Here are few things I've been reading and thinking about: 

1. "Coaching the Person Not the Problem," by Marcia Reynolds. It's a solid book on coaching. Well thought out and very detailed. I think it's better to read than listen, as she packs a lot in. 

2. "The Prosperous Coach," by Steve Chandler and Rich Litvin. It's a better listen for my taste because Steve Chandler's frank, no BS delivery makes me laugh. A lot of their advice around getting comfortable with the "selling" aspect of any helping profession is entirely transferable to other fields. The book often feels like a sales pitch for Rich’s growing business, but there’s a lot of value in there as well, so happy to suggest it.

3. "Start with Why," by Simon Sinek. I know I'm very late to the party on this one. And it's because, as I suspected, there's not much new there for people who are career organizational and leadership practitioners. That said, if you're an entrepreneur, get the book, get inspired, and find your "Why." 

4. "Feminine Leadership," by Karin Jironet. I love this tour through Dante's Purgatory and how the lessons apply to leadership pitfalls and growth opportunities. Karin Jironet has also been coaching me, and she's magic at it. 

5. "The Years of Rice and Salt," by Kim Stanley Robinson. This millennia spanning alternative fiction follows a group of souls who keep reincarnating together. Like other books of Robinson, the concept is more compelling than the execution. He has a knack for these grandiose epics that produce little-to-no emotional connection with the characters. I guess that's kind of his thing-- an idea, context, and history as the main character, and people are just little blips in the big picture.  While I don’t find that approach compelling, this book did evoke feelings of deja vu grade familiarity with friends, family, and colleagues, as if we’ve known each other for perhaps longer than our everyday narratives suggest.

Thanks for reading! 

If you know someone who might find these briefs interesting, please forward along. It's a surprisingly big help. 

I also post shorter content on IG and longer content on my website. 

Warmly, 

Jacob 

Here are a few things I found this week worth checking out: 

1. Clubhouse app, Palestine and Israel. While CH has its appeal, I quickly lost interest. Then a friend turned me on to the room "Meet Palestinians and Isrealis" in the Balance Club. The room has been nothing short of amazing. Here's an article detailing its impact. The dialogues are often raw and moving, and they are visceral examples of serious “face-work” in action.

2. Face-Work and Feedback.  Erving Goffman wrote about what he called "face-work," which are the rituals and behaviors nearly all social encounters use to keep harmony. People use face-work to reduce chances of humiliation and shame in both themselves and others. This is all well and fine until we're in social contexts (e.g., a work team) where we need to give and receive honest, critical feedback to reach shared goals. These contexts require setting aside face-work in order to build a culture of feedback. 

3. Ancient Philosophy. I've been reading Plato's Timaeus lately, and a teacher of mine recently turned me on to this edition, which has running commentary. An excellent running commentary typically reduces the amount of time I spend turning to other sources, so this is a welcome recommendation.  

4. Planetary Contemplations. I am currently a teaching assistant in a two-year meditation series based on the philosophical tradition of alchemy. Part of traditional alchemy is a deep regard for the planets. I downloaded SkView Lite to get a better sense of where planets are throughout the day. That simple awareness is delightfully consciousness expanding. 

Thanks for reading! 

If you know someone who might find these briefs interesting, please forward along. It's a surprisingly big help. 

I also post shorter content on IG and longer content on my website. 

Warmly, 

Jacob 

Here are few things I found worth sharing from the week. 

1. The Power of Questions for Leaders, Consultants, Coaches, Family, Friends, and more. I'm still on an Edgar Schein kick. The influential organizational development theorist and consultant created a useful typology of questions for those in any helping professions. Here's a brief synopsis of what he unpacks more thoroughly here and here.  His approach to inquiry is valuable in virtually all relationships where you intend to help others. 

2. Remaining Open. With some clients, I conduct open-ended inquiries into the team experience. Such interviews are a way of allowing team patterns (both helpful and unhelpful) to surface organically. The tricky part is remaining consistently open to new information. Depending on the size of the team, after the first handful, it can be easy for me to believe I see an accurate picture of critical overt and covert dynamics. The reality is typically more nuanced than my imagined picture. Each new interview then requires the same degree of curiosity to hear more points of view about what appears to be a pattern while also allowing time to explore new material. The more I do that type of work, the more I am aware of the importance of remaining open in all relationships, not just clients.     

