Mindset: A book review by Bob Morris

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Carol S. Dweck
Ballantine Books (2008)

How to achieve sustainable growth of intellectual capabilities with the right mindset

I read this book when it was first published (2006) and recently re-read it before reading Daniel Siegel’s Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Presumably he shares my high regard for Carol Dweck’s breakthrough insights, as countless other authors have duly acknowledged in books published in recent years. She focuses on two mindsets, one that is fixed and another that can be “grown” with appropriate development. Moreover, she also explains how and why it is possible to change one’s mindset. “You have a choice. Mindsets are just beliefs. They’re powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can change your mind. As you read [this book], think about where you’d like to go and which mindset will take you there.” Long ago, Henry Ford observed, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.”

More recently, in Extraordinary Minds, Howard Gardner observes that exceptional individuals “have a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.” Dweck suggets that those with this talent seem to have a growth mindset. Readers will appreciate her strategic provision of a “Grow Your Mindset” section at the conclusion of each chapter.  She poses direct questions, reviews key points, and suggests several different ways to think about how to expand and enrich mindsets to fulfill one’s potential at home, at work, in the community, and wherever else has special relationships.

These are among the subjects, topics, and passages that caught my eye:

o  ”Is Success About Learning — Or Proving You’re Smart?” (Pages 16-17)
o  ”Mindsets Change the Meaning of Failure” (32-39)
o  ”Mindsets Change the Meaning of Effort” (39-44)
o  ”Negative Labels and How They Work” (74-80)
o  ”Leadership and the Fixed Mindset” (112-114)
o  ”Groupthink versus We Think” (134-136)
o  ”Mindsets Falling in Love” (148-157)
o  ”Bullies and Victims: Revenge Revisited” (165-171)
o  ”Sending Messages [to Children] About Process and Growth” (177-179)
o  ”Teachers (and Parents): What Makes a Great Teacher (or Parent)?” (193-202)

I am among those who think that Mindset is among the most important books published during the last decade. While re-reading it again, I was reminded of three key points that help to explain much of human behavior: First, that almost all limits are self-imposed; next, that there is much we cannot control or even influence but we [begin italics] can [end italics] control how we respond to what happens to us; finally, that taking full advantage of a growth mindset requires a commitment no less demanding in terms of its nature and extent than a commitment to peak performance. For example, revelations about such a commitment after decades of research by Anders Ericsson and his associates at Florida State University. (For more about that research, read his HBR article, “The Making of an Expert,” and one or more of these books: Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and Geoff Golvin’s Talent Is Overrated.) Thank you, Carol Dweck, for helping so many of us to gain a better understanding of who we are, and, of greater importance, of who and what we can perhaps become with a growth mindset.

Atul Gawande on the importance of a “positive deviant”

In “The Bell Curve,” an article written for The New Yorker (December 6, 2004), Atul Gawande uses the term “positive deviant” to describe unusually effective performers in the field of medicine. In fact, there are outliers in all fields. To Gawande, it is highly advisable to study outliers and learn from them to improve our own performance.

(Note: To the best of my knowledge, the term “outliers” was first used by Frank E. Grubbs in his article, “Procedures for Detecting Outlying Observations in Samples,” published by Technometrics magazine in 1969.)

In his book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Gawande describes and defines the concept of “positive deviance” as it relates to improving outcomes in the medical profession. He tells a story about a Save the Children program designed to address malnutrition among children in poor, outlying villages in Vietnam shortly after the Vietnam War:

“The anti-starvation program run by Tufts University professor Jerry Sternin and his wife, Monique, had given up on bringing outside solutions to villages with malnourished children. Over and over, that strategy had failed. Although the know-how to reduce malnutrition was long established—methods to raise more nourishing foods and effectively feed hungry children –most people proved reluctant to change…”

Does this remind of us of anyone?

