Books
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Stand Out
→: Stand OutOver the weekend, I finished reading Marcus Buckingham’s Stand Out (Amazon). Similar to StrengthsFinder (Amazon) – which I blogged about recently), only instead of highlighting what your strengths are, it focuses on how others see you. I found it pretty interesting, and if you’re also interested in how your team perceives you, it’s probably worth taking. StrengthsFinder…
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Trust and Team Dysfunction
→: Trust and Team DysfunctionI’m taking a leadership course at work at the moment, and this week we spent time discussing The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon). I’d recently read Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon) so it was interesting to hear what other people thought of the concepts. There’s a pyramid of things – Inattention to Results,…
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Female Chauvinist Pigs
→: Female Chauvinist PigsContinuing my education in Feminism, I’ve been reading this, mind-blowing, book – Female Chauvinist Pigs, by Ariel Levy (Amazon). Essentially it’s about how the sexualization of women and the increasing sexual promiscuity of women is not female liberation. To be clear, the book is not anti-sex. It’s pro-sex. But, sex for pleasure and not for…
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Strengthsfinder 2.0
→: Strengthsfinder 2.0I’m taking a leadership course at work just now, and one of the exercises was to take the StrengthsFinder (Amazon) test. At first I took the test and thought it was a bit rubbish. I didn’t really have strong preferences for a lot of things (much of which came from me being very ambivert) and so…
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Novels are the Best Hiding Place
→: Novels are the Best Hiding PlaceI do subscribe to the theory that will-power is a depletable resource. It’s why I hired a trainer in grad school – I felt like my willpower was used up by research and grad school tedium, and whilst I would do exercise that I enjoyed, I would not get round to doing the weight training that I…
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Engineering an Interesting Life
→: Engineering an Interesting LifeAbstract: In a world where computing power doubles roughly every two years, the goal is no longer efficiency, but effectiveness. The education system prepares students for efficiency, but to be successful when we go out into the world (or before!) we need rather to learn to be effective. In this workshop, we’ll discuss more useful things…
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Blood, Bones and Butter
→: Blood, Bones and ButterI read about Blood, Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton (Amazon) on the Eloquent Woman blog, which discussed a section of the book in which the author writes about a panel she was on, and things she wanted to say, but didn’t. It was a panel about female chefs. Initially she has an attitude of “why are…
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Pride and Prejudice and a Timely Reminder
→: Pride and Prejudice and a Timely Reminder“Someone once said to you that you didn’t have a romantic bone in your body, and I’ve come to think they were right…” My friend and mentor says. I forget where the conversation went from there, but I feel that she would have been shocked to find me curled up with Pride and Prejudice (free on…
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Rise: How to Be Really Successful and Like Your Life
→: Rise: How to Be Really Successful and Like Your LifeRise (Amazon) is focused on helping you become CEO. As a result I found some of it a bit overly-ambitious for me. But – it contained some really great advice. 1. Ruthless Priorities. You have too much to do, but hey – don’t we all. The trick is to decide what’s critical and do an outstanding…