“Time keeps changing/rearranging/me” - Michael Stipe
Photo Credit: Kevin Jordan, West Linn, OR | December 1, 2023
Greetings -
I hope you and your families are well and enjoying the holiday season. It is hard to believe that the year is almost a wrap!
I just returned from a fun and festive trip (multiple family birthday parties!) to my hometown of Portland, OR. It is always a treat to spend time with this great group of family, friends and colleagues, especially at the holidays!
This edition marks our 100th publication, a fact that both surprises and delights me. (I want to acknowledge and offer a huge shout out to my wife and publisher extraordinaire, Rosemary.) In its earliest forms, many years ago, this newsletter was nothing more than a simple email, with a few curated articles of interest for some of my then work colleagues. With the inception of my business 4+ years ago, I altered the concept and the content. It continues to evolve and (I hope) reflect the topics, interests and needs of all you wonderful folks.
To mark this milestone and the close of another year, I am including reading and listening that influenced my perspective, curated from the year's editions. I welcome your suggestions as well, so please feel free to drop me a line. (At the end of this newsletter, there are links to posts from previous years with reading and listening that has and continues to speak to me. Enjoy!)
This will be my last publication for 2023. I will resume in mid-January, after a nice, long recharging period with family and friends. We are especially looking forward to visiting with our daughter over the holidays.
I would like to recognize and thank each of you for your support, partnership and, in many cases, business. I deeply appreciate you sharing your journey with me and being an integral part of mine! I wish you, your families and friends a happy and gratitude-filled holiday season! Safe and expeditious travels for those of you on the move over the next few weeks.
As always, happy reading and listening!
Be well, take good care of your families and community.
-kj
PS - (Missed a newsletter? Past editions can be found here: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog. And if you hit paywall on an article(s), feel free to send me a note and let me know what you need. I have subscriptions to many of the sources that I cite.)
Silently
by Hatsui Shizue
Silently
time passes.
The only life I have
submits to its power.
~Translated from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth
"You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love." ~ Anthony de Mello
Articles
Harvard Business Review: How to Tell If a Prospective Employer Values Psychological Safety. "Understanding the characteristics of psychologically safe organizations, identifying potential red flags from the hiring team, and knowing the questions to ask during a job interview to uncover a company’s values will help you find the right cultural fit."
The New Yorker: Annals of Psychology: Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It. "The concept of Impostor Syndrome has become ubiquitous. Critics, and even the idea’s originators, question its value." [KJ note - this is a fascinating look at the historical (and unanticipated) metamorphosis from "impostor phenomenon" - a phrase coined in the 1970s by Drs. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes - to impostor syndrome, including the limitations of and subsequent backlash against the latter.)
Harvard Business Review: Leading with Compassion Has Research-Backed Benefits, provides an evidence-based perspective and proposes that we: "Start small. Be thankful. Be purposeful. Find common ground. See it. Elevate. Know your power...Managers should recognize that compassion is not merely a 'nice to have.' Rather, it’s an evidence-based skill that is integral to leading effectively and holding teams together."
Harvard Business Review: Why Kindness at Work Pays Off. "Kindness, although an intangible asset and challenging to quantify, holds immense importance in shaping the dynamics of your team and your organization. Creating a culture that fosters kindness allows individuals to not only produce innovative ideas but also feel secure enough to express and share them."
Harvard Business Review: The Simple Power of Communicating With Kindness. "...Looks at opportunities and methods to practice "gracious communication...[that is], to be outward focused — on the other person, not yourself."
Harvard Business Review: 5 Types of Stories Leaders Need To Tell. "...Vision stories inspire a shared one. Values stories model the way. Action stories can spark change and, in turn, challenge the process. Teaching stories transmit knowledge and skills to others, enabling them to act. And when you share your own story you build trust and encourage the heart."
