen Zenji
In 2010, Seth Godin asked people to make a list of what they shipped. I have been doing this exercise each year since then. You can see my past #YearInReview posts here. I continue to believe this reflection is one of the most important exercises I do all year.
If your flight gets canceled, you will get offered other options on that airline. You need to specifically ask them to check other airlines for more options.
The passport ID card only works as identification for land and sea passages. It does not qualify for airport screenings.
Notes from your wife are really awesome, especially when you find one as you are trying to get through the X-ray machine and the TSA agent says, “You need to hold that in your hand. Don’t lose it.”
Great friends send an itinerary with a slot scheduled for watching the divisional playoff game of your favorite NFL team.
An amazing meal feels so good and will give you something to talk about for days.
Look for where the energy is—long line at a food cart, number of questions after a talk—because there is something special happening there, whether you believe it or not.
The story you think you know is always only a fraction of what is really going on.
I love publishing books.
Meat Loaf, Thich Naht Hanh, and Andre Leon Talley all died while I was on the road in January and each touched my world in completely different ways because they were wholly unique individuals.
Tacos are what is eaten in Austin, Texas. Don’t even think of mentioning a burrito.
I want to design a font someday.
On the Mac, I knew CMD-cursor moved you the end of a line, but how did I missed that Option-cursor can move you by word!
Laugh at yourself. When you do, you encourage others to do the same.
So, this morning I woke up and decided that I wanted to share the news about the one book coming from Bard Press in 2022.
It got a little weirder when I found that my personal newsletter here is on issue #22, and as far as I can tell, the Bard Press newsletter also appears to be on issue #22.
So, to go all in, I am post this at 2/22/22 22:22 Pacific Daylight Time.
It’s the last day of the year on the modern calendar.
I published my #YEARINREVIEW this morning, which I captured what I “shipped” this year. It is a yearly tradition that I have been doing for a decade now. I am always struck by all the things that make it onto the list. I am equally in awe of, how each year, there are projects in the queue for the next year. It is good to see the growth, as well as the seeds you have planted.
2021 was different. No new books. No big interesting projects. These months needed a different kind of energy. Much of my year was spent setting up and configuring processes that will run Bard Press for the next several years. I told people that transitioning to our new distributor felt like starting a new job with all the new people, new terminology, and so many new systems.
I keep a document called Running Notes that I start anew each year. I used the document to collect links and quotes. I also use it to do all of my rough drafts for newsletters and important communications. I looked today, the last day I will be using it, and it has over 75,000 words in it. I wrote the equivalent of a book this year in many smaller pieces.
I read extensively: The Millionaire Next Door, The Simple Path to Wealth, Automatic Millionaire, Lotus Sutra of the Wondrous Dharma, Peaceful Action, Open Heart, The Passion Economy, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, Everyday Millionaires, Training the Mind, No One Succeeds Alone, Professional Troublemaker, Traction, The Inner Game of Tennis, The Inner Game of Work, Full Catastrophe Living, The Mindful Athlete, The Energy Medicine Handbook, Saga Book Two, Premonition, Twenty Bits I Learned About Making Fonts, Made To Stick. Chatter, The Progress Principle, Presence, Courage to Be Disliked, Surrounded by Idiots, Getting Things Done. Get Everything Done. QBQ, 2034, Bibliostyle, Deadline Effect, Black Widow (Thompson), Wanting, Limitless, Etiquette of Illness, What I Talk About WHen I Talk About Running, For The Love of Books, Batman: Last Knight on Earth, The Conversation, Backable, Risk Forward, Boundless Vows, Positioning for Professionals, Miracle Morning, The Best Cover Design, Cover (Mendelsund), Chip Kidd: Book Two, The Science of Happily Ever After.
The bolded titles are the ones that stayed with me. Michael Lewis’ Premonition was his book on another view into the long, unseen arc of thinking that impacted how we reacted to the pandemic. The Progress Principle shows small steps motivates people to accept more difficult challenges and to persist longer, while setbacks increase negative emotions and further inhibit motivation.
