How Children Succeed: Rethinking What's Important (Book Review)

When listening to news coverage of education reform, and talking with parents and teachers, one hears a variety of views about what “The Best” approach to education is. While I’ve spent a lot of team learning about teams (of adults), and I have some opinions about what seemed to work best for me when I went to school, I realized that I didn’t really know much about research into education. To that end, I started reading How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, and in the process started to reconsider many of my preconceptions about what’s best for kids, and along the way I learned a few things that I can use to help the people I work with succeed.

A lot of the discussion around elementary (and earlier) education is around what children learn and when. How Children Succeed reminded me that learning isn’t all about academics, and that not all learning happens in school.

Some of the concepts and principles that the books discusses, like Flow, Grit, and the ideas of Seligman in Learned Optimism, are ones that I’ve come across while reading about how adults work, so I felt that many of the concepts, if not the details, are excellent ones to have in mind while working with my teams.

Paul Tough starts out the book with a description of a pre-kindergarten class using the Tools of the Mind curriculum. This approach, which my son’s kindergarten class followed, is about teaching executive function, a set of skills that helps someone interact with other and learn. As the book progresses, Tough describes the other traits that are more related to “character” than “academics.” The argument is that these “non-cognitive” or “character skills” – things like grit, resilience, and resourcefulness, are often a better predictor of eventually success than mastery of academic disciplines. The data Tough presents are compelling, and the related anecdotes are quite motivating, and the challenges to putting these lessons into practice are somewhat daunting,

There are challenges to teaching children these kinds of skills. Using the word “character” can lead to political issues. If you get past those questions. Evaluating character and non-cognitive skills is hard, and teaching these skills is more work than simply correcting an incorrect fact or algorithm. A more concrete issue is how to get past a culture where academic testing is the norm. A recent NPR story on changes to the SAT mentioned that some states are considering using college entrance exams as an assessment mechanism at the same moment as colleges are making them optional.

Character traits are not all there is to success. Academics are important too. The character skills that the book describes are not enough to master a discipline; mastery takes practice too. The character skills do enable you to learn academic (and other) skills though. Academics and character are both important but it may make sense to change our priorities from focusing primarily on academics.

If I think back over the concepts I’ve learned in school, the most useful were the ones that gave me the tools to learn new things. To be successful in my day to day work I need to be able to work to learn new things all the time. It was nice to be reminded of this in the context of my child’s education.

While there are essential skills that children need to succeed (reading, writing, and math at some level), I wonder if I should focus less on whether or not my child is mastering specific subject, than whether he is getting an exposure to a range of topics so that he can find something that he is passionate about. Perhaps he can then use that passion as a way to practice overcoming roadblocks and frustration when things don’t come easily. Those persistence skills are then applicable to the tasks that are simply “necessary” even when they are not compelling.

How Children Succeed is easy to read, with many pointers to places to learn more about specific concepts, and it’s broken into sections that are easy to read during small bits of idle time, such as during a subway commute. This is a great book for parents to read, in particular if you are inclined to get into discussions about education policy with your peers. I won’t assert that this book will make you a expert, but it should lead to some interesting dialogs (internal and external) which will help you reconsider any idea you had that what worked for you in school was that right thing for your children. And in as much as adults and children are different in the details, I think that anyone who leads or works with teams can gain some insights that will help you become a better leader. If you are a parent who has such as role, all the better!

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Turn the Ship Around: Agile Lessons from a Submarine Captain

I was not expecting a book about working on a Navy submarine to provide insights I could use to help a team be more agile. Having heard recommendations for Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by David Marquet from both a colleague at work and people in the agile community who I respect, I decided to give the book a look anyway. I’m glad that I did.

I thought that this was be a quick, enjoyable read with many lessons I could quickly employ at work. The chapters are all short and focused, and the author repeats the key themes often enough that they stick. Each chapter is centered around a story, so it’s easy to see that the lessons in the book are based on experience and not just theory. My focus is on working with agile teams, so I found that the lessons applied to that context. Even if you are not doing "Agile, this book highlights the value of an agile, adpative, self-organizing approach can have in any organization, regardless of the overall process.

