I bought Thinking in Bets (Amazon) a while ago, April 2020 to be precise. It finally made it’s way out of my endless “to read” pile because I was having something of a crisis of confidence about my own decision making.
Some key thing that stood out.
Separating analysis of the result from the decision itself. The analogy throughout the book is poker, which is a combination of skill and luck. It’s an example of the key bias humans have – to associate winning with good skill, and losses to bad luck. Learning from decisions means separating out the luck and the skill, and focusing on improving skill without being as swayed by outcome. E.g. looking for mistakes made in a winning hand.
Assigning probabilities. Useful in communication of certainty, as well as a forcing function to really think though the confidence level. E.g. in a discussion saying, “I”m 60% on this, so I could easily go the other way”. Assigning probabilities in this way also encourages people to communicate them back to you, and then you can reconcile the difference.
The concept of “truth seeking”. Basically group interrogation of decisions, mistakes etc. In poker, talking through the hand in minute detail, and not even mentioning the outcome, and diving into mistakes. She also talks here about dissenting opinions on political lines, and how political polarization on the supreme court became worse as conservative judges stopped hiring liberal clerks. Having your thinking interrogated is part of forming balanced and well founded judgements. I hate the political example because it makes me think about debating human rights, but in other contexts I do agree and believe that you learn the most from people who disagree with you.
All in all I found it interesting, an easy enough read, and it definitely helped with the decision-making-confidence-crisis, so that was great.
I’m unsure what I think about Machiavelli for Women (Amazon). There were things that I appreciated, and things that were infuriating. To be fair, the things I found infuriating were mostly also things the author herself notes as infuriating, saying her goal with the book is to articulate what works as things are, not what should work if things were more equitable.
Some highlights:
“Cinderella syndrome”: where you’re not told no, but rather told to do a lot of work and then yes. Avoids difficult conversation, gets that work done, Cinderella never goes to the ball.
“Hotbox”: being trapped between two bases running back and forth until exhausted.
“The Hotbox is something that often happens to women in mid-career, when they start getting close to leadership positions or positions of power. The two “bases” in this case are femininity and leadership qualities, and many women end up caught between these two sets of expectations, running themselves ragged in a no-win situation.”
There are two sections on negotiation (didn’t quite understand this, structurally). One is built (I think) on the (amazing) book Women Don’t Ask.
“When it comes to asking for more money the Machiavellian woman sees a situation where the downside is certain and the upside is iffy. So she doesn’t ask.”
There’s a list of reasons given why women struggle to negotiate, varying degrees of depressing.
Women are grateful for less.
Negotiation is painful.
Women think it’s safer to be paid less (won’t be identified as too expensive and cut).
It hurts to ask.
Women and money is complicated, women are punished for caring about it
Tips are pretty standard: arm yourself with information, have options other than salary, make it win-win.
On confidence,
“The consequences of a lack of confidence show up in all kinds of ways, including how we value ourselves and our work. In study after study, men place a higher dollar value on their work than women do. In one study, men and women were presented with a task and then asked to pay themselves what they felt they deserved. The men paid themselves 63 percent more, on average, than the women did and were significantly less productive.”
One thing that really stood out to me was the types of office house keeping
Social coordination / hostessing.
Adminastrative-type work.
Emotional labour.
Drudge work.
Serving on committees (academia).
I tend to think of office housekeeping as the administrivia and social coordination, and it was eye opening to see emotional labour called out. I have definitely observed (and experienced) situations where a level of emotional labour is expected from a woman that I am very doubtful would be expected elsewhere.
I wonder if DEI work is industry’s equivalent of serving on committees. Especially the kind of performative DEI work that doesn’t effect systematic change – such a depressing waste of time.
For all some of the advice is really infuriating, there’s a useful section on knowing when to leave, including some depressing facts on how people who are mistreated tend to stay longer. Two key tips.
The first is to try the list once. If you don\t get what you want (like the promotion), ask for the list, do everything on it, and then go back. If you don’t get it after that, it’s time to look for a new job.
The second thing is to look whether people like you are successful there. If not, you’ll always be fighting an even more uphill battle to be the first / only.
I’ve had this book in the backlog for a while and in the end read it when I was in a bit of a funk about things, including specifically office housework and advancement, so it was at least somewhat cathartic. The thing is that so much of the strategies are things that most women seem to know, but are tedious, tiring, and have inconsistent results, which leaves me unclear on how helpful this book actually is. But maybe it’s worth the reminder that certain things are useful, even if they infuriate us.
I heard about The Alchemy of Us (Amazon) when the author (Ainissa Ramirez) was on the Broad Experience podcast, talking about her work in Science Communications and the challenges of being a Black woman in science (great episode).
I immediately bought the book, and then took… 8 months to get to reading it. It’s a lovely book, though. All about key inventions in science and the stories around them. The people you don’t usually hear about, like the guy who inspired Edison to make the electic lightbulb (William Wallace). The failures of the would-be organic chemist who went on to perfect glass composition (Otto Schott). The woman (Ruth Belville) who sold time. It’s an easy but informative read, I really enjoyed it.
I really got a lot out of Coach the Person, Not the Problem [Amazon]. Whilst the content was covered in the courses I took, it approached it in a different way – deconstruction versus experiential – and that was really helpful for solidifying my learning.
At it’s core, it’s about switching your focus to the person, because the temptation to focus on the problem is what leads to advice, solutionizing etc. By focusing on the person, you make them bigger than the problem and support them through the process of deciding themselves what they want to do.
Reflective enquiry is about making people feel really heard. By reflecting back to them you allow them to see themselves more clearly, define steps forward. Sometimes people have the impression that coaching is passively asking open ended questions. Reflective enquiry is crucial for more effective coaching. It helps the person step back and see their actions / themselves from another perspective.