The Conversation by Robert Livingston was the single book that came out of my annual look at the year-end business book best-of lists. The book is about racism and how the real conversation begins when we start to see and discuss how prevalent racism is and how we treat others in a racist manner. You can read my longer review on Medium.
Homebound for most of the year, I seemed to be attracted to off planet TV shows: For All Mankind, The Planets (Documentary), and The Expanse. The Book of Boba Fett is off to a good start.
Our go-to boardgames during the year were:
Wingspan (two players with my wife and with a slightly larger group of friends)
Terraforming Mars (more off-planet interest, dueling with my son)
7 Wonders.
We play Wits and Wagers with my parents over zoom (it works pretty well).
We got Roll Player and Fantastic Factories for the holidays, both are interesting but need a couple more runs to see how they fit into our rotation.
In 2010, Seth Godin asked people to make a list of what they shipped. I have been doing this exercise each year since then. You can see my past #YearInReview posts here. I continue to believe this reflection is one of the most important exercises I do all year.
Fall has arrived and September has been this deep mix of discovery and rediscovery.
I took my first business trip and had the first client visit since the pandemic started. I officially started the next chapter of Bard Press, while moving all of our distribution to our new partner at Two Rivers. Schools reopened with my daughter Alex in eighth grade, my son Zach running cross-country for the first time in his junior year of high school, and my oldest son Ethan starting college. My wife’s practice at Silver Mountain Health is finding new energy.
I went to the movie theatre with Ethan to see Shang-Chi. I sat for a retreat for the first time since my shuso term. I went to a live(!) concert with my friend April, out in a farm field under an old oak tree, and listened to Colin Meloy sing Decemberists ballads.
Colin Meloy at Topaz Farms – September 23, 2021
“Equinox is a time of change. We go from light to dark. It’s still dry, yet there is a coolness in the air. We still have bright skies, but the angle of light changes. A shift from external to internal happens. The school year starts, and people begin things and start to knuckle down and get serious. People make new intentions[…]”
This is a passage from You Are Still Here: Zen Teachings of Kyogen Carlson. Kyogen co-founded Dharma Rain Zen Center, the sangha I have practiced with here in Portland for the last 11 years. Kyogen died seven years ago this month. You Are Still Here is a new book that collects his teachings. It was edited by his student and my teacher Sallie Jiko Tisdale. The book is organized by seasons and starts with fall.
You Are Still Here: Zen Teachings of Kyogen Carlson
I can feel that autumnal shift inward that Kyogen speaks of, tugging at me. That tension between “knowing” and “figuring out” that feels strong in our second fall of the pandemic.
Writing this was hard. At one point, I wasn’t sure I had anything to write. There was no strong theme or encompassing headline that normally lead me forward.
There is a thread in the next three stories…maybe…maybe not…or maybe I will just see it later.
1.
One corner of our yard is connected to an undeveloped section of land, city property for a road that wasn’t built. The prior owners had a length of fence that tried to wall off our side yard from the unmaintained wilds. That fence fell down a few years ago and we never replaced it. Eyeing that patch each day, with its few tall trees and covered in English ivy and blackberry vines, we slowly felt more responsible for it and those trees. It took two years to really tame that section of land and it takes a couple of Saturdays each year to keep it maintained.
The trees on that small patch of land have an interesting story that I didn’t really know until a few weeks ago. It started when a friend in Portland posted a picture of a newly planted tree in their local park in Montavilla. It wasn’t the picture that caught my attention, but rather the comments below the image.
In 1939, a new fossil was found for a type of redwoods that had never been seen before. A few years later, botanists unexpectedly found a grove of these sequoias living in the central Sichuan region of China, after believing that this species has been extinct for millions of years. Fossils records show that, at one point, these redwoods were widespread and prolific across the all of the North Hemisphere. In China, these trees are known as “water fir” because they tend to grow in low lying areas near rivers and streams. Wikipedia claims the tree’s rediscovery as the greatest botany find of the 20th century.
After the trip down the lost redwood rabbit hole, I returned to the photos and left in greater awe—the two trees growing at the base of our driveway were these same types of redwoods. I don’t know how long they have been here, but they stand almost 40 feet tall. Botanists think they might be able to grow to 200 feet, but maybe more. they are not sure because all of the living trees are still young by redwood standards.