The book is easy to read, with one key point per chapter, and with chapters being short enough that one could almost always find time to read a complete chapter (and thus gather a coherent lesson). This wasn’t a perfect book. Certain aspects about the writing style I found a bit jarring. While some repetition of key points is helpful, there is a bit too much of it at times. And I found the author’s use of ALL CAPS as a mechanism for emphasis to be a bit jarring. Over these stylistics decisions don’t take away from the value of the book; they just made the reading experience less than ideal. But it’s not hard to get past that, and the engaging stories that the book uses to set the stage for its lessons keep you reading.

The ideas in the book should be familiar to anyone who has spent time studying agile teams. That the author talks about how bottom up, distributed decision making (an aspect of what the author calls a leader-leader approach) can lead to a more effective operation than the traditional (to the Navy) , top-down leader-follower approach that many military and other organizations follow. Processes and checklists have as place to simplify decision making, but only in the context of rational though about your goals. Command and Control has a place, in particular in a military organization, but a more limited one than you might think. Even in critical situations a leader-leader model, where people are applying their training to do what works, rather than working by the book, or blindly following authority, can solve the problem better.

What I particularly found compelling was that this book is full of stories of how a more botton-up, empowering model of leadership can be a better way to work. That this can be true even on a submarine – an environment that is both literally and figuratively high-pressure – , should be an excellent counter to those who argue that we can’t do (agile, self-organizing teams, etc) in my organization. An agile approach is not the best solution for all problems, but agile techiques are more widely applicable than many think.

This work does not exist in a vacuum. The author frequently cites Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the writer of the forward to the book, and also provides some pointers to other resources. Whether you are a manager, scrum master, or just someone involved on a team (agile or not) that doesn’t seem to be working well, reading this book will be a quick and enjoyable path towards finding help in identifying things that might be getting in the way to effectiveness, and also give you a sense of optimism that things can get better with the right approach.

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Brick By Brick: Lessons from Lego (Book Review)

There is no shortage of business books about companies that lose their way, and then do a dramatic turn around. Some are more relevant that others. Brick by Brick by David Robertson caught my attention because it is about an iconic toy that is, at the moment, popular with people of all ages. The book first came to my attention when we were stopping at a bookstore bookstore in Saratoga Springs, NY last summer. My then 7 year old, a big Lego fan, and avid reader handed the book to me suggesting that I might enjoy it. He was right; I enjoyed reading the book and also learned some useful things.

While I had heard stories about the reasons behind the recent surge in Lego’s popularity, I had not realized both the scope of the changes the company made, and the depth of the problems the company had. Lego’s story is one of a company losing track of it’s core vision while trying to diversify and create market opportunities. Robertson explains the rise and fall, and rise of Lego in an engaging style, while highlighting the key lessons are reader can apply to their orginization.
While much of the book was a great story, it was around the mid-way point that I found items that resonated with me as an Agile Software Development practitioner. One of the insights in the book was that more constraints can make for more creativity. In particular, Lego sets are constructed with many of the same bricks; new bricks are rare, so designers are encouraged to create new models with existing bricks. This isn’t necessarially surprising to someone used to working with constraints (or building with Legos), but it does contradict the sterotype that blank pages are best for creativity.

Also reminiscent of agile adoption is the idea that action that leads to forming new habits is essential to changing a culture. This is much like how agile practices, done well, can help the team form habits that further enable agility.

There were also some interesting lessons in the discussion of how Lego involved community members in the design of new toys. The community related acitivities were managed in a way where the final decisions rested with select people at Lego, rather than in concensus. Deciding how to make decisions is an important decision for every team to make, as Ellen Gottesdiener tells us, and concensus isn’t always best. The formerly top-down company also discovered the power of voluntary commitment. This is an example of how management skills that make sense in the context of volunteers (the community members) apply to workplace management as well. (Tom Demarco also discuses this in Slack ).

I enjoyed reading this book, mostly for the chance to hear the story of the company whose products appear to be even more popular than when I first encountered them as a child. It was an unexpected surprise to also learn a few things that I could apply to help the teams I work with be more innovatiove and productive.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Book Review)

I’ve often thought that the hardest part about building a software product was creating an environment where the people on the project can work together effectively. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team kept showing up on recommended book lists and I finally decided to get a copy. I’m glad I did. This quick to read book helped me to remember some simple, yet important, things about how great teams work.

Reminiscent of The Goal and The Deadline, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team spends most of its time teaching its lessons using the example of a fictionalized story of a new CEO joining company in trouble.

The CEO uses the model to help the executive “team” become a team in more than name. Even though the story itself isn’t great literature, since I’ve been in and around dynamics similar to those in the book, I really wanted to see what happened next. (Though a successful ending was never really in doubt.)

There is a brief summary of the 5 dysfunctions model at the end, but the story form really drives the point home better than the 37ish page summary of the model. You could just jump to the summary of the model, but the lessons might not stick, and the power of the simple model might be as clear. What the model description adds is the important point that the parts of the model work as a system, and can’t really be taken independently.

If you’re on an agile team you might want to think about how agile methods both rely on and encourage the elements of the model.

If you are on a team, (or even part of a family) you’ll find value in this book, either as a way to lead others to form a better team, or as a way to understand what’s happening around you so that you can do better on your own, and make the right choices to help you work on a good team.

Essential Scrum and Other Books to Help You be Agile

I’ve read a few books on Scrum over the years. I read Essential Scrum because others at my company who had not gone through Scrum training with Kenny Rubin, and I wanted to use the book aa a vehicle for refreshing my thinking and getting on the same page as everyone else in terms of terminology, best practice advice etc. The book helped with that and more.

Reading this book did more for me than give me a chance to synch up vocabulary. It helped me re-think some practices and consider ways to move beyond my current approach to Scrum and consider ways to do things better.

This book covers the whole spectrum of Scrum related issues from the usual Scrum mechanics, such as how to execute scrum meetings to questions that often leave those adopting Scrum for the first time puzzled such as how Scrum fits in the larger organization, the the role of Managers (yes, there is one), and how to deal with obstacles.

The book has an excellent discussion of the various Scrum roles, and how they work in real situations. (For example, what to do when you can’t have a dedicated Scrum Master). This is a book on process, but it does not let you forget that people and communication are at the core of Scrum.

This is a rather complete book on its own, as it covers the full spectrum and full lifecycle of Scrum from planning to retrospective, and from Portfolio to sprint. Rubin also provides a selection of good references throughout should you want to go deeper. In particular you might want to follow up by learning more about retrospectives by reading Agile Retrospectives or learn more about portfolio management by reading Johanna Rothman’s book.

What was especially interesting for me to see was the chapter on management. With the focus on self-organizing teams and mechanisms for team feedback and improvement, many people either neglect the role of managers, or overlay an approach that can stifle a scrum team. Rubin has an excellent chapter on this topic. You may also want to read Management 3.0 for a broader perspective on what a manager on an agile team is, and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management for some excellent day to day advice on managing in any context, but especially an agile one.

This book is different from some other recent books on Scrum. Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time is more about the principles of Scrum, and it’s a great book to inspire you to implement Scrum values, but a book like Essential Scrum is what you’ll need to actually execute. The Human Side of Agile adds to Essential Scrum by guiding you through the interplay between technical and people issues.

Essential Scrum is readable and useful by everyone on the team and in the business, and is a great book to read if you can read only one for now. Essential Scrum can help you adopt Scrum more effectively, or reenergize your Scrum thinking if you are Scrum veteran. There are other books that will want to read as you seek deeper knowledge, but you can’t go wrong with starting with Essential Scrum.

The Importance of the Invisibles (Book Review)

When I read Tom DeMarco’s classic I book Peopleware some time ago, one small part of the book stuck with me. He briefly discusses the idea that some people on teams are Catalysts, people who seem to help a team but who didn’t stand out. As an example, DeMarco describes one person:

“ During her twelve years at the company, the woman in question had never worked on a project that had been anything other than a huge success. It wasn’t obvious what she was adding, but projects always succeeded when she was around.”

This brief acknowledgement of the contribution of someone who wasn’t a star can make to a team stuck with me as something that made sense, but which I never thought about before. David Zweig’s book Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion is an entire book that describes the role of people like this, and thus made a big impression as well. It’s not that some of the people Zweig describes are not incredibly talented and skilled; they are. It’s just that they aren’t the people you think about when you consider what went into a successful concert, perfume, building, or diplomatic discussion.

