A Culture of Readers
As an organization we read books……a lot of books! Continuous learning keeps you hungry for personal and professional growth. It also keeps you humble and humility trumps complacency! When you’re continuously learning you can’t help but realize how much more you have to learn….you won’t become the proverbial “know it all”; you keep searching for ways to improve……ways to improve yourself, your family, your team, your community…. and so we read, discuss, learn, embrace new ideas and grow. Personal and professional growth improves the quality of an organization and therefore the quality of service that organization delivers. It’s good for our people, good for our customers and smart for our business – everyone wins!
That said I’ll tell you we just finished an important book titled Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink. In fact our entire leadership team (over 20 folks!) felt it was one of the best books they’ve read! For us, the litmus test is the number of concepts in a book you can apply in your professional and personal lives…..Drive is packed with take-away content. We’ve already embraced and begun implementation of two exciting ideas; “20 Percent Time” and “Employee Directed Giving”. 20 Percent Time allows employees to work ½ day per week on any project that peaks their interest – the result…increased innovation, improved efficiency and engaged teams. Employee Directed Giving let’s employees direct a portion of our corporate giving fund to the charity of their choice.
Drive is a great book full of great ideas….check it out!
I’m a big fan of Daniel Pink and strongly encourage you and your team include his book “A Whole New Mind.” Google has adopted a 70/20/10 philosophy where they spend 70% working, 20% making their work more efficient and 10% on experiments. RE: corporate giving, I endorse http://www.earthsharega.org/.
Brandon – We have also read “A Whole New Mind” and are working on incorporating some of the ideas in that book into our next meeting. (I will have a blog post about the meeting in the next few weeks.) Google’s breakdown of work time makes sense, we will have to research their way of doing things too. Thank you for the tip on earthsahrega.org. For our current meeting, we read the book “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. If you get a chance, check it out. -CN