Our house is built into a steep hill and the water runoff makes it a perfect spot for them. What makes Dawn redwoods, as they are known in the West, unique among redwoods is they are deciduous trees. These redwoods shed their leaves each fall and are the only living redwood species to do that. And they are beautiful, they look like a species of tree you’d find in a magical elven forest. The picture below isn’t from our yard but better show them in their full beauty.
Some of the first Dawn redwoods planted outside China were grown in Hoyt Arboretum here in Portland. Those trees were the first to produce seed cones on US soil. In 2005, the Oregon legislature designated Metasequoia as the official state fossil, because so many can be found in the eastern part of the state.
Dawn redwoods have become popular again and are now cultivated all over the world. Crescent Ridge New Dawn Redwood Preserve is establishing a 50 acre park as the only redwood grove in the eastern United States. They plan to open in 2035 with 5000 redwoods.
I don’t know if I can explain it, but all of this makes it feel a little more magical that we have these redwoods in our neighborhood.
In 2015, my wife gave me a fleece pullover for the holidays. She bought it during a closeout sale earlier in the fall and I immediately fell in love with it. So comfortable. Smooth exterior that didn’t pill easily. Formal enough for Pacific Northwest business casual and warm enough to wear almost year around. The garment was sewn in panels to allow for lots of movement without pulling or tugging at the sleeves or bottom. And the Patagonia Piton Pullover in ‘Medium’ fit me like a glove.
I loved it so much I started looking for another one, but they were already discontinued. The chase started…and quickly got a little out of control. I set-up alerts on eBay for the Piton Pullover. The fleeces are rarely listed at Pitons, because nowhere on the tags is it named as such. You just have to search through listings and identify them visually.
I wrote Patagonia to get more information. They sent me catalog images and told me those fleeces were only available for two seasons—Fall 2012 and Fall 2013. There were nine colorways produced. Black appeared in the line-up both years. The first season had wonderful colors like Red Delicious, Bandana Blue, Dill, and Forge Grey. The second year arrived more reserved with Purple, Nickel, Graphite Navy, and an exception, Electric Orange.
I looked into following year’s style, the Piton Hybrid. It was, of course, inferior with its lightly patterned fabric and a vertical zippered chest pocket. The Hybrid also came in hoody, vest and jacket editions. Patagonia followed with Synchilla, R1 and Better Sweater and they just didn’t seem the same. Besides Ebay, I expanded my search to Patagonia’s own Worn Wear website and, more recently, Poshmark to find these hard to find items.
All told, I now own fourteen different versions of the Patagonia Piton, including the complete line of the original nine colorways, one color that isn’t in the standard line but the bear official style number STY47710 (I still don’t know where it came from), and four of the not-actually-inferior Hybrid editions.
This is the time of year those fleeces go into heavy rotation, as the air cools and the rains gather in Portland. I know it is a little obsessive to have collected all of them. The chase was fun though. And we live in a world that moves a little too fast to the next thing. For a while, I thought it was just me getting old and ornery, but companies can’t seem to settle anymore when they have found the right/best way to make something. It was nice to read and feel validated by Nick Heil and his search to find the best truck of all time.
The real truth is that these fleeces fit well, fit well into my life and they make me happy. I don’t need much more validation than that.
3.
The first time I heard Modern Skirts was on a Paste Magazine Sampler in 2006. I still miss those samplers and the amazing pipeline they were to amazing music in the 00’s. The track on that sampler was for their Catalogue of Generous Men album that the band had just released. For me, it lives as a rare album that I can be played from top to bottom and every song works with their pop hooks, twangy electric guitar, bar piano, and Beach Boys harmonies.
The track I have returned to most often is the seventh on the album—September Days. It was one of the first tracks the band wrote together. The song opens with a sparkling piano riff that invokes a late summer afternoon when it’s still warm and the sun is low in the sky. The lyrics are melancholy—”Everything changes and green turns to brown in your eyes.” It dances with both memory and loss, ending with horns that celebrate “the nicest days of the year”.