Harvard Business Review: How Successful Women Sustain Career Momentum. "...Though the women we spoke with had varied backgrounds, interests, personalities, and careers, they employed...[at least two of] three behaviors that helped [them] sustain momentum during pivotal moments: a focused drive, an incessant desire to learn, and an agile mindset."
Harvard Business Review: Women Get 'Nicer' Feedback — and It Holds Them Back. "...it’s clear that kindness and candor alike are necessary components of effective feedback. It’s up to managers to make sure they’re taking an equitable approach to distributing both."
Chicago Booth Review: The Company Does Not Care about You. "Why indifference is key to building a corporate hierarchy."
Time: What to Know When Five Generations Share an Office. "Advice for intergenerational harmony in a changing workplace."
Harvard Business Review: Businesses Need to Bring Younger Employees into Their Leadership Ranks. "...Striving towards intergenerational leadership is key to overcoming these issues and unlocking competitive advantage by enhancing businesses’ capacity for renewal."
Harvard Business Review: When Lower Intensity Leads to Higher Results. "Many professionals spend most workdays laboring at medium intensity. In contrast, elite endurance athletes spend most of their time working at low intensity — running so slowly it almost appears lazy — and a little time training at high intensity. They reject medium-intensity work, because it has limited payoff. Professionals can learn from this training regimen."
Harvard Business Review: 4 Ways to Manage Your Energy More Effectively. "Life isn’t a sprint. It’s an ongoing journey. And to stay high performing, healthy, and happy both inside and outside of work, you need to have staying power. Look closely at how you work and follow these tips to ensure that you’re working effectively, productively, and within your bounds."
Behavioral Scientist: How Much Does Our Language Determine Behavior? "David Shariatmadari explores how the language we speak impacts the way we see the world, and our behavior in it."
The New Yorker: How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? "Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we realize."
Harvard Business Review: You Need Two Leadership Gears, Finding the Right Balance — and Flexibility — in Your Leadership Style, and The Power of Options. These articles ask to us to: 1. "Question your assumptions about power and fixed hierarchies; 2. Study your habits and your team’s to see if you’re stuck in one mode or the other; 3. Set clear expectations with meeting agendas and rituals that mark transitions; and 4. Reinforce shifts with your own words, deeds, and body language."
Harvard Business Review: The Best Managers are Leaders and Vice Versa. "...Most of the long-running debate over 'leaders' vs. 'managers' focuses on nouns when it should focus on verbs. Everyone needs both 'leading' and 'managing' in their work...It takes both leading and managing, charging and charged, to strike the balance."
Harvard Business Review: When Your Feelings Conflict with Your Leadership Role. "While the emotional work you do as a leader may go unrecognized and undervalued, it is more vital than ever in today’s work world. This labor is often a selfless and prosocial act, allowing you to care for and positively impact others even when you’re not feeling it. However, it should not come at your personal expense."
Kellogg Insight: Leaders, Don’t Be Afraid to Admit Your Flaws. "We prefer to work for people who can make themselves vulnerable, a new study finds. But there are limits."
Harvard Business Review: To Coach Leaders, Ask the Right Questions. "The added challenge for leaders is that showing up as strong and confident – even invulnerable – has long been considered necessary in their roles, and core to their identity. Too often, this persona becomes just another way to defend themselves from discomfort and pain. Today’s leaders need to understand that openness, humility, and the desire to grow are critical to running a modern organization."
Harvard Business Review: Beware a Culture of Busyness. "Organizations must stop conflating activity with achievement."
Harvard Business Review: What to Ask Yourself Before a Career Pivot. "The best thing you can do is to make an informed decision: be clear about the motives you are trying to fulfill — especially changes to your professional self or identity — and scrutinize the pros and cons of available options vis-à-vis your skills, interests, and personality. Finding the balance between an open-minded desire to experiment and a strategic focus, and being honest with yourself when you evaluate the outcome of your choices, will enable you to keep advancing and developing your potential."