Gawande goes on:

“The Sternins therefore focused on finding solutions from insiders. They asked small groups of poor villagers to identify who among them had the best nourished children—who among them had demonstrated what the Sternins termed a ‘positive deviance’ from the norm. …The villagers discovered that there were well nourished children among them, despite the poverty, and that those children’s mothers were breaking with locally accepted wisdom in all sorts of ways—feeding their children even when they had diarrhea, for example, or giving them several small feedings each day rather than one or two big ones; adding sweet potato greens to the children’s rice despite it being considered a low class food. And the ideas began to spread. They took hold ….In two years malnutrition dropped 65-85% in every village the Sternins visited.” (page 25)

Given all the problems we human beings face today, the need for positive deviance is greater now than ever before.

o   It all begins with an unshakable faith in what can be accomplished.
o   Next is some highly unorthodox collaborative thinking that generates lots of possible solutions.
o   Finally, selection of what seems to be the best solution and then APPLY IT.

I agree with Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

 

A Fast Track to 10,000 Hours of Practice

H. James Wilson

Here is an excerpt from an article written by H. James Wilson for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Have you completed your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice?

The idea that 10,000 hours (about 1 year and 51 days total) of practice is what you need to gain expertise in performance-based fields was initially popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Outliers. The research results he focused on emphasized the benefits of practice for fine-motor activities like playing the piano. But more recent studies show the upside of the 10,000-hour benchmark for collaborative knowledge work — the type of expertise required to create, or lead, or grow a company.
For most of us, of course, logging that much deliberate practice may seem unattainable in today’s time-scarce business environments. Employees barely have enough time to complete job responsibilities, no less find extra hours to practice their skills. (Even if your company generously put aside two-and-a-half work weeks per year for you to practice skills, it would still take you 100 years before you hit the 10,000 hour benchmark).

But what if deliberate practice was your job, and the way your organization did business? Then you and colleagues could feasibly hit this threshold for mastery in as little as 5 years. Here are three tips, grounded in our recent Babson Executive Education study of over 500 companies, to accelerate this process:

Try experimentation. Previous studies show that experimentation is one of the most fundamental forms of deliberate practice we can engage in. By performing more of their work in the form of experiments, employees can synchronously advance projects while putting hours in toward their 10,000. This synchronicity can result in stronger organizational performance, according to our data. Experimentation-oriented organizations, one-quarter of our survey sample, are more than 4 times as likely to have achieved greater than 20% growth over the past year compared to others in the sample.

How is an experimental approach different than business as usual? Much of conventional organizational work is about planning and analyzing how to act, often on a large scale; risk is controlled by repeatable processes and standard routines. Rather than planning to do things, experimenting means doing things in a new way on a small scale. You get quick feedback, allowing you to make timely adjustments and improvements. On seeing the results of your action, practitioners can adopt the new way, discard it, or modify it and try again.

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H. James Wilson is senior researcher at Babson Executive Education. He is co-author of The New Entrepreneurial Leader: Developing Leaders Who Shape Social and Economic Opportunity (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011). You can visit him at Twitter.

Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters

Illustration Credit: David Plunkert

Here is an article written by David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz that was featured in the The New York Times (November 19, 2011). I urge you to click on the links to che vk oyt the sources to which the arricle refers. Also, I highky recommend a recently published book, The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else Does, written by George Anders and published by Portfolio/Penguin (2011). This is a “must read” book for anyone involved in — or at least interested in — talent recruitment and/or talent management. I also think Anders’ book could serve as the foundation of talent evaluation and performance review initiatives.

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HOW do people acquire high levels of skill in science, business, music, the arts and sports? This has long been a topic of intense debate in psychology.
Enlarge This Image

Research in recent decades has shown that a big part of the answer is simply practice — and a lot of it. In a pioneering study, the Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they had devoted to practice since they started playing. By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the “best” players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the “good” players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled.

Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability. Summing up Mr. Ericsson’s research in his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.”

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent Is Overrated, adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.”

But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.

Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.

In our own recent research, we have discovered that “working memory capacity,” a core component of intellectual ability, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities. In one study, we assessed the practice habits of pianists and then gauged their working memory capacity, which is measured by having a person try to remember information (like a list of random digits) while performing another task. We then had the pianists sight read pieces of music without preparation.

Not surprisingly, there was a strong positive correlation between practice habits and sight-reading performance. In fact, the total amount of practice the pianists had accumulated in their piano careers accounted for nearly half of the performance differences across participants. But working memory capacity made a statistically significant contribution as well (about 7 percent, a medium-size effect). In other words, if you took two pianists with the same amount of practice, but different levels of working memory capacity, it’s likely that the one higher in working memory capacity would have performed considerably better on the sight-reading task.

