Category: Books
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Book: Wonder Women
Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection (Amazon) is… a brief history of feminism intermingled with an exhausting amount of cis-het-normatism with a side of biological essentialism. In this universe, race and sexuality are an afterthought, “transgendered” is an adjective, and women who don’t want children don’t exist at all. Most of the…
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Book: No Rules Rules
I read this on a recommendation, I was a little skeptical about the whole Netflix culture thing. Like most people I knew about the “fire the people who you wouldn’t fight to keep” and it seemed a little too cut-throat. In the end, I found the book fascinating – there was a level of nuance…
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Book: Off the Clock
In my current round of “argh what has this pandemic done to my life” I have been thinking a lot about time. Feeling too scheduled – at work, and outside of work needing to schedule every little thing (ok, mainly the gym) was really getting to me. I came across another book from Laura Vanderkam…
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Book: Trust Your Canary
I started reading Trust Your Canary (Amazon) to better understand the concept of “incivility” which had come up as part of some of our DE&I work. It was pretty helpful around that, but probably the majority of the value I got out of it was in the first few chapters. It also made me consider…
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Positive Intelligence
This year (thanks to my coach, Dani) I’ve been spending a lot of time on “PQ” aka “Positive Intelligence” aka “mental fitness”. I read the book, took the six week intensive program, and continue to practice it (almost) every day. What is it? the core premise is that there is the part of your brain…
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Book: Let’s Talk
Let’s Talk: Make Effective Feedback Your Superpower (Amazon) was so good – I read an interview with the author, ordered it immediately, read it soon after, and was already recommending it to people a few chapters in. It’s a book about feedback, which, cool, plenty of them, and plenty of conversations about feedback. The thing…
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Books about Therapy
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Amazon) was one of the most impactful books I read in 2019. It was extremely readable and super insightful. Reading this book fundamentally changed my approach to therapy, helped me accelerate my progress, and ultimately finish* (*at least for now) therapy. Therapy is such a personal thing and it’s…
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Book: Living by the Code
I’m in this book Living By the Code, talking about engineering management. Ray helpfully pulled out some of his highlights from my interview: 1) Keeping a team productiveI loved the section where you talked about orienting the entire team toward continuously delivering use value. It sounds so simple when you say it, but it’s so…
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Book: Managing Transitions
I’ve been thinking a lot about change management, lately – what makes it work, what makes it not. As a result, I was looking for reading that would help me formalize some of the concepts, to allow me to go one level deeper than recognizing what won’t work to more thoughtfully critique why certain things…