First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman, 1999

Marcus Buckingham is a well known name in management theory. 

Read this book a few years (possibly decades back), but re-read since it was recommended by a mentor I met for lunch.

Good to read the book now that I manage team of 30+ people v reading it when I was in business school aspiring to be (more of a) leader.

Full title of the book is: First, Break All the Rules: What The World's Greatest Managers Do Differently.  In essence, what great managers do differently is that they accept people for their strengths and weaknesses.

The do not try to change people drastically but figure out how to play to strengths to find projects/roles that fit strengths.

(Great managers sound like they are great at relationships too...)

Great managers do not believe everyone on their team are equals.  They advocate spending time with the best people since they have the most potential.  They do not try to 'fix' people.

They give their best people the best teams/projects to work on (instead of giving them challenging teams/projects, which would only lead to frustration). So counter-intuitive thinking. 

Great managers have awareness that one's filter is not the same as everyone else's.  Don't treat people as I would like to be treated since each person is unique and not like me.  (I know, cray-cray)

To be a great manager:
1. Select for talent; not intelligence or experience
2. Define the right outcomes & objectives, the what not the how
3. Motivate someone by focusing on strengths, not weaknesses
4. Develop someone by finding the right fit, not the next rung in the ladder

Three kinds of talents (use this to score candidates while interviewing?):
1. Striving - why a person gets out of bed
2. Thinking - how a person thinks, does things
3. Relating - whom person builds relationships with, confronts/ignores

Interviewing tips:
- interview for talent
- listen for consistent messaging/responses
- listen to initial responses, what is top of mind
- ask for examples, determine talents - past behavior is predictive of future behavior
- take notes & refer back to see what statements do or do not correlate to strong performers (like everyone thing else: document, measure & refine)

Track my own success, goals and growth and encourage my team to do the same thing.  Similar to above: document, measure & refine.

As I type up my notes from re-reading this book, have already made a few notes in regards managing my team.

Can't Help Myself: Lessons & Confessions from a Modern Advice Columnist by Meredith Goldstein, 2018

I wish I was as talented & funny a writer as Meredith Goldstein. 

A fan of her Love Letters column on boston.com & inaugural novel Singles, I was looking forward to reading Can't Help Myself. 

Even though I knew she would talk about her Mom's battle with cancer.

Hilarious memoir where Meredith talks about giving advice without judgment (something I need to learn to do) which  makes her so endearing.

She talks a lot about her commentators, and how they have become a family and even support group for her.

Honest about past relationships, her non-existent relationship with her father, her 'Rachels' friends in their 20s once her friends have started coupling off, and how she lost interest in dating while dealing with her Mom's health.

She is honest about snapping at her Mom as she goes through chemo, and wishing her Mom would get out of the hospital so she could go home.

More substantive than I though.  Goldstein is self-aware, honest & just plain comedy.

The Startup & The People We Hate at the Wedding

April reads before I went off to UK for vacation & India for work.

The Startup by Doree Shafrir, 2017
Enjoyable novel of start up culture in NYC, imaging the master of the universe feeling these twenty-something white kids feel.  Dealing with building a company, constantly asking for money from investors - what an intense and odd world.

Biting commentary on 'news' today with instant updates, regardless if accurate or verified.  Google employees who are brilliant yet hesitant to leave the benefits of Google to strike out on their own.

Katya Pasternack is a reporter, whose editor Dan Blum struggles to go become a 'grown up' with wife Sabrina & family in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Mack McAllister is the personality driven founder of a 63 employee startup TakeOff taking advantage of his 'celebrity' startup by sleeping with woman and drinking his own kool aid to sell his non-profit generating app.

Thirty-something Sabrina ends up going back to work after having two children, reporting to 20-something Isabel at TakeOff.  The start-up 20-something world of TweetDeck and insta-everything is overwhelming.

Characters include first-generation Russian-American Katya, Korean-American Sabrina and an anonymous Tweeter who gives the African-American take on the very white start up world.

The People We Hate at The Wedding by Grant Ginder, 2017

Siblings Paul & Alice are self-loathing siblings making poor personal choices on their self-destructive path.  They take their anger out on their half-sister Eloise, whose father is a debonair Frenchman.

Paul's & Alice's father is a Midwestern nice accountant named Bill.  Donna is the mother who has not quite gotten over her French ex-husband Henrique and who Paul resents for how Donna so quickly got over the death of Bill.

Eloise is getting married in England, bringing the family together.  Paul finally opens communication with Donna, and eventually finds out how she has shielded him from Bill's resentment after Paul came out.

Alice reacts brutally to Eloise's generosity but in the end, accepts her help.

Family drama captured so well.  Insecurities & ruts, perfect Eloise's snobbery showing - all the 'best' qualities that only family can bring out.