Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

I recently finished Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and while I found it entertaining it's an easily forgettable escapist novel.

Gruen writes the story of Jacob Jankowski, a simple farm boy from a veterinarian family who leaves Cornell after an unexpected family tragedy and ends up on a Benzini Brothers' Greatest Show on Earth circus train. Once at the circus, he makes friends with a variety of characters: an elephant named Rosie, a midget clown named Kinko, the horse whisperer star of the show Marlena, and her bi-polar husband August.

Ultimately, it's a love story told in flashbacks. But it's not something I'll read again.

It's worth reading for a glimpse into America's circus history.

La Seduction by Elaine Sciolino

Just read about Elaine Sciolino's book La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life in the New York Times Book Review.

Like Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French, La Seduction is a book about French culture and ideology from the perspective of an outsider who has spent years in France.

While Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong educates readers (presumably Americans) on why their preconceptions about the French are wrong, La Seduction  frames her book around the idea that the French live for the seduction. Where us Americans have only a way of life, the French have an art de vivre.

While the review by Caroline Weber in the New York Times isn't exactly glowing -- "Carefully researched and lucidly argued, “La Seduction” develops a wonderfully suggestive theory of French pleasure, but in practice, its sometimes schematic thinking and clunky prose would have benefited from a touch more je ne sais quoi — just a little soupçon of seductive allure" -- I would like to read it.

Expect another post about this book if I can find a copy at my local library.

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Type I for Organizations, Compensation Teaching, Exercise

I liked Daniel Pink's Drive so much that I took notes on his suggestions on Type I behavior on Organizations, Teaching, and Exercise.

Type I for Organizations: Nine Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group

• Try "20% Time" with Training Wheels: Encourage employees to spend one-fifth of their hours working on any project they want. Or start with 10%, or an afternoon. Give people autonomy, and maybe someone in your group will invent the next Post-it note.
• Encourage Peer-to-Peer "Now That" Rewards: Allow anyone in your company to award a $50 bonus to any of their colleagues, without permission at any time.
• Conduct an Autonomy Audit: Ask everyone in your group to rate anonymously on a scale of 0 ("almost none") to 10 ("a huge amount") these four questions: 1. How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work–your main responsibilities and what do you do in a given day?  2. How much autonomy do you have over your time at work–for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day?  3. How much autonomy do you have over your team at work–that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate?  4. How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work–how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job?
• Take Three Steps Toward Giving Up Control: 1. Involve people in goal-setting. People often have higher aims than the ones you assign them, so involve them in goal-setting.   2. Use noncontrolling language. Next time you’re about to say “must” or “should,” try saying, “think about,” or “consider.”  3. Hold office hours. Set aside one or two hours a week when your schedule is clear and any employee can come in and talk to you about anything that’s on their mind.
• Play "Whose Purpose Is It Anyway?": Gather your team, hand out blank 3×5, and have everyone write down the answer to this questions: “What is our company’s (or organization’s) purpose? Collect them, read them out loud, discuss.
• Use Reich's Pronoun Test: Do employees refer to their company as “they” or as “we?”
• Design for Intrinsic Motivation: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) says that the most successful websites and electronic forums have a certain Type I in their DNA. You can do the same with your online presence if you: 1. create an environment that makes people feel good about participating  3. give users autonomy  3. keep the system as open as possible
• Promote Goldilocks for Groups: 1. Begin with a diverse team. You want people who can really cross-fertilize each other’s ideas.  2. Make your group a “no competition” zone. If you’re going to use a c-word, use “collaboration” or “cooperation.”  3. Try a little task-shifting. If someone is bored, see if they can train someone else, and then take on some aspect of a more experienced team member’s work.  4. Animate with purpose, don’t motivate with rewards.
• Turn your Next Off-Site Day into a FedEx Day: Set aside a day where your employees can work on anything they want, with whomever they’d like. People must deliver something the following day.

The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way

1. Ensure internal and external fairness.
2. Pay more than average.
3. If you use performance metrics, make them wide-ranging, relevant, and hard to game.