3. Transcription and Spreadsheets. Speaking of interviews, I'm thankful for the recent spate of transcription services. I've been using Otter.ai for transcription and then dissecting the text in a spreadsheet. This method of coding for meaning allows patterns to emerge. Depending on the source material, the patterns vary pretty widely. With working teams, it's common to discover themes around interpersonal relations, decision-making, power, time, and autonomy. But I'll sometimes code strategy documents, marketing approaches, competitor offerings. I find it illuminating to glimpse the underlying architecture of social systems, as it also reveals something about the structure of the mind.     

4. Some Reading. Speaking of patterns, here’s a book list that informed a recent meditation series I led. These contemplatives spent their lives charting the inner landscapes of experience. While our outer lives provide many joys and pleasures, never exploring the inner life is to miss half the show. 

   • The Inner Citadel The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Pierre Hadot 

   • Plotinus, or The Simplicity of Vision, Pierre Hadot 

   • Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot

   • The Neoplatonists, John Gregory  

   • The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila 

   • That Which Transpires Behind That Which Appears, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan 

   • Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill 

   • The Sufi Message, Vol 1, Hazrat Inayat Khan 

Thanks for reading! 

If you know someone who might find these briefs interesting, please forward along. It's a surprisingly big help. 

I also post shorter content on IG and longer content on my website. 

Warmly, 

Jacob 

A few things that caught and held my attention this week:

1. The Way of Ignorance. There are countless approaches to management and team effectiveness consulting. Ignorance may be one the best. Edgar Schein dedicates a full principle to “accessing ignorance” in his Process Consultation Revisited. As did one of my NYU Organizational Behavior mentors, who based his approach on ethnographic methods. Ultimately, if you want to be of any help, you have to listen and observe first. Then, ask honest questions. 

2. Further Adventures in SEO. Michael Carychao turned me to Frase.io. It's a wild piece of software that dissects content based on its SEO ranking and compares it to the top 20 or pages with similar keywords. Between Frase and this article, it's painfully clear, I've been doing everything wrong. Ignorance appears less helpful here. 

3. Team Effectiveness? Group dynamics? Team Building!! Speaking of SEO, most of the group consulting work I do doesn't seem to have strong SEO vibes. Outside of academics, few people are searching for "group dynamics." But countless teams are looking for team building. Sadly, many team-building efforts are woefully misguided. Teams rarely bond and become more effective because of the "off-site" that had an escape room followed by a happy hour. Fun is essential and valuable, but it's no magic bullet for addressing team challenges. 

4. Games and Team Dynamics. Speaking of fun, Super Mario 3D World delivers. Teamwork is in low demand, but team joy is off the charts. In contrast, Overcooked demands a high level of attention, coordination, and communication right out of the gates. That said, Super Mario 3D World's game feel is in a league of its own. 

5. Old and new "change-the-world" efforts.  I'm doing a small project with the Fetzer Institute, which has an inspiring "theory of change." Meanwhile, my fiancée is a lead product designer at Amplitude, which has a radically different approach. I love considering how these approaches could be mutually supportive. 

Thanks for reading! 

If you know someone who might find these briefs interesting, please forward along. It's a surprisingly big help. 

I also post shorter content on IG and longer content on my website. 

Warmly, 

Jacob 

A few things I found worth capturing and sharing this week: 

1. When making decisions, it can be helpful to consult the various aspects of our being. Acknowledging, appreciating, and consulting these multiple selves is the subject of Jordan Gruber and James Fadiman's Symphony of Selves, Napoleon Hill's "Invisible Counselors," and Jean Houston's "Inner Experts." Whenever I've led such practices, people report getting lots out of the experience. If you have time, give it a try. 

2. I help leadership teams become more effective. But for large-scale organization change, NOBL is a quality outfit to checkout. Their newsletter is surprisingly good. 

3. Jamie Wheal's new book is out at the end of the month. Based on the PDF that comes with a book pre-order, it's likely going to be an insightful take on an aspect of contemporary spiritual culture. It could over-index on responding to Burning Man/Silicon Valley spiritual scene but will be insightful nonetheless. 

4. For an older take on spiritual development, I continue to relish Pierre Hadot's take on Marcus Aurelius and Plotinus. Both books are incredible and worth a read. 

5. When I lift my head from the weekly sprint, it can be mindblowing to realize how deep into our merging with technology we already are. Biometric data plus AI in neuromarketing, sports, and games have critical ethical challenges. These challenges seem even steeper when used in managerial decisions, like getting hired or fired due to hormone levels. We’re not there yet, so for the time being, instinct and quality communication still play a central role in leadership and teamwork.  As such, best to keep honing those capacities.  

Thanks for reading! 

If you know someone who might find these briefs interesting, please forward along. It's a surprisingly big help. 

I also post shorter content on IG and longer content on my website. 

