Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

“We have the power to shift course. It’s our disconnectedness—and lost understanding about the amazing capacities of nature—that’s driving a lot of our despair, and plants in particular are objects of our abuse. By understanding their sentient qualities, our empathy and love for trees, plants, and forests will naturally deepen and find innovative solutions. Turning to the intelligence of nature itself is the key. It’s up to each and every one of us. Connect with plants you can call your own."

It’s all . . . A LOT.

So let’s take a break from it. Let’s get out into the damp earthiness of a Pacific Northwest forest, where everything smells like cedar and rain and the earth is mushy and gentle underfoot and the sound is a little muffled, and let’s look at what Suzanne Simard can teach us about how to thrive together.

Consider how to apply the concept of a forest, and the invisible but vital mycelium network that underpins, entwines, supports, and connects it. Escape into this book about survival and ecosystems. Let go of the image of the “American Individual:” set apart, unreachable, needing nothing and no one, screaming “I Got This” as you fall. Try on an image of an integral part of a system of support. Simard talks about her own cancer battle as well as her forest work, and how even she needed to be confronted with challenges in order to apply the forest concept to her own systems.

How can we, as a society, become more forest-like?

How can we create better human ecosystems, all while appreciating the beautiful and misunderstood ecosystems around us for their full complexity?

Consider the idea of co-evolution. Consider the idea that we can thrive and evolve and resist disease and fatigue and fraud and loss and whatever else all these changes have in store for us best when we are deeply connected to each other on multiple levels.

The Phantom Tollbooth

By Norman Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer

“You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”

1. Rereading and re-exploring the books that we loved when we were kids is a great escape as adults, but also full of insight. We see new things. And we remember how glorious it is to go into those worlds, to let the real world and all its challenges slip away for a while. You don’t need to have a young person in your life at this moment to use this escape hatch. It’s there any time you need it.
2. This book celebrates the process of generation of ideas, of playing with words and sentences for the sheer joy of it. This process is so important to who we are as creative cognitive human beings who communicate. And so so fun. Fundamentally, Phantom Tollbooth is about creativity and the creative process, about the love of words and puns and metaphor and mighty rhyme and reason. What do we lose when we hand off that generation, that play, that fun, that exploration to Artificial Intelligence, and become instead merely the editors of content, rather than creators? What are we giving up about our humanity when all our generation of new ideas is done by AI and we just polish and refine? Is there as much joy in that process? As much silliness? As much cognitive leaping as Norman Juster and Jules Feiffer and Milo and the reader make in Phantom Tollbooth?
3. Mistakes and moments of boredom are the keys to creativity. All of this starts because Milo is bored, unengaged and unenthusiastic. Moments when we have nothing to do, as kids and as adults, but look at the world around us and think silly thoughts are not bad moments. Next time you’re in a line or waiting for something set the phone down for a hot minute and look around. What do you notice? What is surprising or silly or awesome or poignant? And what accidental discoveries happen when you make a mistake or get lost or go off in a different direction?

Carry On

By John Lewis

“Whatever good work you do, whatever powerful, profound work—do it because it’s right or because it’s necessary. Do it to make change for the better. Do it because you know you must. Don’t do it for credit.”

Representative John Lewis, as he was dying, wrote one last book in 2020. It included the things he wanted the next generation to keep in mind in order to carry on the work he started as the last of the Big Six civil rights leaders and as the Conscience of Congress.

The book is divided into short topical chapters like “On Good Trouble,” “On Activism,” “On Fear.” It includes anecdotes from his childhood, his time in the civil rights movement, and his time in Congress. You learn how much thought went into each of his 45 arrests, including the 5 times he got arrested after he joined Congress. You learn how often he disagreed with his party leadership and had to vote his conscience instead.

For me, the most powerful section was the description of the deep and painful preparation the civil rights activists underwent: time studying Gandhi, time practicing eye contact while getting assaulted because they wanted their abusers to confront their humanity, time they spent screaming at each other at lunch counters so when they actually sat down they were steeled and ready. Every action was thought out, deliberated, rehearsed, and so enduringly peaceful.

John Lewis reminded us to be our best selves despite the world around us, to act on our conscience regardless of pressure from colleagues or enemies or the way the world or the government tells you to be. He died hopeful, peaceful, and full of forgiveness.

Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat

by Giles Milton

“The work was to be done ‘by undercover men, spies and saboteurs, who, if caught, would be neither acknowledged nor defended by their government’. They would be working outside the law and were to borrow their tactics from guerrillas and gangsters like Michael Collins in Ireland and Al Capone in America. In signing up for Section D, they were effectively signing away their lives."

This team was one of the most extraordinary underground operations in history.

Without them, the Allies might have lost World War II. They created new weaponry out of everything from condoms to kitchen bowls to candy. They learned fighting techniques that had previously been used on the dark streets of Shanghai. They went after targets like factories, power plants, and refueling ships. They ran a war that the traditional military found appalling and ungentlemanly but Churchill deemed absolutely necessary.

Many of the team members didn’t survive the war, as they worked in the most impossibly high risk situations, but there’s no question that their work enabled the Allied victory.

We think our teams are complicated, our projects are a Big Deal, and our timelines are tough. Sometimes it’s good to get that all in perspective.

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

By Masha Gessen

“Totalitarianism establishes its own social contract, in which most people will be safe from violence most of the time, provided they stay within certain boundaries and shoulder some of the responsibility for keeping other citizens within the same boundaries. The boundaries are ever-shifting - Arendt described totalitarian societies as producing a state of constant flux and inconsistency - and this requires the population to be ever-vigilant in order to stay abreast of the shifts. A hypersensitivity to signals is essential for survival."

Context is everything.

We run our organizations inside communities, countries, cultures, and systems.

Because we need that context we can't just read books about business-and-nothing-but-business all the time and think we will gain the insight we need to move through the world effectively. The world is too complex for that.

This book is about Putin's rise to power and how he set up his totalitarian regime in Russia. It is epic and generational in the best Russian literary way. But it's also readable, moving between fictionalized personal experiences and deep political analysis to understand what happened.

Understanding the context of how Russia got to where it is matters in our global society.

Understanding what totalitarianism is and isn't also matters.

Having these stories about what it's like to live in a totalitarian society, as a dissident, as a woman, as an academic, as an LGBTQ+ person matters.

When we read non-business books like this we get context, we build empathy, we gather stories and understanding. All of this helps us make good choices about our own tactics and strategies and approaches and ethics.

Infused: Adventures in Tea

By Henrietta Lovell

“I wanted to get involved in something that actually meant something to people’s lives. I couldn’t just sit passively in the dress circle any longer, looking down at the action on the stage. I set out to work directly with farmers, to travel to their homes, to understand their lives, to support them where I could; to move from grey corridors and windowless rooms full of paper to a vivid life of twisting mountain roads, emerald green gardens, and cerulean skies.”

Why, when there is so much going on in the world, do I want you to sit back and read about tea for a bit?

Because like all good stories that dive into the why of things, that are personal as well as professional, that are intimate and global, it’s not just about the tea.

It’s about craftsmanship and the art of doing things really well and maybe a little slowly. You learn the stories of tea growers and chefs and sommeliers around the world.

It’s about globalization and local traditions around something that is so ubiquitous and so deeply personal. You learn the subtlety and thought Lovell puts into brewing and blending and pairing teas.

It’s about complex supply chains and fighting back against giant anonymous corporatization of everything and greed. You learn how hard it is for tiny tea growers to survive, and how important it is to give them a chance. Yes, even if you pay a little more for the art they bring.

And most of all it is about bravery. This is a woman who left her corporate life behind when her father and then she herself got cancer. She found her way into her life of purpose and passion, working with her favorite products and people.

Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

by Susan Ware

“many women’s lives were profoundly altered by participation in the struggle to win the vote. This narrative captures those personal and political transformations."

Susan Ware’s history is the kind of book they’re not allowed to teach in some places. It talks about racism and sexism. It talks about the history of ordinary women across the country, not just the few names you can think of from New England.

These are biographies of 19 women who stepped well outside their comfort zones into what they thought was the right thing “through actions large and small, courageous and quirky, in states and communities across the nation.” The battle for the right to vote for white women took 80 years. For women of other ethnicities, on a practical level, it is still very much in progress.

Along the way, that 80-year battle saw some women killed. Some went on hunger strikes and some were beaten in prison. Some of them collapsed in exhaustion, lost their marriages, and suffered other personal setbacks. It saw terrible racism within the movement and triumphs despite that racism. It saw international alliances rise and fall. It saw sisterhoods form and families divide.

