This article is part of a series of blog posts entitled, “What’s Xenium Reading?” To find out more about this series, click here. This week’s post features Molly Kelley, an HR Business Partner at Xenium.
As someone who reads four to five books per month, one of my least favorite questions is, “What’s your favorite book?” That’s like asking a parent to pick your favorite child (easy right now since I only have one!) They all have different qualities and strengths and I read so broadly that even selecting a favorite genre is difficult, let alone a favorite book. I’m a lifelong reader and belong to Xenium’s book club and the Every Last Word Book Club, a group of eight literary ladies who read a book once a month. That book club is unusual in that it was founded over 20 years ago (I’ve only been a member for 12 years). With that background in mind, here are my recommendations:
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
I regularly reference this book during my leadership and customer service training sessions, as well as in one-on-one coaching sessions with managers and employees. There are so many good elements, thoughts and ideas contained here that to pick out just one or two is really difficult. For me, the overriding theme concerns the value Tony Hsieh and Zappos as a whole place on positive company culture, and the impact company culture has on not only employee and customer satisfaction, but upon cold hard profits. Before founding Zappos, Tony founded another company that grew beyond its original feel-good culture, and he vowed never to let that happen again. He says, “I had decided to stop chasing the money, and start chasing the passion.”
Zappos and its success provides perfect proof that putting a high value on cultural integrity, individual employee fulfillment and allowing people to bring their “whole self” to work, coupled with having fun with your customer service WORKS as a business model. The audio version of this book is particularly fun in that several employees from the organization, including an HR professional, were tapped to read sections as well. It makes for an easy and fun read for anyone in a leadership or customer service role, which I would argue should be every one of us in some capacity, that will inspire you to think differently about everything from how and who you hire to how you interact with your customer base. I have seen over and over and again, in partnering with so many people and companies that, “Your personal core values define who you are, and a company’s core values ultimately define the company’s character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.”
Other favorite business reads of mine include Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni and Smart Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey.
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
In the category of non-fiction, specifically non-business reads, this book is on my absolute top ten list. I first read it while on my honeymoon, part of which John and I spent touring the battlefields around Ypres in Belgium, where my mother lives. (Yes indeed, I spent my honeymoon in rainy Belgium in March, combing through WWI battlefields with my husband and my mother, and it was the best trip of my life!)
It’s easy to forget with the advantage of distant American shores, long history and all of our modern comforts how truly horrific this war was, for all parties involved. Living conditions for civilians and soldiers were absolutely appalling and in places like Germany, France, Belgium and England, it was almost impossible to find a single family who hadn’t lost someone, or several someones. The sheer scale of collective world pain in the post-war years takes my breath away.
I’m not alone in my fascination with both world wars, and there are umpteen books out there about this era. So why this book? As a voracious history reader, there are few authors who paint a far-off time and place as vividly as Tuchman does. Reading her works, you feel you are right there. And this dramatic little book focuses on just 30 days, the first month, of the war, from which everything else spiraled.
From a business perspective, it is an amazing illustration of how our reliance on “how we’ve always done it, what we think we know, and that cannot or will not happen” can literally blind a leader to reality. Many business people read Black Hawk Down (another great book, written by Mark Bowden) for similar reasons, namely to garner lessons learned from truly calamitous decision-making situations. Tuchman wryly remarks at some point that, “Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.” She add as well, “One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.”
The Guns of August should also be read by any leader for its examples of truly heroic decision making under really tough circumstances. I’m not going to make too heavy a case for the business side of this though, as I reread it every few years more because it’s a rip-roaring adventure that sweeps along, reading more like non-fiction than fiction. Along these lines, I would also recommend the following historical non-fiction: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown, Seabiscuit and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, In the Garden of the Beast by Eric Larson and So Terrible a Storm: A Tale of Fury on Lake Superior by Curt Brown.
And while we’re on the topic of great reads that present moral dilemmas and could be read by anyone who enjoys a well written and thoughtful story, my favorite work of fiction in recent years is:
The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Steadman
This is a beautifully atmospheric read that centers around a marriage and the strains put on individual ethics by isolation. The reader finds themselves sympathizing with so many characters at once, it’s almost emotionally exhausting, and would be if it were not so beautifully written. Lines from this book remained with me long after I finished it, including, “The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm—the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you’re wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.”
The role I play for my clients is often one of conflict mediation and the importance of being able to see multiple perspectives is extremely important to being able to move coworkers forward. I love this book for its ability to allow the reader to walk a mile in each character’s shoes. The writing is absolutely melodic and the isolated landscape of the North Australian lighthouse makes the island almost a character in and of itself. I read quite a bit of fiction and would put this one in the company of other favorites like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce, and Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich.