Patty McCord’s Powerful is an expansion of the Netflix Culture Deck (which she co-authored) from her perspective as the former head of HR at Netflix. It’s a quick read that covers a lot of ground. Much of what she says we should be doing resonated strongly for me.
Early on, McCord makes an important distinction: that transforming culture is a matter of identifying behaviors, using language very similar to what I’ve often said when discussing cultural tranformation:

The most important thing to understand about transforming a culture, whether that of a team or a whole company, is that it isn’t a matter of simply professing a set of values and operating principles. It’s a matter of identifying the behaviors that you would like to see become consistent practices and then instilling the discipline of actually doing them.

McCord digs into the behaviors that matter — for team members, but mostly for leaders. She calls for clear and open communication of business strategy as well as open and honest conversation about performance. She also points out that when people appear clueless, that’s generally leaderships fault:

I expect you’ve had the experience of talking to someone on your team about a business issue and being asked a question that makes you think, This person is clueless! Well, next time it happens, I want you to say to yourself, Wait, right, this person is clueless. He doesn’t know what I know. So I have to inform him.

She also shared this advice: “How do you know when people are well enough informed? Here’s my measure. If you stop any employee, at any level of the company, in the break room or the elevator and ask what are the five most important things the company is working on for the next six months, that person should be able to tell you, rapid fire, one, two, three, four, five, ideally using the same words you’ve used in your communications to the staff and, if they’re really good, in the same order. If not, the heartbeat isn’t strong enough yet.” This reminded me of Julia Grace’s talk from The Lead Developer conference earlier this year in Austin, and I think it can be a useful measure of how well a team is focused on priorities at any level of a business.

McCord’s advice on feedback reads much like Radical Candor. Some of the ideas are more challenging. I’m fascinated as a manager with the idea that Netflix sets an explicit standard that it’s unacceptable to talk about people behind their backs except in the case of ethical concerns which need to be addressed confidentiality. I’m not sure that everyone would be comfortable with that, but I do find the idea intriguing, and it’s given me a new idea to explore.

McCord’s thoughts on hiring and building a team are thought-provoking. She suggests approaches hiring needs with a very future-centered approach that are quite different from the approaches I’ve typically seen: “In my experience, one of the most important questions business leaders must regularly ask is “Are we limited by the team we have not being the team we should have?”” Netflix’s performance system is decoupled from its compensation structure, and McCord suggests an approach to letting people go that many would find shocking. While I do agree with much in the case she lays out, I expect that many (including me) would find it difficult to be so freely willing to fire people (even in writing this, I wanted to avoid that language with “let people go”. But let’s face it, McCord is talking about firing people).

Something that bothered me about the advice McCord lays out in this book seems to ignore any risk of building a monoculture. Comments like: “it taught us that the best thing you can do for employees is hire only high performers to work alongside them,” show thinking that has caused the lack of diversity in our industry. The book mentions only mentions diversity in passing, and that’s a bit surprising for a book published today.

The biggest problem that I have with this book is this: the Netflix approach was developed with a strong, centralized push to embrace it. This book does little to suggest how to pull these ideas into a more traditional enterprise. For those of us not working at Netflix, that is likely to prove problematic. Nevertheless, I found it a thought-provoking and challenging read; and I mean that as a complement.

Iris Bohnet’s What Works: Gender Equality by Design is probably the most pragmatic books on changing organizational culture that I’ve ever read. Over the course of the book, Bohnet offers 36 research-grounded design suggestions for achieving gender equality in the workplace. The use of the word “design” here is intentional: Bohnet is a behavioral economist, and the book offers much in the way of behavioral design from that perspective. Bohnet presents a careful review of current research — occasionally, this can be a bit dizzying as she walks through conflicting studies, but in the end she consistently delivers evidenced-based recommendations for how to achieve gender equality in the workplace and beyond.
This dizzying coverage of so much research and so many ideas can be a bit overwhelming. I had an incredibly difficult time narrowing down my selection of quotes for this summary. The behavioral design approach means that the solutions Bohnet offers in the book are incredibly practical. Given my own focus on hiring and interview processes over the last few years, I loved the checklist for comparative, structured interviews, and it has evolved my thinking on interviewing management candidates. The book also offers thought provoking insights into opportunities to improve diversity when hiring like this one:

The police force in the United Kingdom substantially increased the talent pool by adopting a friendlier tone and asking people a simple question before they took the entry exam: Why do you want to join the police and why does it matter to your community? Hearing a different tone and being nudged to think about what motivated them increased the pass rate of minority group applicants by 50 percent. Making a small change that had a big impact required no more than the insights and experimentation of a few creative thinkers at the UK Behavioral Insights Team.

Bohnet reviews research into all aspects of gender differences without shying away from the fact that there are measurable differences between the genders in different societies. For example, she digs into gender differences in competitiveness, pointing out that, “For MBA graduates at Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, interpersonal differences in willingness to compete translate into significant differences in earnings, explain part of the gender gap in earnings, and have long-lasting effects: competitive graduates are more likely to work in higher-paying industries nine years after graduation.” When discussing these ideas, Bohnet covers both the long term need to explore the ways society might create or amplify those differences, while suggesting how companies might address it in the meantime.
Bohnet really digs into every aspect impacting gender equality in the workplace and society. While I was somewhat aware that female leaders can sometimes be the cause of discrimination against women, I was not familiar with much of the research this book presents. Bohnet gets right into interesting stories like this and goes on to address how we might correct for it.

In Spain, academic promotions from assistant professor to associate professor and then to full professor are determined by randomly created evaluation committees, leading to random variation in the gender composition of the committees. It turns out that female associate professors evaluating assistant professors for promotion were more likely to be in favor of promoting male junior colleagues. But this effect was only evident when evaluator and candidate were at the same institution. It appears as if the evaluator again feared same-sex competition, perhaps assuming some implicit gender quota. In fact, if a male evaluator was replaced by a female evaluator of the same institution, this decreased the likelihood that a junior female candidate was promoted by 38 percent. It did not affect female candidates from other institutions. Nor did the researchers observe any of this behavior for promotions to full professor. When full professors evaluate associate professors to join their ranks, they need not fear same-sex competition. Full professor is the highest rank possible in academia, and at that point, evaluators, looking for friends and people like themselves, exhibited an in-group preference, favoring candidates of the same sex and academic network.

The book also digs into other areas of diversity that, while not directly related to addressing the gender gap, struck me as fascinating. Given the huge trend anti-PC rhetoric in the U.S. at the moment, this research-driven call in favor of political correctness for creative endeavors stood out:

In addition, and somewhat counter-intuitively, groups might want to constrain themselves from speaking freely. The study “Creativity from Constraint” presents experimental evidence on how imposing a norm of political correctness (PC) that specifies how men and women should interact with each other enhances creativity in mixed-sex groups. The PC norm increased the exchange of ideas by clarifying the rules of engagement and providing assurance to those, predominantly women, for whom speaking up was associated with counterstereotypical behavior.

As organizations work to hire diverse employees into largely homogeneous teams, they face challenges. I’ve heard women describe having a single woman in an otherwise-male software team as an anti-pattern. Bohnet offers pointers into when diversity matters the most, and when homogeneity might actually be a good thing. This will take me a while to absorb and think through.

If a task involves coordination, say the provision of a public good like clean water or better health care, homogeneous groups can be helpful. All-women teams, for example, outperformed mixed and all-male teams in Friend or Foe because they correctly believed that women would be more likely to cooperate than men, leading to a virtuous cycle.
If a task involves individual problem-solving, say test-taking, be aware of peer effects. Diversity might produce spillovers (or, more formally, “externalities”) affecting, for example, how students perform in a class. If one group is more likely to work hard or disrupt less, as has been found to be true of girls, having them over-represented can help others, in this case boys, perform better.

Like many, I pay careful attention to diversity reports coming out of major tech companies each year. I often find them discouraging, and after finishing the chapters on behavioral modifications that might work, I find myself wondering if they’re actually doing a disservice by normalizing the current levels of diversity.

Making public and visible how well a company or country does in terms of gender equality compared to others might also promote convergence on a new norm. Indeed, a number of organizations now provide social comparisons or explicit rankings based on gender equality. In 2006, the World Economic Forum (WEF) launched its annual Global Gender Gap Report measuring the existing gender gaps in four categories: economic participation and opportunity (pay, participation, and leadership), political empowerment (representation), education (access), and health and survival (life expectancy and sex ratio at birth). Since then, the WEF has annually published a report measuring how the gaps are changing over time. It ranks countries on their overall performance, as well as on how well they do in all four categories. Over nine years, the Nordic countries have been leading the pack with Iceland having closed the overall gap by 87.3 percent (with 100 percent indicating gender equality) as of 2013. Generally, Middle Eastern and North African countries have fared worst, with Yemen having closed only 51.2 percent of the overall gap.

At the least, the book has me convinced that collecting the numbers that companies release and putting them in ranked order with a visual and easy to understand score might be a helpful step in the right direction.