Psychology Today: Certainty Is a Psychological Trap and It's Time to Escape. "The willingness to actually listen to others and to display your ignorance in a world full of know-it-alls is a bold move that now has a name—intellectual humility. It’s not only a developable skill, but it could just end the culture wars."
Harvard Business Review: You Need to Practice Being Your Future Self. "...You need to spend time on the future even when there are more important things to do in the present and even when there is no immediately apparent return to your efforts...If you want to be productive, you need to spend time doing things that feel ridiculously unproductive."
Harvard Business Review: 3 Ways to Prepare for the Future of Work. "...We have to recognize that we will ultimately make sense of this difficult and exciting transformative period only by creating a new sense of normal for ourselves, one that accommodates rather than resists ambiguity and ongoing uncertainty. That’s simply not something we can do in isolation. But within our organizations, focusing on collective leadership, we can begin to do it together."
Harvard Business Review: Reskilling in the Age of AI. "...To adapt in the years ahead to the rapidly accelerating pace of technological change, companies will have to develop ways to learn—in a systematic, rigorous, experimental, and long-term way—from the many reskilling investments that are being made today. Only then will the reskilling revolution really take off."
Harvard Business Review: 4 Ways to Make Work More Meaningful. "Curiosity is not just a medium by which we achieve professional success, it’s also imperative to unlocking purpose and meaning at work. Curiosity about ourselves, our work, and our colleagues is the key to unlocking the significance behind our work. Adopting the mindset of curiosity with the intention of discovering purpose is made possible through four simple practices: crafting your work, making work a craft, connecting work to service, and investing in positive relationships. With these essentials in mind, we’re prompted to ask the right questions and come into each work day more intentionally, carefully, and mindfully."
Books
Irresistible, by Josh Bersin. Rich in data, analysis and insights, Bersin describes, in pragmatic terms, what and how the best organizations create incredible experiences for their employees. His seven principles offer a powerful narrative and blueprint for the future of work; a future where success is predicated on the culture you cultivate, the people you attract and retain and the values you espouse, both internally and externally. He notes that "in today's economy, where innovation, service, and brand matter more than ever, you should always be thinking about how you can energize, empower and support your people...This is not the end but the beginning of a perpetual discussion."
Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way, by Jonah Berger. This book is rich in research, analysis and insights on how to increase our communication effectiveness in both our professional and personal lives. He distills his "magic words" into 6 types: 1) Activate Identity and Agency; 2) Convey Confidence; 3) Ask the Right Questions; 4) Leverage Concreteness; 5) Employ Emotion; and 6) Harness Similarity (and Difference). Within this framework, Berger offers an array of practical, actionable advice and tools to increase the impact of not just what we say, but how we say it. Ultimately, we have the opportunity to forge stronger connections, meaningfully persuade and tell our stories in ways that resonate more deeply with others.
Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up, by Patricia Ryan Madson. "In an irresistible invitation to lighten up, look around, and live an unscripted life, a master of the art of improvisation explains how...to apply the maxims of improvisational theater to real-life challenges—whether it’s dealing with a demanding boss, a tired child, or one of life’s never-ending surprises."
Blog Posts & Opinions
The Atlantic: Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life. "Five pieces of career advice, shaped by economics, psychology, and a little bit of existential math."
Seth's Blog: Our Dreaming Opportunity. "The dreams we need to teach are the dreams of self-reliance and generosity. The only way for us to move forward is to encourage and amplify the work of people who are willing to learn, to see and to commit to making things better."
Emily Kingsley on medium.com: You Are Not Okay and Tomorrow Will Come. "And you should eat a banana." [KJ note - a concise, bittersweet point of view on the limits of control and the power of perspective, with a focus on the use of the word "and."]
The Daily Stoic: How To Find Treasure. "...We are not in control. We must have faith and patience. We must not want anything in particular but be open–indeed love–to whatever washes up on the shore for us. This is how we’ll find treasure…and happiness."