We live in a world with a lot of instant gratification, so reading about this saga is humbling. The people who started it didn't see it finish. They fought for the rights of their great-great-granddaughters. They organized on timelines that are almost impossible to imagine in a culture that can't culturally commit to climate action to protect the world twenty years out. But they found strength in their teams, in their sisterhoods, in their purpose.

Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made The World

By Virginia Postrel

“We catch airline shuttles, weave through traffic, follow comment threads. We speak of life spans and spinoffs and never wonder why drawing out fibers and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language."

There may be no technology that has woven its way into our lives and language as much as textiles. And yet it often gets overlooked, partly because, as Virginia Postrel writes, “to reverse Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage about magic, any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature.’’

And partly because textile work for so much of human history has been done by women, and women weren’t writing the histories. For example, “Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered.”

Spinning yarn and making cloth dominated the waking hours of women on every continent for centuries, and in some cases, led to huge economic power, where women weavers were the main breadwinners of their families. This isn't in typical history books. Overall, textiles have dominated trade wars, led technology leaps in computing, chemistry, and logistics, and changed governments and religions. This story is bigger than Babbage and Lovelace.

The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

By Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Douglas Carlton Abrams

“Resignation and cynicism are easier, more self-soothing postures that do not require raw vulnerability and tragic risk of hope. To choose hope is to step firmly forward into the howling wind, baring one's chest to the elements, knowing that, in time, the storm will pass.”

There are few people who have been through as much and yet exude as much joy as these two.

There are many people who have been through far less and exude a lot of misery.

According to the book, the keys to increasing our joy are:

• our ability to reframe our situation more positively
• our ability to experience gratitude
• our choice to be kind and generous.

When we are faced with challenges and difficulties, when we are aware of the sheer immensity of the troubles of the world, these approaches are not the first or easiest takes. We have to choose these approaches every time. I re-read this book every couple of years to ground myself again in these messages.

Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine

“I have a cheerfully reckless view of this kind of air travel. It rarely bothers me at all. I don’t think this is bravery, because I am frequently scared stiff in cars, particularly if I’m driving. But once you’re in an airplane, everything is completely out of your hands, so you may as well just sit back and grin manically about the grinding and rattling noises the old wreck of a plane makes as the turbulence throws it around the sky. There’s nothing you can do."

Whether you are great at travel or not, whether you are doing environmental travel or cultural travel, this book has you covered. Douglas Adams has probably had an experience which was worse than yours, or at least funnier, or at least he found a way to make it seem worse and funnier.

This is a kind of resilience, and we can apply it to all sorts of situations. We are, I think Adams always felt, generally silly as a species, and we take ourselves much much too seriously. But while we are doing all that taking ourselves seriously, we can do extraordinary things and we can make extraordinary differences in the world. This book is a love story to the people who do that, and it is one of the best things he wrote in his far too short life.

I met him on the book tour for this book. We all came, armed with our towels and much loved copies of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy, wanting to talk about silly things. And we went away so moved by what he was trying to do with this book, which was bring important stories to us all in his own way.

We can all do this. We can all find ways to use our talents to shed light on things that matter. He wrote this more than 30 years ago, it is even more true today. But as Mary Annaïse Heglar said "Even if I can only save a sliver of what is precious to me, that will be my sliver and I will cherish it. If I can salvage just one blade of grass, I will do it. I will make a world out of it. And I will live in it and for it."

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think In Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

By Temple Grandin

“Visual thinkers, on the other hand, see images in their mind’s eye that allow them to make rapid-fire associations. Generally, visual thinkers like maps, art, and mazes, and often don’t need directions at all. Some visual thinkers can easily locate a place they’ve been to only once, their internal GPS having logged the visual landmarks. Visual thinkers tend to be late talkers who struggle with school and traditional teaching methods. Algebra is often their undoing, because the concepts are too abstract, with little or nothing concrete to visualize."

What are we missing out on, as a society, as organizations, as teams, when we miss out different perspectives? Innovative solutions, new approaches, and recognition of problems that can only be seen from some angles. This is ostensibly a book about education. But as a trained systems thinker, what is happening in education is below the surface of what is happening in society.

Dr. Grandin presents three fundamentally different ways of thinking:

• verbal thinking (words, paragraphs, sentences)
• visual spatial thinking (algebraic thinking, abstract mathematics, traditional engineering)
• visual object thinking (mechanical, tangible, movie-based).