In terms of the writing, one thing I really appreciated about this book was that it took the time to really explore the topic without feeling excessive. As such, it took me a while to read it, but I felt the time was worthwhile. Definitely recommend if you want to better understand coaching.
Woman of Influence (Amazon) is about building your brand as a leader and taking charge of your career. It’s full of actionable strategies for understanding how you’re perceived – and how to change it.
My personal favourite is a long time favourite tool of Jo’s – the shadow org chart. This is the map of who influences who in an organization, and the concept alone is so helpful for bringing this new awareness into what’s actually happening.
The other thing I really loved in the book was identifying the 12 most common pitfalls that women fall into that hold us back. Such as doing work that will never make you shine, being good at a lot of things and famous for none of them, accepting low-visibility assignments and downplaying your accomplishments. And – of course – being over-mentored and under-sponsored! Never forget that one. Each of these come with a “leaderly move” to help escape the trap and build a better brand and career.
Overall I really loved it. There’s a lot of work in the exercises and I definitely didn’t do all of it! A good book to come back to again and decide where next to put attention to.
In the podcast, Gilbert takes people one at a time through their creative block, following up with a call to someone else who she thinks will be helpful. It was so reassuring, after having a long struggle with creativity myself, to hear people echoing the same fears, and finding a way through them.
The book is more Gilbert’s manifesto for what she calls a “creative life”. It’s a little bit out there in some ways (ideas floating around the universe waiting for the right person) but in some ways refreshingly pragmatic. She talks about showing up consistently, and expecting nothing in the way of material success, accepting brutal edits, and letting go of what you put out in the world.
I loved it, really. The book was exactly the pep talk I needed, the podcast the context and empathy that validated my struggle. Definitely recommend if creativity is a topic you’re interested in.
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 time I was reading it, I was wondering what I was supposed to take away from it, I found my answer towards the end:
“My generation made a mistake. We took the struggles and the victories of feminism and interpreted them somehow as a pathway to personal perfection. We privatized feminism and focused only on our dreams and our own inevitable frustrations.”
Which does lead to one thing that I did like, that I think we should talk about more often – the concept of satisficing. That feminism fought for choices, but having those choices means making them – including what not to do, and what not to do well.
But – I am frustrated by the idea that women could just choose to “be less hard on ourselves” in a society that holds us to impossible standards. I’m angry about the lack of consideration for intersectionality. The book is from 2014, but already feels extremely dated. I don’t entirely know why I finished it – perhaps the historical aspect? It’s relatively well written, interweaving the author’s experience with the changes of the time. But on reflection, it probably wasn’t worth the time, and I don’t recommend it.
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 and an intentionality to how the different aspects built on each other that I really appreciated.
The main thesis is around three areas:
“Talent density” (i.e. fewer excellent people).
Candor (high quality feedback culture).
Controls (remove checks and bureaucracy).
The way “talent density” gets communicated seems pretty cold – especially to a European – but the sports team metaphor really landed it for me. “Peak performance” isn’t necessarily a forever situation (although their retention is not so far off industry averages).
Candor and the culture of feedback was the most interesting aspect. The way it’s built up, how leadership models receiving feedback to their teams, and supporting processes like 360s. Fascinating.
And finally the control aspect – there’s so much overhead to many workplace processes, but the layered approach to removing it, and how that fits with the other two pillars to work, has a lot more nuance.
Earlier in the book there’s more insight into the aspects that don’t work as well – such as leaders who don’t take vacation and as a result their teams don’t take vacation. I appreciate that things were checked with data where possible (such as retention rates, and vacation taken). Writing it with an external person and combining it with (candid!) staff interviews definitely made it richer and more believable than when a CEO simply expounds his philosophy in written form.
All in all, I really appreciated it and found it well worth my time. I’m not sure what I will apply, but it definitely gave me some things to think about!
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 – whose 168 Hours I read ages ago and loved, and it seemed like exactly what I was looking for. The book is Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy Whilst Getting More Done (Amazon).
It’s a book about feeling like you have more time, and outlines 7 strategies to help.
1. Tend your garden. Think critically about how you spend your time and iterate on it. There are some helpful prompts for this, which I’ve started doing and appreciating.
2. Make life memorable. Mix things up and do something different.
3. Don’t fill time. Get rid of things that don’t add value, think about how to streamline things you do frequently.
4. Linger. Savor the moment and enjoy it.
5. Invest in your Happiness. Think about how to spend more time doing things you enjoy. Give yourself more treats.
6. Let it go. Where can you lower your standards? Make something easier to make it a more tractable habit to build (e.g. exercise, writing).
7. People are a good use of time. Investing in relationships and supporting activities.
This list was revelatory to me in terms of how I’m struggling with time now in a way that I didn’t before the pandemic – and it goes way beyond feeling over scheduled. The monotony of life (even as I’ve been working to break things up lately and introduce novelty), the social isolation, the time constraints that kill lingering whether it’s in the hot tub after a nice swim or over brunch.
But perhaps more than anything the lack of reflection on how I spend my time, that used to happen as part of every WTHIC. Each time I left – which was frequently – I would think about how I had spent my time and write something about it.
Some changes I’ve made as a result:
Weekly plan under the categories of: career, relationships, self.
Daily reflection on how I’ve spend my time.
Prioritizing the “non standard” thing each day (last week: swimming, floatation, movie night, physio, massage, haircut, new brunch place).
Color coding my work calendar and putting a “DNS” block over lunchtime in a different color.
Seeking out opportunities to “linger” instead of rush.
I really loved this book and thoroughly recommend it. I think almost anyone would get something out of reading it, but if, like me, you feel like the last 18 months has blurred into a series of endless zoom meetings… try it. It might give you a whole other perspective.
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