Susan Cain: The Kindred Letters: How to spend your (remaining) time. "How should you spend your remaining time on this Earth? The reality is that you don't have much time left. Maybe you have decades, maybe years, maybe weeks. Maybe you only have a few minutes. Who knows? What we do know is this: once you frame your life this way, everything changes, in potentially the best of ways..."
MentorLead: [Flash] The Could Mindset vs The Magic 8 Ball. "'…Considering what one could do shifts people from analyzing and weighing what they assume to be fixed and mutually exclusive alternatives to generating options that might reconcile underlying imperatives. Having a could mindset helps individuals engage in divergent thinking.'"
Granted [as in Adam Grant]: The Most Meaningful Way to Succeed Is to Help Others Succeed. "Success is not about winning a competition. It’s about making a contribution."
Harvard Business Review: How High Achievers Overcome Their Anxiety. "...My message is simple: If we harness our anxiety and lessen its personal toll, we will help ourselves work with more energy and ingenuity. We will perform and feel better, become leaders whom people want to work for, and take the visionary risks needed to create positive change. We will achieve the same if not greater career success—without feeling constantly stressed out."
The New York Times: Whatever the Problem, It’s Probably Solved by Walking. "Perhaps because we take walking so much for granted, many of us often ignore its ample gifts. In truth, I doubt I would walk often or very far if its sole benefit was physical, despite the abundant proof of its value in that regard. There’s something else at play in walking that interests me more. And with the arrival of spring, attention must be paid."
The New York Times: I Don’t Have the Secret to Making Hard Decisions, but I Do Have a Yellow Note Pad. "The need for a sound decision-making approach in the face of uncertainty is greater now than ever before."
The New York Times: How My Father and I Drew a New Life. A contemplative reflection on the healing power of renewed connection and reinvention, grounded in a shared love of artistic expression, and sustained with the gifts of grace and humor. While this story focuses on the evolving relationship between an adult son and his aging father, its applicability and appeal is broad. When we have a sense of purpose and meaning in our professional and (in this case) personal lives, our ability to transcend circumstances and see what might be possible can be inspirational and transformative. The desire to adapt, learn and grow is generative; we can create and/or pursue experiences aligned with our values, purpose and where we find the greatest sense of rejuvenation.
Joan Garry: 5 Ways to Make Sure Your Best Employees Never Want to Leave. "Every organization has its rock stars. You, as the leader, want to do everything you can to make them never want to leave. Here are five things you can do to retain your best employees."
Seth's Blog: Goals and expectations. "Empathy, a cycle of skills improvement, developing new attitudes and showing up in service often accompanies the careers of people who get from here to there."
The New York Times - Essay: Off the Clock. "In the wake of the pandemic, people are rethinking their relationship not just to work but to time."
The Wall Street Journal - Work & Life: Don’t Be a Jerk at Work. (But Don’t Be Too Nice, Either.) "How devolving into people-pleasing can hold back your career."
David Brooks: The Essential Skills for Being Human. "Human beings long to have another person look at them with love and acceptance."
Podcasts
Brené Brown: Unlocking Us: Breathing Under Water, Falling Upward, and Unlearning Certainty, Episodes 1 and 2 with Father Richard Rohr. Father Rohr is a "Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher, who bears witness to the deep wisdom of Christian mysticism and traditions of action and contemplation. [He is] the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico." [KJ note - this is an excellent, topic-spanning set of interviews with the insightful, humble and good-humored Father Rohr.]
The Ezra Klein Show: A Top Mental Health Expert on Where America Went Wrong. "...We discuss why our current medical system is so inadequate at helping people with mental illnesses of all stripes, why psychiatric research and patient outcomes are so wildly out of step, the story of how the U.S. government systematically divested from mental health care in the 1980s, and the fragmented system of care that those decisions created. We also touch on...why mental health is not just a medical problem, but also an economic and social one; what public policy can, and importantly can’t, do to solve our mental health crisis; the relationship between loneliness and mental illness; how the loosening of family and social ties is impacting our collective mental health and more."
