Execute faster by reading the same books

When I finish a book, I often want the team around me to have read it. I want to enthuse and make plans around the concepts I’ve learned. While I can try and summarise the key parts, nothing really substitutes for the shared understanding that is achieved by multiple people reading the same book.

To remedy this, I’ve introduced a book club in our senior team. So far we’ve read 6 books together. The biggest benefit is that we use the same words and phrases for ideas we are trying to express. This is incredibly time-saving and avoids misunderstanding.

One of the great things I’ve found is that when there is a little peer pressure involved, people can read a lot more than they might have initially thought they would.

Even though it’s easy to get started, but you can run into some easily avoidable inertia unless you plan a little. Here are some tips I’ve found helpful:

• The advocate of a book should have read it — there’s a large opportunity cost from having a senior team (or any group) read a book they don’t like. The book doesn’t have to be a surprise for everyone.
• Agree some criteria for good books — ideas to think about are: situational — when there’s a common weak-spot to explore together (eg. coaching or decision-making); stage dependent — preparing you for the next level; or evergreen references that are always have some wisdom.
• Don’t just choose business books — while some of the books we’ve chosen have been about management or company-building; it’s perfectly fine to get inspiration from history, or pillage fields such as psychology for ideas. We haven’t tried fiction yet though.
• Anyone can facilitate a session — once you have some rapport, it’s pretty easy for anyone to guide the sessions. I tend to prefer a free-wheeling approach anyway. A list of questions can help when chatting stalls (see below).
• Buy the books for people — don’t rely on people to acquire the books for themselves. It creates another opportunity for inertia to strike. Understand individual reading preferences (eg ebooks or dead trees) and cater for them.
• Don’t wait for stragglers — if people haven’t read the book, it’s often a good idea to go ahead anyway. The alternative can mean a lot of re-scheduling. This is easier in a slightly larger group.
• Encourage champions — someone has to keep the torch burning for the sessions. It’s surprisingly easy to let the process decay. It helps if there is someone reading a lot and scouting ahead for useful topics, but this won’t always be the case.

Some examples of books we’ve read together:

• Quiet Leadership (when we were thinking about the role of coaching in our management approach)
• High Output management (great handbook for any startup — good to agree on the basics)
• Scaling up Excellence (a slightly more lengthy reference for running a great company)
• Turn the Ship around (interesting stories from an empowered submarine crew)
• Thinking in Bets (when we were thinking about the quality of our decision-making)

I focus on leadership book clubs, but only because this is the team I tend to work with most frequently. There’s nothing stopping us from having wider-ranging groups, but these become more logistically difficult unless it is a grass-roots movement.

Having said that, sometimes it can be good to spin up a situational book club, for the hiring managers to get aligned on a certain approach; to learn new ideas about diversity and inclusion; or to map the different ways that cultures operate together (we have 17 nationalities at Pusher).

Appendix

Here are some super basic questions for facilitating. You can prepare a lot more, but this is often completely fine to get synced on the topic:

• What was your favourite part?
• What lessons does it teach us about what we could be doing better?
• What did you disagree with?
• What do you think we should do as a result?