In 2010, the band crowdfunded a new album on Kickstarter. One of the rewards for backers was an opportunity for fans to choose a song and the band would make a unique recording of it. I asked them to do an acoustic version of September Days. The stripped down version is a touch slower and feels like an even better tempo for the song. I’ll post both of them here for your enjoyment.
September Days by Modern Skirts on Spotify
September Days (Acoustic Kickstarter Reward) by Modern Skirts
To stay sane over the last 16 months, I started walking every day. Our house sits on one of the walking trails in southwest Portland and, not far, there is a small park that contains a tree-filled ravine. Round trip, the walk is about one and a quarter miles along a hilly path. Most days, someone joins me. Some days, I walk alone. Some Saturdays, we’d get ambitious. One weekend, it was a drive out to Klickitat Trail in Washington. A few weeks ago, we left early in the morning to explore Ecola State Park on the Oregon coast during one of the lowest tides of the year. All the walks made the world seem a little bigger.
As the current shift in the US around COVID, I have labored to keep the walking habit and get out even more. There is a larger network of urban trails that run through our city quadrant. The trails connect parks, paths through side yards, and neighborhood streets. The trails are marked with brown signs with a hiker and the trail number. You see them sometimes if you pay close attention driving through a neighborhood or walking through a larger park.
I decided to walk all of the SW Trails this summer. My son Zach took up the challenge with me. They range between 4 and 10 miles in length with 500 to 1000 feet of elevation change.
We walked on Saturday mornings when it is cool and the sun is low in the sky. We run into people on various sections of hikes but we have yet to cross paths with someone truly hiking the trail we are on. So far, we’ve walked Trails 3, 4, 5, and 7. Trail 1 is next and we’ll end with Trail 6 that runs from Goose Hollow in downtown Portland, south 10.6 miles, to Lake Oswego.
Changes at Bard Press
There has been a lot going on behind the scenes at Bard Press over the last several months. It was the kind of work that was interesting and important but couldn’t talk about publicly until recently.
The first piece was our decision to move our sales and distribution to Two Rivers, a part of Ingram Publisher Services, the second largest book distributor in the US. We’ll be distributed alongside Harvard Business Review Press, Plata Publishing, the publisher of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, The New Press, Spiegel & Grau, and Molly Stern’s new publishing house Zando.
We have also been working on the future of Bard Press itself. In addition to my current role as publisher, I will become the owner and operator of Bard Press in September. We’ll continue to work with all the authors that we have published over the last 25 years and explore new ways to expand the reach of our amazing backlist. I will be announcing new projects in these coming months with our existing authors and new authors to our publishing house.
I am so happy to have reached this point and feel honored to have the opportunity to continue the tradition of publishing amazing books at Bard Press.
2021 Mid-Year Business Book Publishing Review
I mentioned before that most of my writing on book publishing takes place over on the Bard Press website now. Since my last newsletter, I have posted a 2021 Mid-Year Review for the world of business book publishing.
This year has been a good one for book publishing, with the industry up 21% year-to-date.
Atomic Habits by James Clear is the fastest book to reach a million copies in print sales.
Adam Grant’s Think Again is the breakout business book of 2021, with over 200K copies sold.
Jon Gordon, the author of over twenty five books, managed publish FOUR more in the last 12 months.
If you wanted to read books about Amazon, rather than buy books from Amazon, there has never been a better time. I count six new books published in the last six months.
And four books you might have missed – the new and expanded edition of Robert Cialdini’s Influence, the hardcover edition of The Psychology of Money, The Scout Mindset, and Ask Iwata, the collected writings of the former CEO of Nintendo.
Watched the Season One of For All Mankind on Apple TV. I don’t know why this show isn’t getting more love. Ronald Moore, of Battlestar Galactica fame, is helming the series and it is a historical reimagining of the Space Race. So good. We are starting Season Two and reports are that a third season has been ordered.
We have also been watching Marvel on Disney+. I feel like each series has been better than the prior one. Loki has been my favorite so far. Falcon Captain America and the Winter Soldier was really good and pushed hard on race like nothing before in the MCU. WandaVision was just OK for me, with the rolling sitcom treatment. Last weekend, we watched Black Widow through their Premier Access. The movie was good with its focus on “family” and gave more insight into what made Natasha a complicated character, both morally and with her fame as an Avenger.
