Category: Professional Development

Books, Personal Project, Professional Development

Book 467: The Mastery of Love (Toltec Wisdom Collection #2)- Miguel Ruiz

Geoff W

I’m not sure I will make it through the third book in the collection. I probably will because I already have it, but I can guarantee I won’t look into the fourth book, The Fifth Agreement or any of the other works by Ruiz.

As I mentioned when I responded to The Four Agreements, this isn’t really my cup of tea and I think The Mastery of Love made that even more apparent the further I got through the book. I found myself getting more agitated the more I read, thankfully it came it at just under 200 pages.

I’m not sure if it’s the deepening spirituality of the books or what, because Ruiz is very careful not to use only Judeo-Christian references, even if he chooses predominantly Western religious references including the Ancient Greeks.

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Books, Personal Project, Professional Development

Book 466: The Four Agreements (Toltec Wisdom Collection #1) – Miguel Ruiz

Geoff W

This book came to me from the Human Resources person at my previous job. I had gone to her to ask advice on how to communicate with another member of our team and she had a lot of great advice, but she recommended this book.

It came up again when I was talking to our Human Resources person at my new job. We were discussing great resources and I mentioned my old HR person loved this book and I realized I had never actually gotten around to reading it.

Once I finished reading it, I spoke with her again and told her some of the drawbacks and she mentioned some others that might be more in line with my life philosophy and pretty much lack of spirituality. That being said this book still had some great points that I appreciated and think anyone can put into practice in their own life.

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ARC, Books, Personal Project, Professional Development

Book 465: A Truck Full of Money – Tracy Kidder

Geoff W

Ugh. (Nothing to do with the book, which I quiet enjoyed.)

This is what I get for not responding to my reading of the book in a timely manner. Like the other book published this week (You Will Not Have My Hate), this has been sitting in my queue to be responded to for almost an entire month.

I wish I could say what took me so long to respond but I have no idea. I’ve just been so busy at work and with Thanksgiving that I dropped the ball. Unfortunately that means my normal Opening and Closing Lines at the end aren’t there because this was a book from NetGalley* and by time I went to write this, they’d already archived it 🙁

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ARC, Books, Professional Development

Book 422: Smarter Faster Better – Charles Duhigg

Geoff W

When I requested a copy of this upcoming book (released March 8, 2016) from Random House*, I was really hoping for a repeat of Duhigg’s 2012 The Power of Habit. Unfortunately, there was something missing from this one. I can’t quite figure out what it is, but I think it has to do with the first book being much easier to apply and this one overall being more theoretical.

That being said, this was incredibly readable and had a lot of great case studies that I’ve encountered in numerous settings and other books I’ve read recently about work productivity and managing up. Duhigg’s writing style is incredibly easy to read and he seamlessly ties together disparate examples to elucidate his points. Off the top of my head a few are: the development of Disney’s Frozen, General Electric (I feel like I’m an expert after Badowski’s excellent Managing Up), aviation near-crashes, the writing and staging of West Side Story, Google, Cincinnati school reform, debt collection and many others! Needless to say you will easily find at least one example that you really identify with.

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ARC, Books, Professional Development

Book 403: What Millennials Want From Work – Jennifer J. Deal & Alec Levenson

Geoff W

Long story short, Millennials are just like everyone else so quit complaining about us! 😉

When I saw the title I knew I wanted to read it as I’ve been reading everything I can recently on management, the workplace and professional development topics that interest me. The publisher, McGraw-Hill Professional, kindly provided a pre-publication copy* and it will be available the first week of 2016.

Obviously, the ultimate lessons of the book are a bit more complicated than the opening of this post, but it really does boil down to something as simple as we’re all the same, just reacting to ever-changing technology, economy and society. It was reassuring to see this with well backed global research and written in an approachable and readable way.

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