Improvements in a college’s rank on US News and World Report Best College Rankings immediately translate into a larger number of applications. Interestingly enough, however, the authors only find this effect when the magazine presents the colleges ordered by rank. When the colleges are listed alphabetically, with their rank included in the body copy describing the institution, no effect on applications could be detected. Only easily understandable and highly visible comparisons mattered, something gender equality designers hoping to influence behavior need to keep in mind.

Beyond the huge volume of research surveyed in this book, Bohnet also provides tons of other resources for people and organizations working towards gender equality. It’s a tremendous resource of practical and thought-provoking ideas. I especially appreciated the depth of coverage. In fact that very depth occasionally had me worried that this book could become a resource for the James Damores of the world to cherry pick isolated arguments out of context. But I suppose it would be a bit too much to expect this book to offer solutions to that. Overall, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s sure to be something I refer back to often, and if you’re interested in understanding and correcting gender inequality, you should read this book.

This book is a very short overview of the management career track — it’s probably of most use to an engineer debating making the switch between the technical and management track. Fournier’s thoughts resonate strongly with me, and I have already recommended it to a few friends and colleagues.
Some of her advice was entirely new to me; like this particular idea that made me stop reading and think for a bit: “Leaders who are strong team players understand that the people who report to them are not their first team. Instead, their first team is their peers across the company. This first-team focus helps them make decisions that consider the needs of the company as a whole before focusing on the needs of their team.” That’s such an interesting idea, but I was disapointed that Fournier doesn’t go on to explore the idea in significant detail. Here’s a longer passage that showcases the human-centered approach that she’s filled the book with:

Do remember to be kind. It’s natural and perfectly human to want to be liked by other people. Many of us believe that the way to be liked is to be seen as nice — that niceness is itself the goal. Your goal as a manager, however, should not be to be nice, it should be to be kind. “Nice” is the language of polite society, where you’re trying to get along with strangers or acquaintances. Nice is saying “please” and “thank you” and holding doors for people struggling with bags or strollers. Nice is saying “I’m fine” when asked how you are, instead of “I’m in a really crappy mood and I wish you would leave me alone.” Nice is a good thing in casual conversation. But as a manager, you will have relationships that go deeper, and it’s more important to be kind. It’s kind to tell someone who isn’t ready for promotion that she isn’t ready, and back that up with the work she needs to do to get there. It’s unkind to lead that person on, saying “Maybe you could get promoted,” and then watch her fail. It’s kind to tell someone that his behavior in meetings is disrupting the group. It’s awkward, and uncomfortable, but it’s also part of your job as his manager to have these difficult conversations.

Her advice on hiring managers was, to me, one of the most valuable bits of insight in the book. She lays down some suggestions that have helped me think through how I could potentially build out a manager interview process that is truly audition-based. I’m excited to put those ideas into practice.
If the book has a weakness, it’s that in achieving the “very short overview” it offers, the book feels rushed. As with the first-team focus I mentioned above — she leaves lots of ideas only partially explored. Luckily, the book does include a great list of suggestions for follow up reading. I found several books I’m looking forward to digging into.

It’s a challenge to think of useful things that I can tell you about this book that you don’t already know from listening to the Radical Candor podcast (and you are listening to it, aren’t you?) — much of the book will be very familiar. The podcast often references the book and the book often references the podcast, so there’s a bit of a ouroborus trying to talk about one or the other.
The premise of the book and podcast is simple: by providing honest feedback (and especially not shying away from negative feedback) you will lead your team to better results. That’s not quite enough to fill a book, but that’s really at the core of all the advice: whether it’s getting to know what motivates your team or how to run effective collaborative meetings, it all relates back to create a culture of useful feedback.
There’s plenty of good advice to be followed here, and I would strongly recommend the book for new leaders (or even leaders moving into new roles) looking for good advice on getting started: there’s even a “Getting Started” guide at the back of the book to walk you through implementing the books’ ideas. Here’s one of my favorite bits, which is a typical example of the obvious (once it has been clearly stated) advice that the book is full of:

One of the funniest things about becoming a boss is that it causes an awful lot of people to forget everything they know about how to relate to other people. If you have a beef with somebody in your personal life, it would never occur to you to wait for a formally scheduled meeting to tell them. Yet, management has been bureaucratized to the point that we throw away effective strategies of everyday communication. Don’t let the formal processes — the 1:1 meetings, annual or biannual performance reviews, or employee happiness surveys — take over. They are meant to reinforce, not substitute, what we do every day. You’d never let the fact that you go to the dentist for a cleaning a couple times a year prevent you from brushing your teeth every day. Don’t use performance reviews as an excuse not to give impromptu in-person feedback.

I’m a reader and I liked this book quite a bit, but if you’re not a reader, fear not! You can get plenty from tuning into the podcast each week.

I’ve been interested lately in the idea of using infographic pages to display critical stats about the services my teams build. In typical fashion, I decided to start by reading a book, and this one seems to be the book to read in the field of informative graphics.
It was definitely a bit of a mismatch — I didn’t get what I was hoping to out of the book. Perhaps partly because of my disappointment in that, I also didn’t find the book to be very helpful. For one thing, most of the rules Tufte lays out are negative rules. “Don’t use gridlines” (he calls it chartjunk) is typical. Even some of his “Do” rules are really about things that should be erased. Some of the ideas seemed obvious to me and others felt like an opinion stated as absolute fact.
And that’s definitely a thing in this book: Tufte rarely sounds like he’s voicing an opinion, instead the book is filled with statements like “Beautiful graphics do not traffic with the trivial.” As I was reading the book, my inner voice would often fall into a Hollywood “Voice of God” tone. Here’s another typical example (although in this one, at least Tufte starts out with the qualifier “should”):

Data graphics should often be based on large rather than small data matrices and have a high rather than low data density. More information is better than less information, especially when the marginal costs of handling and interpreting additional information are low, as they are for most graphics.

Perhaps this book, written in 1982, has just become a bit dated? I found some of Tufte’s “improvements” on data display more confusing than the originals; apparently those visual metaphors did not catch on. I did get some value out of the book; I suppose it served as an introduction to some of the vocabulary and concepts, but overall I’d say this book is more useful to someone who’s building graphics in a statistical context than someone looking to do so in a business context.

This short, entertaining and insightful book tells the story of how the author, David Marquet, effectively applied bottom-up leadership principles when taking over command of a submarine, and achieved some truly remarkable results.
As I began reading a lot about leadership research a few years ago, I initially found myself quite surprised to find references that the US Armed forces have been increasingly abandoning command and control leadership approaches for a much more modern and collaborative approach. If you haven’t seen evidence of that yet, it may surprise you that the passage below was written by a submarine Commander:

In our modern world, the most important work we do is cognitive; so, it’s not surprising that a structure developed for physical work isn’t optimal for intellectual work. People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers. As followers, they have limited decision-making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy, and passion. Those who take orders usually run at half speed, underutilizing their imagination and initiative.

Because this book walks through his journey starting a short time before he took over command, it offers insights that would probably be especially useful to someone taking on a new leadership role: I suspect it will be on my re-read list when the next transition in my career comes.
The book is surprisingly short, but it packs a lot of thoughtful advice into its pages while remaining entertaining and engaging. Marquet does a fantastic job of using stories to illustrate his point, and having fun with them. He achieves a subtle elegance with language that I don’t expect out of leadership books. Here’s a typical example, where I had to pause to ponder for a bit which meaning of “blow stuff up” applied:

For phase one, we rendezvoused with a helicopter and picked up the SEAL team. Eleven burly guys, their weapons, two rolled-up Zodiac inflatable boats, two motors for the Zodiacs, and a bunch of equipment to blow stuff up left the helicopter, came on board the submarine, and went down the hatch.

If you don’t have time for the book, you can get most of the essence of it from this excellent video:

meh.
The last time I was applying for a job I wondered frequently whether it would be a worthwhile investment for me to get my MBA. Many people go and get their MBA to get the sort of job that I had at the time. But would it have made me a more attractive candidate? Since then, I’ve had conversations with several trusted mentors and have decided that it’s not going to help me do the sorts of things that I want to do.
However, The Ten Day MBA looked like a quick and potentially useful survey over some of what I was missing. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to retain much of what I read; it’s simply too fast. A 30 page summary of quantitative analysis? Nope. Silbiger only has the space to make super quick statements without follow-up, such as when describing the Keynesian relationship: “It was especially true in the period between 1950 and 1985, but it has not been consistently so over time, such as the period since 1985.” What exactly is that saying? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You’ll have to find your own answers to many such questions when reading this book.
The book also suffers from being an older book that has been updated over time. A section recommending the internet as a really good way to do research, which lists a few useful search sites including yahoo and google as really good resources? You might get a headache from the speed at which your eyes roll into their sockets. And that worries me about other advice in the book which I know less about.
I quickly realized this was going to be useful in the same way that books like “Teach yourself C++ in 21 Days” were useful in the age of dial-up networking and terrible internet searching — the book gives you a general overview of the topics, gets some key words and concepts in your head, and you can refer back to it whenever you need to. When you do that it will give you a quick overview, which you can use as a springboard to jump into more detailed study.
All-in-all, for me personally this book was probably a better investment than getting an MBA would be. I’ll leave it at that.