Type I for Parents and Educators: Nine Ideas for Helping Our Kids

• Apply the Three-Part Type I Test for Homework. Refashion homework into home learning by asking yourself three questions. 1. Am I offering students any autonomy over how and when to do this work?  2. Does this assignment promote mastery by offering a novel, engaging task (as opposed to rote reformulation of something already covered in class.  3. Do my students understand the purpose of this assignment? That is, can they see how doing this additional activity at home contributes to the larger enterprise in which the class is engaged?
• Have a FedEx Day. Let kids come up with projects themselves and complete them overnight.
• Try DIY Report Cards. Ask students to list their top learning goals, and then ask them to “do-it-yourself” grade themselves.
• Give Your Kids an Allowance and Some Chores -- but Don't Combine Them. 
• Offer Praise ... the Right Way. Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence. Make praise specific. Praise in private. Offer praise only when there is a good reason.
• Help Kids See the Big Picture. Why am I learning this? How is it relevant to the world I live in now?
• Check Out these Five Type I Schools: Big Picture Learning (bigpicture.org), Sudbury Valley School (sudval.org), The Tinkering School (tinkeringschool.com), Puget Sound Community School (pcsc.org), Motessori Schools (montessori.org).
• Take a Class form the Unschoolers. They encourage mastery by allowing children to spend as long as they’d like and to go as deep as they desire on the topics that interest them. Start with John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down. 
• Turn Students into Teachers

The Type I Fitness Plan: Four Tips for Getting (and Staying) Motivated to Exercise

1. Set your own goals. Don't accept some standardized, cookie-cutter exercise plan; instead, create one that's tailored to your needs and fitness level.
2. Ditch the treadmill. Unless you really like treadmills, that is. Turn your work(out) into play by gathering friends for informal games of tennis, basketball, dancing, etc.
3. Keep mastery in mind. Pick an activity in which you can improve over time; this should help keep your energy and motivation up. 
4. Reward yourself the right way. If you’re really struggling, consider a quick experiment with Stickk (www.stickk.com) where you publicly commit to goals and must hand over money (to a friend, a charity, or an "anti-charity") if you fail to reach it.

Click here to read all my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Beautiful photos by Stephane Vetter

Beautiful photos by Stephane Vetter

The Drive Discussion Guide: Twenty Conversation Starters to Keep You Thinking and Talking

If you liked my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, you'll love this discussion guide.


The Drive Discussion Guide: Twenty Conversation Starters to Keep You Thinking and Talking

1. Has Pink persuaded you about the gap between what science knows and what organizations do? Do you agree that we need to upgrade our motivational operating system? Why or why not?
2. How has Motivation 2.0 affected your experiences at school, at work, or in family life? If Motivation 3.0 has been the prevailing ethic when you were young, how would your experiences have differed?
3. Do you consider yourself more Type I or Type X? Why? Think of three people in your life (whether at home, work, or school). Are they more Type I or Type X? What leads you to your conclusions?
4. Describe a time when you’ve seen one of the seven deadly flaws of carrots and sticks in action. What lessons might you and others learn from that experience? Have you seen instances when carrots and sticks have been effective?
5. How well is your current job meeting your need for “baseline rewards”–salary, benefits, a few perks? If it’s falling short, what changes can you or your organization make?
6. Pink draws a distinction between “routine” work and “nonroutine” work. How much of your own work is routine? How much is nonroutine?
7. If you’re a boss, how might you replace “if-then” rewards with a more autonomous environment and the occasional “now that” reward?
8. As you think about your own best work, what aspect of autonomy has been most important to you? Autonomy over what you do (task), when you do it (time), how you do it (technique), or with whom you do it (team)? Why? How much autonomy do you have at work right now? Is that enough?
9. Would initiatives like FedEx Days, 20 percent time, and ROWE work in your organization? Why or why not? What are one or two other ideas that would bring out more Type I behavior in your workplace?
10. Describe a time recently when you’ve experienced “flow.” What were you doing? Where were you? How might you tweak your current role to bring on more of these optimal experiences?
11. Is there anything you’ve ever wanted to master that you’ve avoided for reasons like “I’m too old” or “I’ll never be good at that” or “It would be a waste of time”? What are the barriers to giving it a try? How can you remove those barriers?
12. Are you in a position to delegate any of the tasks that might be holding you back from more challenging pursuits? How might you hand off these tasks in a way that does not take away your colleagues’ autonomy?
13. How would you redesign your office, your classroom, or your home–the physical environment, the processes, the rules–to promote greater engagement and mastery by everyone?
14. When tackling the routine tasks your job requires, what strategies can you come up with to trigger the positive side of the Sawyer Effect?
15. Drive talks a lot about purpose–both for organizations and individuals. Does your organization have a purpose? What is it? If your organization is for-profit, is purpose even a realistic goal given the competitive pressures in every industry?
16. Are you–in your paid work, family life, or volunteering–on a path toward purpose? What is that purpose?
17. Is education today too Type X–that is, does it put too great an emphasis on extrinsic rewards? If so, how should we reconfigure schools and classrooms? Is there an elegant way to reconcile intrinsic motivation and accountability?
18. If you’re a mom or dad, does your home environment promote more Type I or Type X behavior in your child or children? How? What, if anything, should you do about it?
19. Does Pink underplay the importance of earning a living? Is his view of Motivation 3.0 a bit too utopian–that is, is Pink, if you’ll pardon the pun, too rosy?
20. What are the things that truly motivate you? Now think about the last week. How many of those 168 hours were devoted to these things? Can you do better?

To Lend or Not To Lend, That is the Question

interesting post from boston book bums:

This week’s question has left a little scar on our psyche. It reminded us of a bad moment in book history and provoked a spirited conversation about generosity or miserliness.

Simply, do you let people borrow books?

Do you let anyone borrow a book, friends or lovers? Or do you confine certain books to a mental cabinet of untouchables that no one is allowed to read from except you?

Before lending a book do you note how friends or loved ones handle books, weighing whether they are trust worthy to borrow a work? Or are you throw caution to wind lender, not worried at all about the state of the book upon return.

For the most part, the Boston Book Bums team are generous lenders, with a few being cautious. One however is a flat out book lending Scrooge.

Our eldest Book Bum had an experience back in High School where a friend was DYING to borrow a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The owner was a little hesitant to lend the book because the would-be reader wasn’t exactly the most voracious consumer of the printed page. Also, said would-be reader had a habit of being very messy. The idea of the beloved science fiction book buried under heaps or burger wrappers and empty soda cans was off putting.

Despite the concern, our lender handed over Hitchhiker’s. And then spring became summer, became fall and still the book wasn’t returned. After a few gentle proddings, the lender asked…”So…did you finish Hitchhikers?”

Reply, ” Uh, no. Couldn’t get into it. But it’s in my car if you want it back.”

With lip bit, lender nodded and the pair walked over to the friend’s jalopy. Door opens. Tension rises. Lender imagines a dusty but undisturbed book emerging from the glove box.

No, instead The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is PRIED from between the front seats. Wedged between the center console and the passenger seat, the great comedic novel emerges with torn cover, dozens of crumpled and folded pages; as well as a distinct and overwhelming odor of coffee. Yes, the book was soaked in Dunkin Donuts iced coffee somewhere along that long summer car ride.

That moment. That besmirched book was pivotal in making one of the Book Bums vow never to lend a book again. A vow he has stuck to ever since.

Al right, let’s hear it- Are you a one woman/man library or an alligator armed book lending miser?

I loan my books out freely, but once a person fails to return a book in perfect condition I won't lend another book to that person.

Drive - The Type I Reading List: Fifteen Essential Books

If you liked my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, you'll want to take a look at his Type I Reading List. 

I've added a few to my list of books to read.

The Type I Reading List: Fifteen Essential Books
Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are integral to the human condition, so it's no surprise that a number of writers -- from psychologists to journalists to novelists -- have explored these three elements and probed what they mean for our lives. This list of books, arranged alphabetically by author, isn't exhaustive, but it's a good starting point for anyone interested in cultivating a Type I Life:

1. Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P Carse
2. Talent Is Overrated: What Really Seperates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin
3. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
4. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward L Deci with Richard Flaste
5. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
6. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
7. Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, and William Damon
8. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
9. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
10. The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal by David Halberstam
11. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn
12. Once a Runner by John L Parker Jr.
13. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
14. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler
15. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M Senge

I was very surprised that several novels made this list.

Enjoy!