It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.

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David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz are associate professors of psychology at Michigan State University and Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, respectively.

Here’s the July 1, 2011 New York Times Hardcover Business Best Sellers – with the Financial Meltdown back in the Top Spot

Here’s the July 1, 2011 New York Times Hardcover Business Best Sellers – with the financial meltdown back in the top spot.

Each month, I post this list.  The new #1 is another look at the players and the disastrous mistakes that led to the massive financial meltdown.

At the First Friday Book Synopsis, our monthly gathering in Dallas at which Karl Krayer and I each present our synopses of a best selling business book, we tend to stay away from investment books, and most finance related books (although I have presented synopses of All the Devils are Here and The Big Short).  So I’m not sure that we will tackle Reckless Endangerment for this event.  We have scheduled the Brzezinski book, and Touchpoints, within the next two months.  And we have already presented Switch, Strengths Based Leadership, The 4-Hour Workweek, Delivering Happiness, and Outliers from this month’s list.

still on the list!

The 4-Hour Workweek was first published in April, 2007.  Outliers was published in November, 2008.  And here they are, still in the top 15.  Amazing!  (They are both worth reading, but Outliers is especially that good of a book).  I presented both of these at our monthly event.

You can purchase most of our synopses, with audio + handouts, from our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.

Here’s the list:

1	RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT, by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. (Times Books/Holt, $30.) This account of the Wall Street implosion highlights individuals who played crucial roles of responsibility.
2	KNOWING YOUR VALUE, by Mika Brzezinski. (Weinstein, $22.95.) Exploring what women can do to get the compensation they have earned. (†)
3	CAR GUYS VS. BEAN COUNTERS, Bob Lutz. (Portfolio/Penguin, $26.95.) American manufactures focus should be on product quality not on quarterly projections.
4	GET RICH CLICK!, by Marc Ostrofsky. (Razor, $19.95.) An Internet entrepreneur’s strategies for earning money online. (†)
5	WE FIRST, by Simon Mainwaring. (Palgrave Macmillan, $26.) How brands and consumers use social media to build a better world. (†)
6	TOUCHPOINTS, by Douglas Conant and Mette Norgaard. (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, $26.95.) Creating leadership connections in the smallest moments. (†)
7	SWITCH, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. (Broadway Business, $26.) How everyday people can effect transformative change at work and in life. (†)
8	STRENGTHS BASED LEADERSHIP, by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie. (Gallup, $24.95.) Three keys to being a more effective leader. (†)
9	THE MONEY CLASS, by Suze Orman. (Spiegel & Grau, $26.) The noted personal financial adviser offers a reconsideration of the American dream. (†)
10	THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK, by Timothy Ferriss. (Crown, $22.) Reconstructing your life so that it’s not all about work. (†)
11	DELIVERING HAPPINESS, by Tony Hsieh. (Business Plus, $23.99.) Lessons from business (pizza place, worm farm, Zappos) and life. (†)
12	THE MOST IMPORTANT THING, by Howard Marks. (Columbia University Press, $29.95.) Successful investments are guided by thoughtful attention. (†)
13	THE TOTAL MONEY MAKEOVER, by Dave Ramsey (Thomas Nelson, $24.99.) Debt reduction and fiscal fitness for families, by the radio talk-show host. (†)
14	THE CORNER OFFICE, by Adam Bryant. (Times Books/Holt. $25.) How to build and maintain a successful organization from lessons learned from interviews of over seventy CEOs conducted by a New York Times business reporter.
15	OUTLIERS, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Why some people succeed — it has to do with luck and opportunities as well as talent — from the author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point.”

2 Ways To Guarantee Mediocrity (Or Even Outright Failure) – Poor Work Ethic; No Team Meetings

I have spent 13 years reading business books and presenting synopses of these books to folks ready and willing to learn.  It took a while (I’m not all that sharp!), but I think I am beginning to learn some things myself.  In fact, I think I am ready to state, for certain, that there are 2 ways to guarantee mediocrity (if not outright failure):

1)    Have a poor work ethic

2)    Don’t have regular (team/executive team) meetings.