She is a visual object thinker, which means she was terrible at higher math and excluded from engineering, but her gifts gave her insights that have advanced her field and our understanding.

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

By Dacher Keltner

“In our studies, people who find more everyday awe show evidence of living with wonder. They are more open to new ideas. To what is unknown. To what language can’t describe. To the absurd. To seeking new knowledge. To experience itself, for example of sound, or color, or bodily sensation, or the directions thought might take during dreams or meditation. To the strengths and virtues of other people. It should not surprise that people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained."

Awe is one of the most complicated and under-estimated emotions you can tap into. It is also really misunderstood.

It can seem primal, the emotion of people who don't know any better about how the world works. But in fact, it is an emotion of appreciation and synchronicity.  It's great for your brain chemistry, your connections, your teamwork, and your mental health.

The science of awe is rich and complicated. Keltner takes you on his own journey through it and invites you to explore what it could mean for you if you take it on.

All We Ever Wanted: Stories of a Better World

by Matt Miner, Eric Palicki, and Tyler Chin-Tanner

“Hey, been waiting for you. Have I got a story for you. It’s going to seem a little bleak at first. Maybe even a little apocalyptic. But . . . Trust Me . . . There’s a happy ending.”

It’s SOOO easy to imagine the terrible futures.

This book is a response to the plethora of dystopian science fiction out there. Pick the series: the world deteriorates, the rich are isolated and well-fed, the poor are embattled, only the physically perfect survive. This. Trope. Is. Everywhere.

This tendency towards the suckage is in our teams and organizations as well. Our minds are great at seeking out and focusing on the worst case scenarios. It’s a cognitive survival skill left over from our primal foraging days. Neurologically negative feedback and experiences stick in our heads better than the positive. Our brains are built for dystopia.

So visualizing a positive future is radical at any scale.

It takes courage, creativity, audacity, innovation, and even a little furious determination to say “This is going to turn out well. Help us make good things happen.” A clear and inspiring enunciation of what the future looks like, what it means for the people involved, and what good is going to happen is vital to organizational success.

Broad Strokes: 5 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in that order)

By Bridget Quinn

“Great Lives are inspiring. Great art is life changing. The careers of the fifteen artists that follow run the gamut from conquering fame to utter obscurity, but each of these women has a story, and work, that can scramble and even redefine how we understand art and success."

It’s a rough time to be an artist. Folks are using AI art instead of art by humans. Humans who do art but pay bills through other jobs, like graphic designers, copywriters, etc. are losing their jobs and having to set their art aside. Creating art is a mental and emotional imperative for many artists, not just a use of a particular talent. And often the stories they tell are ones we need to hear as individuals or as a society.

For women it has been hard to be an artist for a long time.  This book is a deep dive into 15 women artists and the stories they made in their lives and work. Starting from Artemisia Gentileschi in the 17th century and going through to Susan O’Malley in the 21st, these are women who knew their worth and fought for their right to do what they loved, what they were good at, what fulfilled them.

How To Be Weird: An Off-Kilter Guide to Living a One-of-a-Kind Life

By Eric G. Wilson

“We crave the weird—the quirky, the eccentric, the peculiar, the freaky, the far-out—because it estranges us from our normal habits of thought and perception, nullifies old conceptual maps, and so propels us into uncharted regions, outlandish and bracing, where we must create, if we are to thrive, coordinates more capacious than the ones we already know.”

This book is a set of activities to open up your inner weirdness in a world that wants us to be narrow, programmable, interchangeable, easily replaced.

WE NEED THIS.

There are bunch of fun ways to use this book to embrace our weirdness both as individuals and as teams. Pick an activity that excites you personally and try it out, but consider bringing it to your team as well.

For example, #25: In this activity, you write a ridiculous riddle without a solution on a Post-It note (his example: What do you get when you cross a manatee and a dream?) and leave it in a public bathroom. But you could also leave a picture of it in a Slack channel to share the fun and start a conversation outside the norm. The kind of conversation you’d have over a slow coffee maker in a different time.

Weirdness is a superpower. It's good for your brain and your heart. Embrace it.

How Long 'Til Black Future Month

by N. K. Jemisin

“Everyone—even the poor, even the lazy, even the undesirable—can matter. Do you see how just the idea of this provokes utter rage in some? That is the infection defending itself … because if enough of us believe a thing is possible, then it becomes so.”

This is a book of great short stories covering a range of science fiction and fantasy ideas that are little jewels. As a geeky tech kid who grew up on short stories from Clarke, Heinlein, and Bradbury, this book is an extension of the genre into some beautiful territory. Some are fantasy, some are more future fiction. Some are the pre-cursors of her novels.

All of them are stories that stretch your mind and your ideas beyond what society has told you is possible. And that's good for all of us. That is the essence of 'Future Months' as opposed to History Months.

Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

By Nick Hornby

“Think quicker, be more ambitious, be more imaginative. And whatever you do for a living, that’s something you need to hear, every now and again . . . This book is about work, and nobody ever worked harder than these two, or at a higher standard, while connecting with so many people for so long.”

Hornby’s book reminds us, through his loving tribute to these two amazingly ridiculously high achievers, that your high performers:

Have so much of their identities, egos, and sense of self-worth tied up in their work that they are actually pretty fragile.

Dickens would get so depressed he would walk for hours instead of sleeping, once walking 30 miles in one night between London and Kent.

Are operating so far above everyone else that by the time you notice they are burnt out, they are at about 30% of their normal engagement, and 70% gone.

It’s hard to reel them back in and heal them up at that point. Both geniuses had times where their output was lower and they were really struggling, but their bar was so much higher that no alarm bells went off, and they didn’t have the support systems they needed.

Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

By Morgan Jerkins

“I thought gangs were filled with members who were often unemployed and shunned from society. I never asked the heavier questions, like how did this unemployment begin and why has society shunned them in the first place?”

This is a lesson in the deep dives. On the surface, it’s a simple idea: one woman’s exploration of her own family’s journey during the Great Migration and what happened to them next.

Her family story is one of millions of Great Migration stories that shaped the United States in fundamental ways. There are 6 million stories about who moved and why, who stayed and why, how cities changed, how culture changed. The TL/DR is that EVERYTHING changed.

Beneath those stories are structures. Powerful terrible racist structures. Historical and cultural structures. And complex family structures. Understanding those structures helped Jerkins understand how her family evolved and adapted and struggled.

Starter Villains

By John Scalzi

“I expected the members of Earth’s leading society of villains to be smarter,” I said. “I don’t know why.” “They’re smarter in movies and books.” “They would have to be, wouldn’t they?” Morrison said. “In the real world, they can be what people like them usually are: a bunch of dudes born into money who used that money to take advantage of other people to make even more money. It works great until they start believing that being rich makes them smart, and then they get in trouble.”

The Hyper-Intelligent Management Cats are only about the 4th most absurd thing in this book. The other three, are in some order:

• billionaires (because, honestly, when you think about it, that is just TOO MUCH MONEY)
• subscription service villainy
• unionized dolphins

It is an utterly ridiculous book.

And it's perfectly OK, all you changers of the world and companies and systems, you Bringers-In-Of-Important-Tech and you Usherers-In-Of-New-Eras, to read utterly ridiculous books. They remind you to recognize ridiculousness when you see it and call it out. And to laugh at it.

Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World

By Christian Cooper

“Birding shifts your perceptions, adding new layers of meaning and brokering connections: between sounds and seasons, across far-flung places, and between who we are as people and a wild world that both transcends and embraces us. In my life, it has been a window into the wondrous.”

There was a moment in Central Park in May 2020. Christian Cooper was birding, as he'd done every year for 35 years, when he was threatened by a white woman with police brutality. This is not a book about that moment. It's about the birder and the writer and the comic book geek and the activist and the queer Black man that was present in that moment. It's a reminder that there is context in all these moments we only see in a flash and have no capacity to really judge or understand. 

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

By Eric Klinenberg

“People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructures—not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships inevitably grow.”

This book is about all the ways we have connected as communities, from libraries to union halls to parks and pools and community gardens. These pieces of social infrastructure can have profound impacts on the health of a community, the safety of community members, and the connections people make across different cultures, backgrounds, and religions. For example, an urban neighborhood with a community garden where elders feel physically safe is a neighborhood where people know and check up on their neighbors, so more elders survive heat waves. A community with a robust and well-funded library has better high school graduation rates, more connections across generations, and longer-lived community members.