We did nothing but decide on the prop (i.e. management book) for the next several sessions.  I pulled out my running list of books to read and we cross-referenced that with the top 100 business & investment books on amazon.com.

And so the book we narrowed down to was…

…

…

Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point!

I will try and get copies of this book for all the regular attendees.  If you are not a regular attendee but want the free book, the easy solution is to become a regular attendee

I plan to create a mind-map for the first chapter from the book before the next scheduled session on May 6th.  See you then.

While reading the book "Strengths based Leadership" which builds on the StrengthsFinder assessment, I came across this very intriguing and applicable section titled "What strong teams have in common".  The topic is very close to my heart, so I had to blog about it and obviously create a mindmap!

Mind Map: What strong teams have in common?

Recently we had a fantastic opportunity to improve our health and hone our team skills at the same time.  Our employer, Fiserv sponsored a fitness competition called "FiservFit".  As part of the competition, employees formed teams of 4 (nearly 1000 teams globally) and competed against other teams to log the most number of steps (Fiserv also provided the pedometers to all participants)

At the start of the competition, we had no idea what a wonderful experience the 8-week period would turn out to be.  We formed team "FastPace" with 4 moderately motivated and utterly non-athletic colleagues!  As the weeks progressed though, we learned tons of lessons in team building and leadership. 

In hindsight, here is a list of things that helped us finish this journey successfully together:

• Do everything together: Of the 3.1 million steps we logged as a team, we walked more than 60% of those steps together, while adjusting to each other’s schedules and motivating each other in the process.  If we hadn’t done that, we would have not even reached the 50th percentile, let alone 95th percentile.
• Sacrifice a little on the personal-level to reap rich rewards as a team: One of our team members had tight family obligations on weekends and after-work-hours.  So, the rest of us adjusted our schedules to walk together early on Saturday mornings.  (I never woke up before 7am in my life, but for 8 straight Saturdays, I woke up by 5:30am so I could join the other teammates by 6:30!)
• Do not judge/undermine other team members:  We quickly realized not all of us had the same threshold or capacity to walk longer/faster.  However, we silently made a pact not to judge those individuals or undermine their contributions.  We slowed down for them or just went out for longer walks when those team members did not join in.
• Challenge smartly and realistically:
• We challenged each to beat the step counts at the individual level…. "if anyone on the team can beat my step count this week, that person will get a surprise gift!".  Although no one took this too seriously, we nevertheless had a healthy competition that week as everyone stretched themselves just for the bragging rights.
• At the team-level, every time we went out together on weekends, I challenged the team to complete 50K steps (together) and that I would buy them breakfast as a reward.  Again, we never reached that goal but we came pretty darn close several times.
• Reward team successes: The first time we moved up 26 positions into the top-70 group, I got every one on the team a sport water bottle.  That was a very tiny gesture but I am sure we will remember that in relation to our accomplishment for a long time to come…
• Focus on giving your best rather than to win: Right from the beginning we knew we had no chance of reaching into the top 20, but we nevertheless kept trying; our best performance was the 44th spot and ultimately ended up at position number 59.
• Outperform yourself, not others: We never compared our performance to others.  Our individual and team goal was to beat the previous week’s step count by 10% or more.

Oh, by the way, all of us lost tons of weight as a direct result of this exercise and feel a whole lot fitter.  We promised each other (during our victory lunch celebration) that we would keep up with the healthful walking, albeit at a scaled down level

I have been reading the book “Influencer: The Power to Change Anything” off and on for a few weeks now. 

One of the sections about influencing emphasizes identifying and changing vital behaviors.  And I could totally relate to the example on how just identifying a few vital behaviors will tremendously impact your quest for losing weight.  Here goes the list:

• Exercise more days than not (i.e. >= 4 days a week)
• Eat Breakfast everyday
• Weigh yourself daily
• Plan where and what to eat during lunch
• Make a grocery list in advance and don’t shop while you are hungry

As simple as that!  The National Weight Control Registry identified these vital behaviors by tracking people who lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for a minimum of 6 years.  So, this definitely for the long-term…

As I was reading the December 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, a small but prominent article on page 21 caught my eye.  The article was titled “The Best Advice I Ever Got“.  This article is an excerpt from an interview with Hans-Paul Burkner conducted by Daisy Wademan.

Hans-Paul Burkner, President and CEO of The Boston Consulting Group starts off by saying that good advice often comes in the form of deeds, not words.  He goes onto talk about his role model, Tom Lewis and his leadership style.

The best part of the article, for me, however, was Tom’s subtle articulation of team-building philosophy.  Hans-Paul quotes several examples in the article about how Tom lead extremely diverse and opinionated team members to great success against all odds, even as a very modest and empower leader.

This article is a must read for any developing leader!  Unfortunately, this is copyrighted material from Harvard Press.  So, you can either buy a copy of this article for $4.50 here or borrow a copy of the December 2007 issue of HBR from your local library.

I came across this wonderful and very insightful interview with Sandra J. Sucher in the latest edition of Harvard Business Interview.  In the interview, Sandra shares some very thoughtful and interesting views on how and why bringing executives together to read and discuss literary works can be a potent leadership development tool.

This interview is very relevant to what we do every time we meet and what we hope to accomplish through the book club!

Here’s the link, one more time: http://tinyurl.com/27f7dn

During last night’s meeting we decided to meet twice a month, 1st and 3rd Tuesdays! Everyone unanimously agreed that we were having fun and meeting twice would be beneficial to all.

We decided to scale down to 1 chapter every time we meet; that way we still cover two chapters a month.

Sanjay sent this link to Forbes.com about the review for a book “Remarkable Leadership“.  Based on the Forbes review, the book seems to have some potential.  Like all engineers, I love check-lists and this book is based on one

The author Kevin Eikenberry seems to have cracked open some of the secrets of obtaining leadership skills, in exactly 13 steps!

Interestingly enough, he quotes a reference about 164 new business titles in the next 30 days.  That is a whole lot of books to read when we are struggling to read and digest 2 chapters a month.  We really need to be careful while selecting our books.  Kevin claims that his book is different from the 164 in that it is not a story about a great leader but what one can do today, tomorrow and the next day to become a better leader.

Here’s a link to amazon reviews, in case you are interested:

We had a fantastic discussion tonight! In fact, we were so engrossed in the conversation that we could only talk about the first chapter of the book (Leadership is Influence) instead of the scheduled two chapters.
We discussed various issues and ideas leading off from the core principle of Leadership via influence. Ram, Suraj and Sanjay had some great ideas from their personal and professional lives and everyone had at least 1 or 2 take-way ideas that they plan to implement soon!!
We were all pretty excited to continue these meetings. If you want to be a part of the club and share and benefit from the brainstorming and sharing, be sure to attend our next meeting. More details to follow….
Happy reading!