#1:  Have a poor work ethic.
The sources are too many, but let’s start with the 10,000 hour rule (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers).  I summarize it this way in my presentation:

…centerpiece to this book is the 10,000 hour rule… — with much intentional practice!
“Practicing:  that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better”  (Outliers).

Or, to put it another way, putting in 10,000 hours does not guarantee that you will reach the pinnacle of success; but, not putting in the time practically guarantees that you won’t reach that pinnacle.

In other words, to remind us all of the obvious, it takes work, hard work, to be successful.

#2:  Don’t have regular (team, management, executive team) meetings.
This is the one that has most captivated me.  I am looking for this everywhere I speak, in every book I read, and everywhere else I can.

The insight hit home after reading the Verne Harnish book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, but it took a while to see it in action.  Now I am looking for it, and finding it, everywhere I look.

The Rockefeller “habits” are Priorities, Data, and Rhythm:  an effective rhythm of daily; weekly; monthly; quarterly; annual meetings to maintain alignment and drive accountability (“until your people are mocking you, you’ve not repeated your message enough”).

In the book, Harnish points to this:
Mastering the Daily and Weekly Executive Meeting
(Structure meetings to enhance executive team performance).
• meetings overview:
• daily & weekly – execution
• monthly – learning
• quarterly and annual – setting strategy}.

This is the discipline, the habit, that I am looking for, paying attention to, and have become convinced is a (maybe the) critical key to genuine success.  Assuming that a company or organization has hired competent, passionate people (admittedly, this is a big assumption), then it is imperative that these people get together in regular meetings to tackle those key goals/priorities for the organization.  I wrote about this as practiced at Mighty Fine Burgers (see this post), and here is a clue from Zappos, from this article:

For instance, Zappos.com, the shoes and clothing e-retailer now owned by Amazon.com Inc., No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, has agents meet about once a week for hour-long, one-on-one coaching sessions in which a supervisor and agent each take a call. The two then discuss what the agent did well and what could be improved the next time around.

Of course, you need to pay attention to what occurs in such meetings, but don’t miss what comes first:  weekly meetings!  The rhythm of weekly, regular meetings!

As I said, I am asking around about this a lot.  I find absolute consistency – excellent teams, excellent organizations, spend intentional, regular times in meetings.  They do not skip those meetings.  It is part of their routine, their ritual, their “rhythm.”

Yes, yes , I know… a lot of people sit through a lot of bad meetings.  And that is a problem.  So, yes, learn to run your meetings well.  If you are a leader, learning to run a good meeting may be the next important skill for you to master.  And, always, don’t forget to have an agenda, with something important to discuss/work on/accomplish.  The most successful organizations meet about the same thing over and over and over again. It takes that kind of “long haul” attention to get really good at anything.

But if you want a sure fire path to mediocrity (or outright failure) just try getting by with no meetings. That is a guaranteed path to failure.

You accomplish what you meet about!  Yes, you do!

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest contribution

Malcolm Gladwell

I highly recommend an issue of The New Yorker (May 16, 2011) that includes Malcolm Gladwell’s article, “Creation Myth,” his latest contribution to the “Annals of Business” series. Gladwell is a brilliant journalist but hardly an original business thinker. His books consist of articles, most of which originally appeared in The New Yorker and all of which cover ground plowed by others.

In Blink, for example, he introduces his concept of the “tipping point” without acknowledging that Andrew Grove discussed the same concept (he called it an “inflection point”) and Grove acknowledges his debt to Michael Kami’s concept of a “trigger point” years before. Outliers offers another example of (a) Gladwell’s erudition and (b) his usual position atop others’ shoulders, sharing the view with his readers. This book is mostly based on others’ insights (notably Geoff Colvin’s in his book, Talent Is Overrated) that – in turn – are mostly based on research conducted since the early-1990s by Anders Ericsson and his associates at Florida State University.

If you do not subscribe to The New Yorker, purchase a copy of the aforementioned issue and read Gladwell’s essay. He is again at his best when explaining what he characterizes as “the truth about innovation.” What he reveals is by no means a secret. The separate but interconnected stories are well-known. They feature Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), what Steve Jobs learned from it, the subsequent development of what became the personal computer, and the pivotal role that Gary Starkweather played throughout those years.

What Gladwell learned from his research (which included conversations with several key people such as Starkweather and Nathan Myhrvold) is best revealed in context, within his narrative. However, I am comfortable disclosing that not one but several myths are scrutinized and a few are discredited. He surveys quite a range of colorful history and draws attention to events and consequences that he considers most significant.

Gadwell will continue to make valuable contributions because he is a gifted and energetic journalist who has devised innovative ways to share others’ original ideas. He makes excellent use of his highly-developed skills as a raconteur as well as a cultural anthropologist when reconstructing “story lines” in which colorful “characters” compete for our attention while driven by their curiosity and passion to generate what Jobs characterizes as “insanely great ideas” and then make them even better.

And if you share my high regard for Gladwell’s latest contribution, here are two “must read” books: John Linkner’s Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity and David Kord Murray’s  Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others.

Here’s The New York Times Hardcover Business Best Sellers, published February 4, 2011

Here’s the New York Times Hardcover Business Best Sellers, published: February 4, 2011.  Two books that we presented quite a while back at the First Friday Book Synopsis (Outliers, presented two years ago, January, 2009 & The 4-Hour Workweek, presented nearly three years ago, March 2008) are still #s 2 & 3 (actually, tied for #2 – that’s the meaning of the asterisk.  An asterisk (*) indicates that a book’s sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.).

We have already scheduled Change the Culture Change the Game, and Flash Foresight for future months.  And we have presented Switch, Strengths-Based Leadership, Delivering Happiness, The Big Short, and Drive.  We would have presented All the Devils are Here at the February First Friday Book Synopsis, but a snowstorm caused us to cancel that event, so I will present this book in March.

We tend to stay away from personal finance and investment books at our event.  That leaves us with only two on the list for us to consider:  Getting More (on negotiation) and The Comeback.

We provide a four-six page handout with each of our presentations for each book, and we record our presentations at our live event.  If you don’t have time to read these books, or want a quick refresher, you can purchase our synopses of these, and many other business books, with audio + handout, at our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.

Here’s the February 4 New York Times list.

1	THE INVESTMENT ANSWER, by Daniel C. Goldie and Gordon S. Murray. (Business Plus, $18.) Five questions every investor should ask. (†)
2	THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK, by Timothy Ferriss. (Crown, $22.) Reconstructing your life so that it’s not all about work. (†)
3*	OUTLIERS, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Why some people succeed — it has to do with luck and opportunities as well as talent — from the author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point.”
4	DEBT FREE FOR LIFE, by David Bach. (Crown Business, $19.99.) A financial coach advocates paying down personal debts. (†)
5*	GETTING MORE, by Stuart Diamond. (Crown Business, $26.) Strategies for negotiation, whether at business or at home. (†)
6	SWITCH, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. (Broadway Business, $26.) How everyday people can effect transformative change at work and in life. (†)
7	CHANGE THE CULTURE, CHANGE THE GAME, by Roger Connors and Tom Smith. (Portfolio/Penguin, $25.95.) Advice for managers on how to emphasize accountability in the workplace. (†)
8	THE TOTAL MONEY MAKEOVER, by Dave Ramsey (Thomas Nelson, $24.99.) Debt reduction and fiscal fitness for families, by the radio talk-show host. (†)
9	THE COMEBACK, by Gary Shapiro. (Beaufort Books, $24.95.) Innovation as the engine of American economic growth. (†)
10	FLASH FORESIGHT, by Daniel Burrus with John David Mann. (Harper Business, $27.99.) How to solve business problems before they arrive. (†)
11	STRENGTHS BASED LEADERSHIP, by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie. (Gallup, $24.95.) Three keys to being a more effective leader. (†)
12*	DELIVERING HAPPINESS, by Tony Hsieh. (Grand Central, $23.99.) Lessons from business (pizza place, worm farm, Zappos) and life. (†)
13	THE BIG SHORT, by Michael Lewis. (Norton, $27.95.) The people who saw the real estate crash coming and made billions from their foresight.
14	DRIVE, by Daniel H. Pink. (Riverhead, $26.95.) What really motivates people is the quest for autonomy, mastery and purpose, not external rewards.
15	ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. (Portfolio/ Penguin, $32.95.) Two business journalists ex­amine the financial crisis of 2008.

Another Perspective on the “Best of 2010″ Lists

 

This is the time of the year that we see so many collective lists of the “best of 2010.”  In the last few days, we have seen such lists for films, sports accomplishments, songs, architecture, recipes, restaurants, and of course, books.

I want to tell you that I am unimpressed with most of the lists that I have seen that focus on books.  As with films, these book lists contain great confusion among quality and quantity.  That premise is particularly true when the lists come from booksellers themselves, such as a recent e-mail I received from Barnes and Noble with their “Books of the Year.”

Just like a film, a book is not necessarily good because it sells.  Popular, best-selling books are of no greater quality than are popular, high dollar-grossing films.  Because people buy a book does not make it good.  Nor do I consider it a good barometer for quality.

Consider the terrible film from the late ’70′s, the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.”  That film grossed millions of dollars and played regularly in theatres on Friday and Saturday nights through the mid ’90′s.  It had no redeeming merit and critics panned its quality.  Yet, it had a cult-like following, and it played to packed audiences, mostly either inebriated or bored, for many years.

In the recent Barnes and Noble list, I saw one business book for the 2010 year.  It was The Big Short by Michael Lewis.  I saw no other business books.  I believe that was a fine book, but not as good as his previous offering, Moneyball.   Why was it on the list?  Because it sold.  The best books in that list are the best-sellers.  But, best-selling does not indicate high quality.  I can give you titles of at least a dozen other books this year that were of higher quality than that one, but that simply did not sell as well.

Please remember that we only summarize the content of best-selling books at our monthly First Friday Book Synopsis in Dallas.  The number one criterion is that the book must be on a best-selling list somewhere that we find credible.   These lists include Business Week, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Amazon.com, among others.  I will admit to you that after 13 years of doing this, I have delivered synopses of some books that sold well, but that were simply not very good.  Some were not well-written, some were ill-researched, and some were best-sellers just because of the reputation of the author.

Regardless, we will continue to use best-sellers as our basis for book selection at the First Friday Book Synopsis.  But, I am telling you that popular does not equate to good.  And, there are likely some very good books that do not have the boost of marketing dollars from huge publishers that likely go overlooked.  Strange as it sounds, it may not be optimal, but these lists remain the best vehicle available for us to use for our selections.  Remember – popular may not be good.  And, good may not always be popular.

What do you think?  Let’s talk about it!

Are We Truly A “Flabby Lot?” – In A 10,000 Hour Rule World, Why Are We So Flabby?

Discipline is hard – harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures.  We can’t even keep from snacking between meals.  We are not built for discipline.  We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail.  Discipline is something we have to work at.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto

The list of posts on this blog referring to the 10,000 hour rule, the need for deliberate practice, the books Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, is long.  We have chronicled the ascendancy of, the centrality of  — call it what you will – “work ethic,” “it take s10,000 hours to master anything…” thinking.

But…

The quote that indicts me personally, in a way that I cannot escape, is the one from Gawande:  “We can’t even keep from snacking between meals.”

This morning, Pulitzer winner Kathleen Parker has a column about Wikileaks.  In the midst of this column is this section:

With the exception of our military, we are a flabby lot, and I’m not just talking about girth. We are merely disgusting in that department. I’m talking about our self-discipline, our individual will, our self-respect, our voluntary order.
Note the operative words: self, individual and voluntary.
We don’t need bureaucrats and politicians to dictate how to behave; how to spend (or save); what and how to eat. We need to be the people we were meant to be: strong, resilient, disciplined, entrepreneurial, focused, wise, playful, humorous, humble, thoughtful and, please, self-deprecating. We have all the tools and opportunities a planet can confer.

We are a flabby lot.  And it shows – not in a good way.  We’ve read all about 10,000 hours, but how many of us actually put in the work?

As always, we are back to the “knowing-doing gap.”  We know, we just don’t do…

Take inventory.  Be honest with yourself.  Are you flabby, undisciplined, unfocused?  If so, you’ve got your work cut out for you (as do I).  Let’s get to it.