Vol. 1, Iss. 7: What’s on tap - climate crisis, social public goods, and business smarts
In reflection, this past month seemed to be steeped in self-improvement. One book further enlightened me on pervasiveness of climate impact (comes with a free panic attack, too). Another reminded how damn cool it was going to libraries as a kid, and the importance of advocating for these institutions. And the other helped me hone my strategy skills in time for 2020 planning. Any which way you look at it, one of these books will likely appeal to some active interest of yours.
Subscribe to receive the monthly newsletter! We let you know when new review are published and we only send one every 4–6 weeks.
This book is the cool kids book at my company right now. Our exec team gushes about it and recommended it to everyone in the company. This book was published in 2013 and Rumelt is a very well known strategy & management professor at UCLA, and a consultant for some of the biggest companies in the world. So, this isn’t hot of the press. But time let’s you see how well something ages, like fine wine or strawberries in the sun. I’ll give my take in a minute, but here are some details about the book.
The Gist: He provides the counterpoint to good strategy, by illustrating the contents of a bad strategy. Signs of Bad Strategy: fluff — using inflated words that can’t tie back to actions or a clear message; failure to clearly identify the challenge; statements of desire that do not state how to overcome challenges. And with this baseline in mind, he proceeds to share his framework, which he calls the ‘kernel.’ The kernel has three parts: diagnosis, guiding policies, coherent actions. The diagnosis sets out to answer the question of ‘What is going on?’ This could be an assessment of internal operations, competitive dynamics in the market, intellectual property, etc… and determing what your company believes should be the driving force that the team should get behind. As a result of a clear abstracted diagnosis, it unlocks your strategy to follow up with policies and actions that beget a cohesive response to the important challenge that was identified. A guiding policy directs and constrains without fully defining its content. And the actions are specific, enumerable initiatives employees believe will follow one of the company’s policies and achieve the outcomes set by the diagnosis. His belief is that strategy is not just setting some ambitious goal, it is exaplaining why the company is going towards a goal, what are the subgoals that help guide the organization, and then empower teams to set actions. Vague is the enemy of success.
My Take: Generally speaking, I hate business books. I find them incredibly conceptual — attempting to provide a clean and simple framework to solve the worlds problems and then failing to present diverse examples of its success. They are also too long, where instead a 10-min article would be sufficient to get the point. However, Rumelt’s book didn’t fall into these banal traps. It was by far the best strategy/management book I’ve ever read. I’ll explain the simple reasons why:
- Rumelt taught his framework for decades
- Rumelt implemented his framework from multi-national corporations to small mom & pop shops, and he uses these as examples throughout the book
- When you get to the end, I believed that it needed to be a book and not a 10-min article
Weirdly, this framework is a great actionable diagnostic tool to use even outside of business. For fun, my sister and I tried this on one of our personal goals. We followed the ‘kernel’, wrote it out on paper, and it helped us home in on the problem we were personally try to improve on and then hone the actions we were using to achieve the personal goals. Sorry — I think I have a very liberal use of the word fun… No more rambling from me. I would say give this one a read.
The Gist: The Uninhabitable Earth is less about the science of climate change as it is about the effects post-warming. Wells articulates the tipping point of 1.5 to 2 degrees warming as the threshold we should fear crossing. He spends time in the beginning to explain that we are on a path to suprass these numbers without massive behavioral and physcial infrastructure changes. The current projection by the IPCC, Wallace says, is a temperature rise of 3.2 degrees by 2100. Once he establishes some of the numbers, he states that his objective is to remove complacency and to abolish the idea that climate change as a concept is too abstract and difficult to quanitfy. He breaks the book down into ‘Elements of Chaos’, of which some are hunger, wildfire, dying oceans, unbreathable air, economic collapse, among others. For each element he describes the protracted impact at varying levels of temperature rise between 1.5–5 (approx.) degrees. Wildfires burning stronger and longer than we have ever seen, coastlines completely disappearing, forced migration, trillions of dollars of lost productivity from climate disasters that will be more frequent, droughts that will destroy our crop supplies. There is a lot that will happen. And not in 2100, but now. And in 10, 20, 30 years as we steadily tick closer to the tipping point. The last section called the ‘Climate Kaleidoscope’ emphasizes the actions to be taken to curb this downward spiral. He covers topics such as activism and importance of voting, he discusses the positive and negative contributions of technology, the value of solving the problem here on earth rather than looking for an escape to another planet, etc...
My Take: If Wells’ goal was to shake you out of complacency, job well done. He demonstrated the pervasiveness of the climate change, the imminence, and the life-altering ramifications. However, I did struggle a bit with this book on a few fronts. One thing I found difficult, was the deluge of data he throws at you. He references hundreds of sources and provides an array of metrics and information. I assume this was to make his argument substantive, but I found it dizzying. And besides the 1.5–2 degree mark I’ve found it very hard to retain other important data points that help me break it down and explain some of his ideas to someone else. The second issue I had was around the importance of the shock therapy he was inducing. It was powerful, but also brought on the type of anxiety that infuses chaos in your brain without clarity on what to do next. Although his book ends with demonstrations of what needs to change and what action can be taken, I would have found the book more useful if more time and attention was spent on those actionable topics. And finally, most people, including myself, who buy this book are likely to already believe in climate change. And although he added an extra fire under my step, if he wanted to glavanize action, he is preaching to people who are already likely to be acting. I’d say it is a well researched and deep book that you could pick up every so often and review the data and explanations. But I wonder if there are other books out there that can help produce a more focused explication of the causes, the effects, and the actions.
The Gist: Klinenberg is a sociologist, professor at NYU, and writer. Unbeknownst to me until well into his book, he also co-authored Modern Romance with Aziz Ansari. Palaces focuses on how public social infrastructure can have an incredibly positive effect on reducing inequality, ethnic division, and improve civic engagement. Klinenberg starts the book referencing a case study conducted on a severe draught in Chicago during the 90s, during which one very poor neighborhood had far fewer (statistically signifcant) deaths related to the heat than an equally poor neighborhood across town. As part of the research they found that the afflicted neighborhood was greatly abandoned and lacked social cohesion. People could go days without being seen and that wouldn’t have been an alarm. The other neighborhood, although equally poor, had a strong social cohesion, parks and public meeting areas, where support for one another was much stronger.
Throughout the book Klinenberg uses examples where libraries, parks, religious centers, remediation of abandoned buildings, communal gardens, swimming pools, and so on, helps to reduce a lot of fragmentation you find in communities. Many of the components of the social infrastructure, or lack thereof, afflict poorer populations to a greater extent. In a time where every abondoned building (or small business corner store) is taken over by a commercial real estate ‘grand plan,’ Klinenberg urges for citizens, mayors, legislators, and activists to champion the value of these free, welcoming, and open spaces.
My Take: I have a soft spot for this type of work. I was already a believer, and so reading Klinenberg’s book was music to my ears. It also helped me remember the incredible weekend mornings I would go with my family to a library when I was young, and how I’ve lost that connection. And although the time I spend in bookstores would still be considered part of the social infrastructure, the important difference is the inclusion aspect of a library that provides free resources. Communal gardens, community groups, and restoration are all efforts we individually can engage with and use to be a part of a tighter community. People co-exist in tight pockets and the use of social infrastructure provides a medium to form important ties that come in handy from trivial matters like borrowing peanut butter, all the way to checking on your elderly neighbor who you haven’t seen in days at the local park. Read it, engage, and be inspired.
