Check out more of Kevin’s article recommendations.
Harvard Business Review: What to Ask Yourself Before a Career Pivot "The best thing you can do is to make an informed decision: be clear about the motives you are trying to fulfill — especially changes to your professional self or identity — and scrutinize the pros and cons of available options vis-à-vis your skills, interests, and personality. Finding the balance between an open-minded desire to experiment and a strategic focus, and being honest with yourself when you evaluate the outcome of your choices, will enable you to keep advancing and developing your potential."
Harvard Business Review: The Best Managers are Leaders and Vice Versa "...Most of the long-running debate over 'leaders' vs. 'managers' focuses on nouns when it should focus on verbs. Everyone needs both 'leading' and 'managing' in their work...It takes both leading and managing, charging and charged, to strike the balance."
Harvard Business Review: How Successful Women Sustain Career Momentum. "...Though the women we spoke with had varied backgrounds, interests, personalities, and careers, they employed...[at least two of] three behaviors that helped [them] sustain momentum during pivotal moments: a focused drive, an incessant desire to learn, and an agile mindset."
Medium.com: The Crossroads of Should and Must. "This is a story about two roads — Should and Must. It’s a pep talk for anyone who’s chosen Should for far too long — months, years, maybe a lifetime — and feels like it’s about time they gave Must a shot."
Harvard Business Review: How Will You Measure Your Life? "I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success."
The New Yorker: Failure and Rescue. "But the only failure is the failure to rescue something...So you will take risks, and you will have failures. But it’s what happens afterward that is defining. A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it—will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?—because the difference between triumph and defeat, you’ll find, isn’t about willingness to take risks. It’s about mastery of rescue."
Harvard Business Review: Be a Better Ally. "How can white men be effective allies to those employees? First, by taking responsibility for their own behaviors, educating themselves about racism and privilege, and getting and accepting feedback from people in underrepresented groups. They can also become confidants to and sponsors of women and people of color and insist on diverse hiring pools and practices. They can vigilantly watch out for bias at work, intervening decisively if they discover it. Last, they can work to build a community of other allies against racism and sexism."
Harvard Business Review: Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time. "...We envision a new and explicit contract that benefits all parties: Organizations invest in their people across all dimensions of their lives to help them build and sustain their value. Individuals respond by bringing all their multidimensional energy wholeheartedly to work every day. Both grow in value as a result."
Harvard Business Review: Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve. "...The most powerfully transformative executives possess a paradoxical mixture of personal humility and professional will. They are timid and ferocious. Shy and fearless. They are rare—and unstoppable."
Harvard Business Review: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. "...By providing a blueprint for how you can be real, be whole, and be innovative as a leader in all parts of your life, this program helps you perform better according to the standards of the most important people in your life; feel better in all the domains of your life; and foster greater harmony among the domains by increasing the resources available to you to fit all the parts of your life together."
Here are a few of Kevin’s podcasts recommendations.
Part 1 of 2 with Adam Grant & Simon Sinek.
Part 2 of 2 with Adam Grant & Simon Sinek.
"What’s happening in the workplace right now?...We talk about what we are seeing in organizations across the world—and there are definitely some trends that emerge. And so much learning. We talk about disconnects between what we know from data and what we’re seeing practiced. We also talk about what high performers actually look like and the most meaningful way to succeed."
Dare To Lead with Brené Brown: Brené with James Clear On Atomic Habits. Part 1 0f 2
Dare To Lead with Brené Brown: Brené with James Clear On Atomic Habits. Part 2 0f 2
"In part 1 of our series, we talk specifically about developing identity-based habits and how we can become the architects of those habits, not the victims of them. We also talk about the intersection of his work and mine, the collective stories we make up, and how our mindsets and our systems can set us up for success. [In part 2 or our series], ...we talk about how and why habits are atomic and how to build a habit or break a habit. We also look at our environments and how we can tweak them to support the habits we want to have, and then dive in and talk about organization habits and how we create habits in a team and in organizations."
TEDxBend: Why some of us don't have one true calling.
"What do you want to be when you grow up? Well, if you're not sure you want to do just one thing for the rest of your life, you're not alone. In this illuminating talk, writer and artist Emilie Wapnick describes the kind of people she calls 'multipotentialites' -- who have a range of interests and jobs over one lifetime. Are you one?"
Why you should define your fears instead of your goals "The hard choices -- what we most fear doing, asking, saying -- are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail, in a simple but powerful exercise he calls "fear-setting." Learn more about how this practice can help you thrive in high-stress environments and separate what you can control from what you cannot."
Check out Kevin’s book recommendations. We love local bookshops and recommend finding titles through bookshop.org. This is a great resource to find books all while supporting local bookshops
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER Discover the twelve breakthrough practices for bringing creativity and a sense of possibility into all of your endeavors in this bestselling guide from the author of Pathways to Possibility.
Named one of 100 Leadership & Success Books to Read in a Lifetime by Amazon Editors The world's most trusted guide for leaders in transition.
A revised and updated edition of the acclaimed Wall Street Journal bestseller that explores why some leaders drain capability and intelligence from their teams while others amplify it to produce better results.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The author of The Talent Code unlocks the secrets of highly successful groups and provides tomorrow's leaders with the tools to build a cohesive, motivated culture.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG AND LIBRARY JOURNAL
“...Renowned industry analyst Josh Bersin introduces a new way to think about organizational design, employee engagement, and employee development. Distilled from decades of research and management theory into seven practical yet profound management principles, Bersin outlines how business leaders can create enduring companies that thrive with improved customer satisfaction, employee retention, and business agility." [KJ plug - this is a fantastic, easily consumable and eminently pragmatic, data and insights driven work.]
Check out Kevin’s poetry recommendations. He loves local bookshops and recommend finding titles through bookshop.org. This is a great resource to find books all while shopping local.
A spiritual masterpiece set in prose poetry, The Prophet follows the advice of the prophet Al Mustafa as he gives his insight on the intricacies of life and the human condition. His thoughts comprise those on love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.
Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, Volume One. Since its initial appearance it has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country. This collection features thirty poems published only in this volume as well as selections from the poet's first eight books.
Some Jazz a While, the eagerly anticipated collected poems of one of America's best-loved poets, gathers Miller Williams's most representative work and adds some new pieces as well.
Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America's Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning.
Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is revered as one of the great writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Now beautifully repackaged, the poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions.