Book review: Mindset by Carol Dweck

This book is scary! If I had ever bothered to keep a dairy during my life, and managed to faithfully jot down my emotions and thoughts, then reflecting on those diaries now would I am sure have taught and shown me everything that Dweck has somehow managed to capture in her book. She has given words to thoughts and learnings I have only begun to learn for myself. This book has opened up a new world to me, a world that confirms more than ever just how similar we all are, and that feeling of being special is just an illusion we build to protect ourselves. It is an uncanny experience to read a book by a total stranger and to recognize almost every example in the book as something you have personally experienced. And yes, if you were wondering, I have a fixed mindset in many areas, or at least had to a high degree.

This is a must read for anybody who has ever been/felt a natural or a talent in some area. Most likely, such a situation will have fostered some form of fixed mindset thinking and most likely, this mindset will be blocking your further development in some way. This book will at least make you more aware of this, and hopefully give you a "mindset" to tackle and overcome these blockades.

This is not to say the book is The Truth. In fact, the simple split into fixed mindset vs growth mindset is I think a little over simplified. Personally, although I recognise most of the examples of fixed mindset in myself, I also recognise strong elements of the growth mindset in myself. Especially in different areas such as business, family, friends, etc different mindsets seem to apply, overlap, or flow into one another. For example, I tend to have a strong fixed mindset initial reaction to many things, but after some reflection and time, I tend towards growth mindset actions as a result. In short, it's not all as black and white as the book sometimes seems to suggest.

Book review: Management 3.0

"Management 3.0" is written by Jurgen Appelo, a dutch author with an active blog.

If you take a look at the blog, you'll understand where the book came from, most of the content covered in the book is on the blog in some form or other.

So, what is the advantage of the book over the blog? Well Jurgen introduces his 6 views on management and gathers/aggregates his blog entries under these 6 views, splitting each view into a chapter on theory and a chapter on practice.

The book succeeds in presenting alot of information, from a wide variety of disciplines such as chaos theory and agile. Quite often Jurgen gathers existing models and combines/modifies them to build his own model. Generally the thinking is good and gives some new insights.

I found the book hard to get through at times (and in fact I didn't quite finish it). There isn't that much of a "story" in it, and I find it could profit from some more real life examples to spruce it up. I do think it makes a great reference. If you ever find yourself wondering about this or that model, and how it all fits together with agile/leadership/managemment, then this book is a good book to pick up and flip to the relevant pages.

Book review: Switch, a great book about change.

Change is hard. Why? Because people resist change. Well this book is the answer. It provides a simple framework for achieving change, a recipe for change if you will.

There are basically three main parts the book focuses on: the rational mind, the emotional side, and the environment around us. For each part, three key criteria are defined that need to be dealt with to achieve change successfully.

Luckily, it's not all theory or psycho babble. The book is filled with great motivational examples of real life change, each illustrating one or more key criteria at work. This makes teh book a joy to read.

All in all, it's a must read for anybody interested in change, for example anybody in a leadership or management role within an organization.

review: 21 irrefutable laws of leadership

If I were to compile a list of 21 skills that:

1) I have little or no natural talent for
2) I am not currently good in (having not developed these skills actively)
3) I have never considered very important

then this list would look very similar to the skills listed in the book "The 21 irrefutable laws of leadership" by John C. Maxwell.

I love it! I'm like a sailor lost at sea who sees an unfamiliar coastline looming on the distant horizon. Land ahoy indeed!

Every single chapter in this book offers an opportunity for me to learn and grow. It's as if John Maxwell wrote down a self improvement program specifically tailored to me.

In the appendices, there's a questionnaire allowing you to quantify your leadership ability. I filled it in and identified the skills that I'm best in:

1) law of empowerment: delegating work to others, making sure they can do it, and then getting out of the way.
2) law of victory: doing whatever it takes to win
3) law of priorities: making sure you are doing only the important stuff
4) law of connection: keeping it human
5) law of solid ground: be open and truthfull always

In the coming weeks/months, I'm going to be focusing on developing these skills into strengths as the basis for my leadership. Of course they're only 5 of the 21 but as the book itself also mentions, always focus on the 20% that gives 80% of the rewards.

Another 2 book reviews

Lean software development: An agile toolkit, by Mary & Tom Poppendieck

Great book! Definitely choc a bloc full of really usefull information. This is a book I'll be returning to many times and each time I will probably learn something new. Alot of the stuff needs hands on experience first to really understand the value of what has been written down but I'm definitely eager to get started right away.

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User stories applied: for agile software development, by Mike Cohn

A pleasant, easy read. Nothing very shocking but good to have on paper to grab for reference. there is quite a bit of padding to the book, it could have been a bit thinner without having lost value I feel.