What I Will Remember from the Books I Read in 2019

This year's recap is thematically focused on my messy as hell quest through the trenches trying to earn the right to be a leader.

I can't claim that I have succeeded, but I can certainly say that I've tried. As Mark Welsh states:

"Leadership is a gift given by those who follow."

Atomic Habits by James Clear

The quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits. The outcomes of your life are just lagging measure of your habits. You get what you repeat.
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
"Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity."
Three layers of behaviour change: Identity (true behaviour changes are identity changes), Processes (changing your system to support the identity change), Outcomes (the lagging measures)
Habits are modern day solutions to ancient desires: Finding love → Tinder, Belonging → Facebook, Seeking validation → Instagram, Reducing uncertainty → Google

When you steal like an artist, you don't copy the end result, you steal the thinking. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like them.
To pair "stealing like an artist" with improv theatre's "yes and" where you build upon the best of what someone else has done.
"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again."

Small gains in onboarding speed increased productivity and length of tenure.
An organisation is the accumulation of every choice made by every employee.
Great rituals are authentic, foster relationships, recurring, supported by company, scale, priority and has a why that is understood.

Big winners are ones who take a flywheel from ten turns to billions of turns, rather than crank through ten turns.
Execution across the flywheel needs to be spot on: if you score a 9, 10, 3, 9, 10 across, you need to bring the 3 back to an 8.
The greatest danger in business and life lies not in outright failure but in achieving success without understanding why you were successful in the first place.

Three types of work for product teams: Tactical (shipping, daily activities), Strategic (positioning to win in the market), Operational (tying strategy back to tactical work)
Three major gaps that block strategy: Knowledge gap, Alignment gap, Effects gap
Strategy is both a top down and bottom up effort.

Introversion and extroversion having little to do with shyness but more so how an individual derives energy.
Build in sacred time for battery recharging.
High monitoring introverts have the ability to turn on extroversion for certain periods of time but require significant downtime to recover.

Resilience is knowing that you can't change the wind but you can change your sail.
Follow the 40–70 rule: making decisions when they have between 40–70% of the information needed.
Maintaining relationships: Send handwritten notes, remind people that you're thinking of them, acknowledge and show appreciation.

Leadership is not something that can be bestowed, it must be earned and people must want to follow you.
Your role as a manager is to improve the purpose, people and process to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.
1:1 questions to identify what matters, understand root problems, and offer support.

Writing is thinking, write write write as a PM. Emotional journaling to keep track of your triggers as well.
Delegate tasks but never accountability. Regardless of who does the work, you are always responsible.
Promoting people who are 60% ready for a role leads to extraordinary returns and impact.

Every time I feel my imposter syndrome creeping up, it is simply my inner child speaking, one that is just trying to make sure that I am loved, feel safe and belong.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
Leadership is a pathless path and success is not having the strength to surmount the odds at every obstacle but surmounting the odds despite being broken and human.

The biggest shift needed is to move from being a "To Me" leader to a "By Me" leader by taking radical responsibility.
Toxic fear drives the victim-hero relationship. Blame and guilt keep it going.
I commit to learning over being right; I will be defensive at times, but I will need to shift into curiosity.
When giving praise: Praise needs to be sincere, speak an unarguable truth, be specific and succinct.

"Your title makes you a manager, your people make you a leader."
1:1 structure: performance, relationship with peer groups, management/leadership.
Be the evangelist for courage. Believe in people more than they believe in themselves.
Four characteristics to hire for: smart around making connections, work hard, high integrity and grit.

Culture is how your company makes decisions when you're not there, it is the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day.
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
Cultural design, Cultural orientation, Shocking rules, Object lessons, Make ethics explicit, Walk the talk.

Your goal should be to make people feel like "we're all in this together and have a huge opportunity as a team."
Sharing a failure story gives people permission to take bigger risks in their own work.
Disagree and commit only works when after a decision is made, each participant must commit support out loud.

Culture spans from visible (artifacts, behaviours, metrics) to invisible (beliefs, values, assumptions).
Rituals give order and meaning, give people a safe space to experiment.
Ritual principles: They have a magical quality, are done with intentionality, carry symbolic value, and evolve over time.

Three use cases for AI in business: 1) understand and interact with customers, 2) offer intelligent products and services, 3) improve and automate business processes.
Companies with the best data will quickly gain an advantage over their rivals.

Full post originally published on Medium with complete details on each book.