Warmly, 

Jacob 

Here are a few things that caught my attention this week. Enjoy.

1. Repurposing a year of recordings. I went deep into looking at course platforms this week. I want 7.5 months’ worth of daily meditation content to live somewhere and be available to others. Course platforms seem like a good choice. I’ve narrowed it down to Thinkific, Kajabi, and Udemy. If you’ve been down this road and have suggestions, I’m all ears.

2. Myth and Meditation. Some colleagues and I have an ongoing exploration of the relationship between myth and meditation. In that study, we look at different myths, ancient and emergent, and how they offer inspirations and insights into contemplative practice. This week I was exploring Dune and the Bene Gesserit Prana-Bindu practice. The art form bears such close resemblances to yogic and martial arts practice that the bridge is easy to explore. One person even wrote a whole manual on the subject.

3. Resurfacing what you’ve read. If you read digital sources and do a lot of highlighting, I highly recommend checking out Readwise.io. It’s an app and website that will pull in all your highlights and conveniently resurface them. My favorite feature uses OCR to convert photos of non-digital text to digital notes. Then you can tag, categorize, and make additional notes.

4. SEO and the dark arts (text in italics written by an AI). The posts on my site are unsophisticated ramblings about topics I find interesting. That will start changing. Why? Because I’m being schooled in the SEO arts. I find them dark because they are wildly manipulative. That is, I’m being manipulated to be in dialogue with algorithms, not people. I mention it now because I suspect this is the beginning of a transformative process that will change the blog tone, audience, format, and even content. According to Snazzy, another GPT-3 AI writer assistant, (more below), SEO is one of the most important skills you can learn as a blogger. It helps you attract an audience, and then it helps you hold on to them by keeping them engaged. If your blog isn’t getting found by people looking for information on your topic, or if they don’t stay long enough to make it worth their while, then you won’t be able to succeed in this medium.

5. AI-assisted posts (Snazzy and Grammarly wrote this section). Snazzy is an AI writing assistant that helps me write better content for my Praxis store. It suggests topics and phrases I might want to include in my posts and even recommends different ways to word those phrases. Snazzy can help me find the right ideas to write about, suggest images to use as blog post headers, and even suggest relevant links that I might want to link out to.

   Grammarly had some issues with a couple of Snazzy’s suggestions. I made the executive call. I also left some of Snazzy’s more liberal choices, like mentioning Praxis, which doesn’t have a store or website but is my consulting business entity. I included it because I’m curious to see how the AI evolves over the coming years and wanted to record my early explorations in co-authoring.

That’s it for this week!

Warmly,

Jacob

Here are a few things I found interesting this week:

1. I’m on a deep dive into to “spiritual” dimensions of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, and the guide who has me very captivated is Pierre Hadot. He’s credited with helping revive the understanding of ancient philosophy as primarily a way of life, and indeed a spiritual life at that, and not an intellectual analysis of old texts.

   “The relationship between theory and practice in the philosophy of this period must be understood from the perspective of these exercises of meditation. Theory is never considered an end in itself; it is clearly and decidedly put in the service of practice.” - Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life

2. On a more future-looking front, ShortlyAI.com is a shot across the bow of writers. With a short prompt, the Open AI GPT-3 powered software just finishes paragraphs for you. I didn’t use ShortlyAI for this post but I could have, and no one would have been the wiser. With writing becoming a commodity, helpful and inspiring ideas are the thing of value.

3. Canva. While not new, Canva makes doing basic visual design tasks so easy. I’ve been using it to create quick quote posts for IG. I’m not naturally attracted to social media, so whatever makes my participation easy, I’m a fan of. With creative production becoming a commodity, again, helpful and inspiring ideas are the thing of value.

4. What the Buddha Taught is such a great intro to Buddhist thought. Wapola Rahula eloquently and succinctly distills what the Buddha taught into the core principles. Well worth the read or listen.

   “‘One is one’s own refuge, who else could be the refuge?’ said the Buddha. He admonished his disciples to ‘be a refuge to themselves’, and never to seek refuge in or help from anybody else. He taught, encouraged and stimulated each person to develop himself and to work out his own emancipation, for man has the power to liberate himself from all bondage through his own personal effort and intelligence.” - Wapola Rahula

5. If you work with a team I highly recommend the writings of Roger Schwarz. It was interesting to learn that the models I associate with him (Unilateral Control vs Mutual Learning Mindsets), are really from the work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schon. They called these two approaches Model I and Model II, but Roger borrowed his language from Robert Putnam, Diana McLain Smith, and Phil MacArthur. Everything is always evolving and getting remixed!

Enjoy your week!

Warmly,

Jacob