I also want to share some love for Raya and the Last Dragon from Disney and Shadow and Bone on Netflix. I have also enjoyed The Playbook on Netflix, which interviews successful sport coaches about the work they do to prepare their players for games.
There are SO many books in my To Read pile. I have almost 40 books that I purchased and another 15 books that are checked out from the library. It’s so bad that I have started a list of “Books I Will Not Read in 2021.” My Not To Read list is a nod to the fact that many of these books caught my attention and I need to record them somewhere, while acknowledging there is no way I will get through all of them.
Right now, I am reading The Bhagavad Gita, Leadership On The Line by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linksky and just started Michael Lewis’ pandemic book The Premonition.
My music playlist has been all over the place lately. New releases I would point you toward would be Summer Bird by The National Parks, Nathan Evans’ version of Wellerman (the TikTok remix is amazing), and If Ever by Paula Fuga with Jack Johnson and Ben Harper.
This weekend, I was on the retailer’s website, searching for the product page for The ONE Thing. I had gotten advice earlier in the week that there was real value for publishers to add certain elements to the page, because Amazon weighed the inclusion of those elements in their search algorithm. When the page loaded, I noticed a special offer – buy two, save 50% on 1. The marketing copy was a little awkward, but it’s always great to see a Bard Press title included in a promotion like that. I clicked through to see what other titles were included in the promotion, and the results showed 1000 business titles to choose from, along with other items in office products, electronics and home improvement.
The promotion instructions said to put two participating products in your shopping cart and the discount would be automatically added. I choose Humor, Seriously by Jennifer Aaker and the new edition of Robert Cialinidi’s Influence. In the shopping cart, I could see the promotion reduced the two books’ cost by $9.15. I clicked the ‘Place your order” button and was informed the books will be here tomorrow. I can share the link to the promotion, so you can see what they offered, but the promotion has ended.
Amazon is always running experiments. Also this weekend, I researched or ran across:
A front list title offered for 80% off the retail price – that’s crazy low for a new book.
A book format option called “Print on Demand (Hardcover)” – why call it out?
Made for You Custom T-shirt– download the app, take pictures for measurements, and order your custom made shirt
Prime Wardrobe will pick out clothes for you for a five dollar styling fee and each month send you a selection to choose from – yes, I am going to try it.
2.
For the company that got its start selling books, there have been an amazing number of books written about it in the last two years. Amazon, Think Like Amazon, and Bezonomics are among the books that predate the pandemic. In the last six months the pace has quickened.
Invent & Wander, edited by Walter Isaacson is a collection of Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letters, speeches, and interviews. Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis, which came out in March, is described as a “a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow.” Working Backwards is the business book treatment of leadership principles and cultural values by former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. And this week Brad Stone’s Amazon Unbound is being released, the sequel to the BusinessWeek reporter’s 2013 book The Everything Store.
Six weeks ago, my daughter and I opened a seller account on Amazon. She wanted a way to earn money and I needed to recover floor space in my office from the overflowing piles of books. Of course, as a book publisher, I was also interested to see if I could learn anything about the used book market by dipping my toe in as a seller.
We did some research before we started and checked what the internet had to say about our new venture. Non-fiction sells better than fiction. Books with higher sales ranks sell faster, with #500,000 being the lower limit if you want to sell something fast. We found all of that to be true.
Since the first of April, we’ve shipped over 80 orders and sold almost $1500 in books. Like anything, we had to learn the system. Fees and shipping mean you can’t sell for less than eight or nine dollars. You can buy shipping from Amazon which is great, but they will only sell you shipping methods that meet the promised delivery times. Rather than economical media USPS media mail, you can get locked into Priority Express. Some adjustments to the lead times on our account reduced the need for faster shipping and the higher costs.
I learned that Amazon’s marketplace is robust. We sold books ranging from $6 to $100. Sellers are heavily competing on price—watching each other closely and adjusting continuously. Our buyers tended to live in populous states like New York, Florida, California, and Michigan. We sold through two-thirds of the books we listed in these last six weeks. We also have an equal number of books that we didn’t list because there was too much inventory or the price was too low for it to make sense for us.
4.
I just got done watching The Planets, a 2019 documentary series from NOVA and BBC Earth. I’d started watching it on Amazon Prime during one of the free windows to subscription content. It was so good I spent the $9.99 to buy the series outright. The five episodes were outstanding. My wife and I kept saying “How did we not know that?” The series pulled together 20 years of findings into a fun and informative highlight reel of scientific discovery. Interviews with NASA project managers and scientists were weaved together with imagery and animation from a wide variety of missions to other planets. Loved it.
And of course, if I am talking about Prime, I have to mention The Expanse. The series has been exclusive on Amazon Prime, since they brought the series back from near-death after the cancellation on the Scifi Channel. The Expanse is the best science fiction TV series since the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. They just finished the amazing fifth season and have started filming the sixth and final season of the series.
5.
Thanks for reading this month!
There was a big influx of new folks to the list over the last few months.
If you are interested in hearing from me and what is going on in my life, you are in the right place.
I have written extensively about pricing over the years and it seemed like a good idea to pull all of that material into one place with current links.
Pricing Pictures
This is a 10 page visual essay on how pricing can be employed many ways and involves decision beyond how much something costs. This essay is heavy on models and frameworks.
Fixed to Flexible
This is a longer essay I wrote about pricing that pulls together a set of ideas that are still relevant. From the introduction:
“Fixed has been replaced with flexible. Control of a product category, distribution channel or branding message no longer exists. While this is being heralded as a boon for customers, companies have been slower to adapt to the new terrain. Companies with multi-national presence and individuals with multitudes of projects both need to create a new set of strategies.”
After I published Fixed to Flexible, Phil Libin, then CEO of Evernote, reached out to me to correct a bit of my math. I took the opportunity to interview him and capture some of the current thought of the time around freemium tactics and startups.
In 2010, Seth Godin asked people to make a list of what they shipped. I have been doing this exercise each year since then. You can see my past #YearInReview posts here. Given how easy it is to feel like 2020 was a lost year, I feel an activity like this is more important than ever.
Took a full year of Japanese classes at my local community college.
I started a meditation group on Insight Timer for my Zen Center.
I collected a set of Buddhist writings and published a book called When We Make This Path Our Own. The print run was 10 copies. The book was created for a trip we planned to take in April and had to cancel.
Wrotefourresearchreports on the state of business book publishing after the market shifted in March.
Created The Nature Preserve, a seven game campaign expansion for Wingspan, with my wife Amy.
Spent a week solo in a cabin on Mount Hood that restored my soul.
Read 28 books.
Wrote eight personal newsletters under the “I’ve Been Thinking…” banner.
I wrote two 3000 word papers for a class at my Zen Center. The first paper was on my experience with engaging in Rinzai Zen practices. The second paper was on my experiences with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.
You might not believe it, but there were some great business books this year. And you probably missed them, distracted by the crazed year that was 2020.
Let me talk about it in two parts :
Part I
Like last year, I worked with Marker on Medium and did a meta-analysis of best of business book lists for 2020. In total, there were seven lists I looked at. They chose exactly 100 books this year. There were five books that were selected by three or more times by those lists.
No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer – Selected by five of seven lists. Just a great book on the Netflix’s culture. Not sure everyone will agree with everything they do.
No Filter by Sarah Frier – the best account of the rise of Instagram, on three lists including winning the Financial Times / McKinsey Business Book of The Year Award.
Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson – Things are changing, lots of examples here. Appeared on three lists.
If Then by Jill Lenore – The history of the first analytics company Simulatics and how their work still resonates today. The book appeared on three lists and was a longlist nominee for the National Book Award.
Uncharted by Margaret Heffernan – Some books are written to explain a moment, other books arrive at the right moment. Uncharted is both. It was also selected three times and is my personal favorite of the whole year.
There were three books on my list of personal favorites and there is some nice overlap with the meta-analysis. Here are longer reviews for each of them.
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
I remember being at a tech conference about six years ago and watching a set of speakers from Netflix. “No one approves our expense reports,” said one of the presenters. In a room full of corporate executives, there was an audible gasp. The speakers went on to say that no one approved the code they wrote either. Together, these two examples were meant to show that it wasn’t a question of policy or procedure. Netflix operates with a different culture.
No Rules Rules is the book that attempts to describe that culture. The book is written by two authors. The first author, to no surprise, is Reed Hastings, the co-founder and CEO of Netflix. With Hastings, you get the direct transference of his beliefs and reasoning for why Netflix is organized and run the way it is. The second author is Erin Meyer, a business professor from INSEAD. Meyer serves two roles, one as provider of confirming research and another as the voice of Netflix’s employees. As a part of writing the book, Meyer interviewed hundreds of workers all over the world. This internating narration enhances both the traditional CEO book and standard business school thesis, as they respond to each other on the pages of the book.
Hastings says Netflix’s culture is based on three reinforcing principles. The first tenet is to build the best group of talent possible, because highly talented individuals make each other more effective. “Talent density” is increased by always evaluating if the company has the best people and by paying top of market salaries. Next, increase candor among those folks, because the highly talented love feedback that can make them better. To ensure effectiveness and no hurt feelings, Netflix trains everyone to give and receive feedback. And finally, you remove controls and trust people to do their best work. Hastings says each of these practices has challenges, but the benefits of each tenet multiples when enacted with the others.
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Everything by BJ Fogg
If you looked at the business bookstore shelf any time in the last decade, you would have seen books on habits trying to crowd each other out. Novel scientific research provided new material to writers. The growth in the gig economy and work-from-home arrangements fueled new interest from readers adjusting to the challenges with personal accountability. And everyone found help with titles like Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, Wendy Wood’s Good Habits, Bad Habits and The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.
I didn’t believe there was more room for another habits book until I read Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. His research and his writings isolate the particular components of what make up habits and show people how to best utilize each to create new habits. I can’t think of a better time for this kind of book. Fogg is like a trainer you might hire if you really wanted more and better habits. He makes it simple to learn. He discerns the particular techniques that work best. And he’s also creative in how to engage them.
Only a few pages into the book, Fogg starts talking about a universal model for behavior. He says the model applies to everything, good and bad. Every behavior has three components: motivation, ability, and prompt (BMAP, for short) Simple, right? When you are trying to change a behavior, start with the prompt and ask if there was a reliable trigger for the behavior. Next, ask if how able you were to do the new behavior? Ability could affect everything from having what you need to knowing what needs to be done. The final factor to check is motivation. High motivation makes creating a new behavior easy but motivation fluctuates and can interact with other competing motivations.
What you are getting in Tiny Habits is a 300 page workshop. There is a whole chapter with ideas on how to break habits. And a chapter on working with others on habits. And appendices with scripts, flowcharts, and lists to help you brainstorm habits for common challenges. This book is packed with tips and lessons to learn how to change your behavior and teach others to do the same.
Uncharted: How To Map The Future by Margaret Heffernan
Some books are written to explain a moment, other books arrive at the right moment. Uncharted is both. In our craving for a “new normal”, Heffernan would caution against there ever being a known future. Forecasts attempt to predict the future, but they are easily flawed with the ideologies of their creators. Memory, individual and collective, gives us the capacity to simulate the future, and we then miss the variations by creating false analogies of new situations. As our datasets grow, so does our false confidence in seeing the patterns they hold.
There are so many stories that drew my attention, the additional benefit of reading the perspectives from a European-based author. You could draw lessons from Ireland’s experiment with deliberative democracy to work with controversial topics like gay marriage and abortion. You could look to Alberto Fernandez’s work to fight corruption and reestablish a sense of ethics in his home country of Mexico. Heffernan highlights artists like playwright Henrik Ibsen and printmaker Norman Ackroyd, pointing to a different process for how one might uncover and trust what will unfold.
Uncharted read like popular nonfiction from authors like Mary Roach or Chip Heath. Heffernan mines a wide ranging cast of characters and histories. Her style favors more examples, which runs the risk of overwhelm, but never does. The throughline persists and we can see how all of these points connect into a greater understanding. Her intention is not to provide answers, but consider the questions that makes you think about how you think about the future.
I don’t remember exactly what caused me to calculate this. I vaguely remember a “How To Survive 2020” article from early in the summer and its encouragement to shorten the timeframe you were focused on.
The pandemic has shown how foolish we are in thinking we know what will happen next, how strong the illusion that all our plans will unfold and all our goals will be achieved. Our plans never survive first contact with reality, but the needed adjustments are often minor. We forget all the tinkering and how easily the direction of our lives is nudged towards another unknown destination.
I don’t know anyone who is not noticing the adjustments now, all that change that feels like has been forced on us. There is an enormous amount of denial about that change. We seem unable to accept. We cling to being certain, mostly certain that reality is something different that it really is. In times like these, “I don’t know” is a good antidote. Not knowing can be a good place to sit. The tension between ‘what we want’ and ‘what is’ is relieved.
The actuary tables say I have almost exactly 11,000 days left. I turn fifty this year and that is coming with some denial. There is also nostalgia. I want to hold onto things that aren’t true anymore. There are not more days ahead of me than behind me. Maintaining my weight is no longer automatic. My three amazing teenagers will not be here forever.
Right now, I am focusing on today and finishing writing this newsletter. That feels like a good place to sit.
Best of 2020
Last year, I wrote a piece for Medium about the best business books of 2019. I looked at all of the important lists—Financial Times/McKinsey competition, Amazon, Inc. Magazine, Porchlight Books, Strategy + Business Magazine, and Bookpal—to see how much agreement there was between them. Last year, there were three books chosen by five of those six sources. That was some incredible consistency across such a wide range of perspectives. Range, Nine Lies About Work and Loonshots are all great titles if you haven’t read them.
Medium invited me back again this year and I am working on the essay for 2020 now. It will be published next week but I thought I could give you a little sneak peak 🙂 There wasn’t the level of consistency that there was last year. One book appeared on four of the six lists and that was No Rules Rules by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and INSEAD professor Erin Meyer. I like this book alot. The book explains the media company’s culture that has propelled them forward as they disrupted their own business multiple times. The teachings are also intriguing because I am not sure they can be easily applied in other places. Hastings and Meyer talk about the convincing upsides and downsides that they knowingly accept.
Four other books were selected by three outlets: No Filter by Sarah Frier, If Then by Jill Lepore, Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson, and Uncharted by Margaret Heffernan. I’ll have more to say about those in the article.
The Season of Celebration
December is a month full of celebrations. There are almost too many to list: Christmas, Hanukkah, the Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day in UK, Omisoka in Japan. You could certainly add the various forms of Thanksgiving and Diwali. I’d like to add one more to your list.
In Buddhist tradition, this week is the most venerated time in the yearly calendar. In Zen, this week is called Rohastu, which literally translates as ‘the 8th day of the 12th month.’ December 8th, which was yesterday, commemorates the Buddha’s enlightenment. The story goes that Siddharta sat under the Bodhi Tree for 49 days without moving. On the final night, he finally found the answers he had been searching for most of his life. His insights became the core teachings of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. In temples all over the world, even this year, people are sitting seven day sesshin, in respect to the Buddha’s and their own enlightenment.
In 2017, I visited India and made a trip to Bodhgaya, where the Bodhi Tree is located. I was immediately taken by the place. There were practitioners making their way through 100,000 full prostrations in front of the temple with their kneeling boards and digital counters. Monks were circumambulating the temple, most walking, some one prostration at a time. For most of the week there were several thousand Tibetan monks on the grounds each day chanting.
Before all those ceremonies started, I spent a day sitting under the tree. I didn’t bring Siddharta’s commitment to finding the path. My intention was to just be there and be curious. I watched people chase the precious leaves that fell from the tree. I sat with my teacher for a while. I looked for images to capture with my camera, trying to hold onto the indescribable feeling of devotion and peace that this place held. As I got up to leave, someone walked over to me, smiled, and handed me a leaf.
Last Words
The secret to happiness, of course, is not getting what you want; it’s wanting what you get.”