Invisibles helps you to understand the importance of people you don’t normally think of in our lives, and also explains how their under the radar existence both helps them be effective, but also is enjoyable for them. In addition to learning about what invisibles are and what makes them tick, you also learn a bit about how the traits of invisibles are useful, even if you are someone who enjoys roles in the spotlight.

Invisibles is a surprisingly entertaining and engaging book that not only made its point, but also taught me quite a bit about some professions I knew little about. This book starts with the premise that “invisibles” all share 3 traits, and then introduces you to a few people who illustrate those ideas. I got a review copy of the book because I was intrigued by the premise. As I started the book I thought that it was mis-titled. It seemed less about invisibles themselves, than the jobs they do. But it is through a deeper understanding of the work, and how the people perform their work that you understand what makes invisibles tick. Along the way you also learn a bit about leadership, management, and motivation. At one point, Zweig explains how the desire of some invisibles to help others leads both to very effective groups and projects, and (sometimes) poor individual performance and I was the connection the “Catalyst” role Tom DeMarco describes in Peopleware, and the relevance of this book to people who work in or with teams of any kind, but espectially agile teams.
It’s important to note that not all of the invisibles are all that invisible. One example was a Director of Photography, a role that often is quiet visible on movie credits. But for the most part, you probably didn’t know that many of these people existed, and yet they are essential. (The structural engineer who worked on Falling Water, was responsible for the structure not falling down, in spite of Frank Lloyd Wrights’s design, for example). The book ends by illustrating how we often notice these invisible roles only when the persons performing them fail, or when we don’t engage them to do their jobs.

Having read this book, I’m realizing that I sometimes took the importance of invisibles for granted. Sometimes inwardly focused star performers are more effective when being helped by someone who can help keep the team focused on the goal. This isn’t the message that we are often told. The usual message is that it’s a star performer who saves the day. One recent exception is the Lego Movie (which I won’t claim to be anything more than a fun, self-aware film, but I have seem it a few times with my 7 year old). It is reassuring to see real stories of the value of people who are not in the spotlight.

In software development much of the useful work happens among teams of skilled professionals, all of whom need the work of the others to produce really great products. As an advocate for agile practices, and a Scrum Master, I realized that the importance of individual enablers. While I get to facilitate meetings and play some central roles, I also know that at the core, a good Scrum Master is a servant leaders, for whom the best praise is praise directed at the team.
Invisibles doesn’t torment you with its message that there are 3 traits that invisibles have. It tells stories and examples to makes its point, and even if you don’t fully buy it’s message, you end up having learned some things you didn't know and with some things to think about.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book, and how much it helped me to learn and made me think. If you like books about work style, motivation, or are just a curious person, this book is worth a look.

Books and other media I mentioned above

Gulp! (Book Review)

It could be that I'm the parent of a 7 1/2 year old boy. It could also be that the book has such great footnotes ( when I was in grad school working on a paper for a group project, one of my fellow students commented that I wrote great footnotes), but I found Mary Roach's book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal to be very engaging and entertaining, as well as educational.

Gulp is a very approachable "top-to-bottom" tour through the human digestive system. Combining fact, history, some editorial commentary, and much humor you can't help but get pulled into this book, and even pull in those around you. At various points I found myself laughing out loud, leading my wife to comment that I,  have a lot more in common with our 7 year old, or at least that there is a certain timelessness to that sort of humor among certain demographics. The chapter on flatulence was particularly amusing, and was a great example of how Roach uses humor to help us learn about socially awkward topics, and to make details memorable.

One of the charms of this, and the other books of her's that I have read, is that she is adept at staying on the correct side of the boundary between humor that makes us comfortable (and makes facts memorable), and humor that is just awkward. She did a similarly good job with Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

While this isn't the book to read for serious research, it is a good place to learn some fun facts about a subject that is not often discussed in polite company. With footnotes and references, you also have a good starting point in case you want to learn more. The only down side of reading the book is that you may find yourself laughing out loud or at least finding it hard to share a particularly amusing storing with whoever is sitting next to you while you are reading.

Gulp is a great example of how you can be entertained, informed and educated at the same time.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal