5 Books that Helped me Grow my Career in 2020

We’re nearing the finish line, and while the milestone of January 1st, 2021 will not magically make all the trying times of the past year disappear, it feels like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

I am privileged to work in an industry that is highly adaptive and one that could withstand some of the blows from the past year better than others. Despite this, achieving both my personal growth goals as well as the goals my team had at the start of the year was more challenging than expected.

With audacious plans of overhauling the team’s main functions including our project management, lead generation mix, and diving into new markets, I needed to stand on the shoulders of giants and not re-invent the wheel. While there were many other factors that helped me achieve my overarching goals, the five books below were fundamental to my own professional growth:

1. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make it and Others Don’t by Jim Collins

This is the book I read most recently of the five, but its impact on my plans for growing my leadership and coaching skills was significant. The key ideas in Good to Great are:

1. Level five leadership: The idea that leaders are humble and strive for a greater good, not only for their own individual benefit, and are able to massively transform their surroundings to achieve enduring success.
2. First who, then what: Jim Collins uses the image of people on a bus and the importance of getting the right people on first, and then discovering how each can help set the direction for the bus. I am beyond thankful for my team and how they all help determine our next steps based on their individual skills.
3. Confronting the brutal facts: This learning is based on the idea that a deep-seated belief that you will succeed in your endeavour does not negate the need to confront and acknowledge the current reality. This is critical to teams and organizations that are undergoing rapid change and improvements. It is necessary to both acknowledge what is going wrong, and to maintain the belief that you will eventually succeed.
4. Hedgehogs and foxes: Knowing what is the single answer to the 3 questions: What makes you money? What can you be the best at? What lights your fire? and sticking to it. While foxes may try many tricks, hedgehogs have one fantastic one that they use to counter the foxes’ attacks.
5. The Flywheel: Each small initiative drives a larger wheel with a more noticeable impact. Similar to the idea of compounding interest building up over time from much smaller blocks, the flywheel is the idea that each minor change will eventually roll up to a much greater goal.

Overall, this book contained many ideas that I was familiar with, but Jim Collins’ presentation and research were very helpful in affirming the path to success and identifying the impact these ideas had on different companies.

2. Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne

Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, applies the key idea of bearing responsibility for what you create to tech products and companies. This sector is obsessed with rapid growth, and can sometimes lose sight of the real impact of all that it creates — moving fast and breaking things is the mantra of so many young entrepreneurs.

Through many stories that shine a light on Microsoft’s internal decision-making, Tools and Weapons discusses the impacts and morality of cybercrime, privacy laws, AI, and social media in a thought-provoking way. Some of the stories were more inspirational and showed the effort that goes into creating an entirely new concept or introducing one into a new area, and those were my favourites.

The cooperation between government bodies and individual companies that was required to introduce broadband internet into rural areas was massive, and Brad Smith talks about the lengths that Microsoft and other companies went to to make it a reality. At the same time, he doesn’t shy away from connecting these initiatives to the cyberthreats they introduced and how these areas were not always well-equipped to handle them.

As my responsibilities continue growing and I make more impactful decisions, I am constantly reminded about this book’s core idea that every tool can also be a weapon.

3. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It… and Why the Rest Don’t by Verne Harnish

Scaling Up is an excellent book for any company intent on transitioning from being a startup to being a larger enterprise, but it is also great for people making a similar jump. It’s not a perfect book and I do think that some of the frameworks it introduces can be improved to suit different situations, but it also presents some ideas that are key to achieving holistic growth across an entire organization.

Verne Harnish’s book felt like a collection of all the business books I’d ever read, but with all the actionable takeaways turned into ready-made tools for sustainable growth. For my personal and professional growth, adapting the One Page Personal Plan (OPPP) and the Personal Accountability Chart (PACe) tools and the concept of a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) was highly beneficial and helped me better articulate my own goals. By focusing on a few target areas and breaking them down into plans and actions, I am finding it easier to visualize my growth journey and track my success.

4. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

An interesting note about this book is that I read it a week or two before beginning to work from home. I say this because one of the key ideas Malcolm Gladwell discusses in The Tipping Point is the super-spreader effect whether it is in the creation of an epidemic or the creation of the newest fashion trend.

As I was reading this section of the book, I strangely kept thinking of the scene in Mean Girls where the group cuts holes into Regina’s shirt and that creates a new trend in their school. While I have no aspirations of revolutionizing women’s fashion in quite the same way, it made me more aware of the minor decisions I make and how they can help influence change around me. To borrow Gladwell’s wording, I was thinking of how I could be a natural pollinator of the mentality and direction I want others to adopt.

The Tipping Point goes over a few other examples of small actions leading to big changes such as the success of Paul Revere’s herculean effort to warn the colonies when the British were attacking. This specific example also resonated with me because Revere was not the only person who rode out to warn early Americans about the nearing threat, but he was the most successful.

Gladwell’s accessible writing makes it easier to understand why some small actions do lead to a bigger difference and others don’t, and it helped me apply these ideas to my own career and growth.

5. The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness by Stephen Covey

I saved this one for last because The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is one of my favourite books of all time, and I have been using its framework for guidance since I was 13 and first read the teens version written by Sean Covey. The 8th Habit was so fantastic that I read it, and a week later I went on a long walk and listened to much of it as an audiobook all over again.

A concise summary of this book is “Find your voice, and inspire others to find theirs”. This message at the core of the book is what takes the guiding habits for being an effective person and and builds on them to set the key principles of becoming an effective leader. In my last blog, I discussed the importance of listening and how it has helped me learn from my team and empower them to use their unique skills and identify our growth areas.

Stephen Covey makes a distinction between moral authority (the choice to lead) and formal authority (having a leadership position). This particular point was one that strongly resonated with me as I reflected on the past year and the different choices I made. By acting on my own personal morality and interest in working as a part of a high-output team, I was also establishing my moral authority and the team’s ethos of following what’s right before I had any formal authority. When I was asked to lead the team, there was already a set direction, and I had an established relationship with the team that was built on communication and empowering each other.

One of the first and key teachings in The 8th Habit is on how to discover your voice by developing, balancing, and listening to your four intelligences: mental strength developed into vision, physical strength into discipline, emotional strength into passion, and spiritual strength into conscience.

During a year of so much uncertainty, I found this exercise of checking in on my mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual selves key to a balanced and sustainable growth. It is something that we are all taught at an early stage in life, but it’s easy to let it slip and forget about one or more of these aspects.

I hope that this upcoming year is one of growth and prosperity for all across each of these four pillars of success.