Adam Grant: Re: Thinking. Surgeon Atul Gawande wants everyone to have a coach. "Atul Gawande was advised by a colleague to say yes to every opportunity until he turned 40. Since then he’s been a renowned surgeon, a public health leader and government policymaker, and a bestselling author and “New Yorker” writer. He talks with Adam about his fascinating career and how he balances his passions for different fields, why he works with a coach even in the operating room, and how he’s working in The White House to end our current pandemic–and prevent the next one."
HBR IdeaCast: Ron Howard on Collaborative Leadership and Career Longevity. "A conversation with Hollywood legend Ron Howard about talent, success, and taking chances."
Re:Thinking with Adam Grant: Brené Brown and Simon Sinek on the leadership skills we need to build. "...A lively discussion about the most important skills for leaders to build -- and the most vital steps for organizations to put people first."
Freakonomics Radio Network: No Stupid Questions. Do You Have a Scarcity Mindset or an Abundance Mindset? "Are highly effective people quicker to share credit? What does poverty do to your brain? And how did Stephen's mother teach him about opportunity costs?"
Brené Brown: Empathy vs Sympathy. "In this beautifully animated RSA Short, Dr Brené Brown reminds us that we can only create a genuine empathic connection if we are brave enough to really get in touch with our own fragilities."
The Ezra Klein Show: The Tao of Rick Rubin. "...It [his book] is less about music than mind states: awareness, openness, discernment, attunement to nature, nonjudgmental listening, trust in your own taste. It is at once mystical and practical, alive to the tensions of creation but intent on holding them gently..."
TED: How great leaders take on uncertainty. "In a constantly changing world, it's impossible for leaders to provide employees with the assurance they want, says Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud. Her solution: lead with humanity and flexibility...Sud discusses her experience connecting remote employees worldwide, addressing burnout and adapting company practices for the needs of the next generation. Hear her vision for the future of work and ideas on how to be a leader that empowers others."
Freakonomics Radio Network: No Stupid Questions: How Do You Deal With Big Life Changes? "What’s more stressful, divorce or jail? Are you in the middle of a 'lifequake'? And should we all be taking notes from Martha Stewart?"
Harvard Business Review: Why Today’s Leaders Need to Be Perpetual Learners. "Change is never easy, especially if what you’re doing now seems to work just fine. 'Changing yourself in the job, especially if you’re doing well, is one of the hardest things to do.'"
WorkLife with Adam Grant: How to tell your own story with Baratunde Thurston. "...Whether it’s through his witty and thoughtful work at The Onion or The Daily Show, or via in-depth reflections in a New York Times best-selling book or a hit podcast, Baratunde is adept at addressing complex ideas with compelling stories and serious issues with levity. Baratunde speaks with Adam about the evolution of his communication style, shares ideas on what kind of storytelling actually moves the needle for an audience, and discusses the surprising ways in which he’s rethinking his approach to AI."
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. "Amy Edmondson (Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well) is a professor and author. Amy ...discuss[es] why she was drawn to studying organizational learning, what psychological safety is, and how systems exist to make societies better. Amy and Dax talk about why working groups can have different interpersonal climates, the definition of learning behaviors, and what the three types of failure are. Amy explains that vulnerability can actually be a desirable trait, how to take smart risks, and why apologies exist."
On Being with Krista Tippett: Three Skills for Staying Calm, Sane, and Open in a Chaotic World (Krista interviewed by Dan Harris for Ten Percent Happier.) "[Krista] shares lessons learned from 20 years of interviews, including: how to live with open questions, counterprogramming against your negativity bias, and getting over the God question."
Joan Garry: Embracing Our Finite Time (with Oliver Burkeman). "This conversation is a call to rethink how we view and use our time, not to squeeze more out of it, but to make our work and lives more meaningful and impactful."
For prior year faves:
2021: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog/2021/12/12/this-is-water-my-favorite-reading-amp-listening