Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Book Reviews

Horizon Point writes about dozens of leadership, career, workplace, and workforce topics, and we love to feature other researchers, writers, and practitioners who are doing similar work.

  • The Proximity Principle – A Book Review

    The Proximity Principle – A Book Review

    The right people + The right places = Opportunities. – The Proximity Principle

    The Proximity Principle by Ken Coleman is a great book for job seekers or anyone not content in their current role. The theme of the book is getting “in proximity” to what you want – career-wise. Coleman shares his own personal experience with finding his dream job. Coleman notes: Everyone wants to do work that matters. The Proximity Principle is a guidebook to get you there!

    Amazon Overview:

    Right now, 70 percent of Americans aren’t passionate about their work and are desperately longing for meaning and purpose. They’re sick of “average” and know there’s something better out there, but they just don’t know how to reach it.

    Forget the traditional career advice you’ve heard! Networking, handing out business cards, and updating your online profile does nothing to set you apart from other candidates. Ken will show you how to be intentional and genuine about the connections you make with a fresh, unexpected take on resumes and the job interview process. You’ll discover the five people you should look for and the four best places to grow, learn, practice, and perform so you can step into the role you were created to fill.

    Here are a few of my favorite takeaways from the book:  

    • You must never stop learning, no matter how high you climb.
    • No one is sitting around thinking about how they can help you find your dream job.
    • To get in proximity to your dream job, you need to find professionals who are excelling at the work you’d love to do at the highest level.
    • You will experience the most growth when you surround yourself with talented people who challenge you to perform at a higher level.
    • Use the connections you already have to make new ones in the place you’d love to work.

    Be in proximity to what you want. Read The Proximity Principle to find out how!

  • 2020 Book of the Year and a Few Memoirs to Grow On

    2020 Book of the Year and a Few Memoirs to Grow On

    2020. What a year it has been.  We’ve all experienced what it truly means to live in a VUCA- volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous- world.  From a global pandemic to social and political unrest there have been literal and figurative storms everywhere.  They haven’t seemed to end.  Will they end? 

    And in all this, what does a leader do? Our 2020 book of the year suggests that true leaders go Upstream.  Whether in a crisis or not, the quest to solve problems before they happen- as the subtitle of the book indicates- is a noble calling, especially during times where problems seem to be everywhere. 

    And in the year of such volatility and uncertainty, a theme that has come out for us is the power of story (again as seen in our very first book of the year pick).   

    As I sat facilitating a focus group one day for a client, I was struck by the candor amongst group members that began to come out about a difficult topic.  Their candor was shared through the lense of their own stories and the stories of others that had impacted them in large and small ways.

    I paused and asked, “Do you all talk about things like this normally? At work?”

    They all just stared at me.  One person finally said, “No, not at all.” 

    I suggested that they might find benefit by finding a way to engage in dialogue with each other more often, learning each other’s stories and experiences as a way to bridge divides that seem to be everywhere these days.   

    Overcoming polarization is upstream work.  And taking the time to seek out and hear other’s stories so we can build empathy, understanding, patience, tolerance, and self-awareness is also upstream work.  One being the means and the other being the end to the what the means seeks to achieve. 

    As I look back on what I’ve read this year, Upstream has been the one book that has engaged our team in a transformation of thought that we hope is impacting our work.  The point is that in all upstream success, we have to get personal.  “Macro starts with micro” and you have to work on a “name-by-name” basis, as the author Dan Heath states repeatedly. 

    And as I also look at the totality or “macro” of my reading list for 2020, more memoirs are present this year.  A diversity of unique and very personal stories have been interwoven into my thought process.  What this has provided, I hope, is a valuable perspective, increased empathy, heightened self-awareness, exposure to things I have never experienced, and a platform for engaging in dialogue with others about shared and diverse experiences.  

    So, if you’re seeking to engage in the more upstream work of seeking out and sharing stories, maybe a first step is picking out some good memoirs to read with your team and then discuss.  

    Here’s a list to get you started (all ones I really enjoyed in 2020): 

    Wild   

    Hillbilly Elegy

    The Gift of an Ordinary Day 

    The Unwinding of the Miracle

    Caste: The Origins of our Discontents.  Although this book is not actually a memoir, the author interweaves personal experiences and stories to illustrate her well-researched thoughts on the issue of race in America. 

    41: A Portrait of My Father

     

    Upstream asks the question, “How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we’ve forgotten that we can fix them?” 

    Let’s make 2021 a year of taking ownership of upstream work and moving forward one next right thing at a time with the patience and diligence to allow our efforts to bear fruit.  Let’s start by seeking out others’ stories, having the voice to share our own, and having the grace and empathy to learn and grow when other’s stories differ from our own. 

    What stories are you telling and listening to? 

     

    Like this post? You may also like:

    3 Ways to Go Upstream

  • 2019 Book of the Year

    2019 Book of the Year

    Ideas. They move the world forward. They make businesses and communities succeed through growth and innovation in an everchanging marketplace. But more importantly, ideas are important for what they do and create for the individual. Ideas illuminate us and those around us.

    In our 2019 Book of the Year, What Do You Do With an Idea?, we can see how ideas impact the individual that then impact the world. Creating is one of the most special and meaningful things we can do as humans. And in order for us to create and generate ideas, we have to create homes, workplaces, and communities where people feel safe and have the margins of time to give to the art of thinking, creating, innovating, and bringing ideas to life.

    When we create an environment for ideas to thrive, it’s magical. It transforms us. Then individuals, organizations, and communities can transform the world by sharing what’s created.

    We spent much of 2019 launching a sister business- MatchFIT– based on the idea that employers need to connect with employees and vis versa in a better way. We have taken the dating site model and applied it to employee and employer relationships based on a values-driven approach.

    In 2020, we hope you have the safety and time to create. To generate ideas and help others do the same. We will be striving for this as well, for ourselves and for our clients.

    What do you want to create in 2020?

  • 2017 Book of the Year

    2017 Book of the Year

    “Being original doesn’t mean being first. It just means being different and better.”

    Adam Grant, Originals

     

    Most of us strive to be better.  Few of us strive to be different.  But what if being different is a requirement for being better? For being an original? Turns out that to take better beyond just ourselves, we have to be both.  We have to be non-conformists in order to move the world, according to Adam Grant, author of Originals.

    And because our goal at Horizon Point is to build a better workplace through innovative people practices, we’ve chosen Originals, our 2017 Book of the Year.

     

    The book teaches how to become an original by:

    1. Taking calculated risks. We think most innovative people have risk-taking in their DNA, but it turns out there are some guardrails around risk taking when it comes to the most successful innovators.

    2. Embracing failure.  Failure that leads to innovation comes from quantity of ideas not necessarily quality.

    3. Embracing diversity of thought.  For more on this: Diversity and Inclusion In My Eyes and In the Eyes of My Children.

    4. Speaking up. You can’t be original if your ideas don’t get translated.  This requires voice.  More on this here.

    5. “Passionately procrastinating”.  For more on this: Leaders, Set Manageable Goals to Lead and Run Well.

    6. Converting your enemies. Your actual enemies. Not your frienemies. There is a great example in the book to describe the difference.

    7. Building commitment through purpose.  

    8. Getting over yourself. The ego, especially an inflated one, gets someone who could have all these other characteristics nowhere. Being authentic is required to be an original.

     

    “In the quest for happiness, as Grant writes, “many of us choose to enjoy the world as it is. Originals embrace the uphill battle, striving to make the world what it could be.…Becoming original is not the easiest path in the pursuit of happiness, but it leaves us perfectly poised for the happiness of the pursuit.”

    Go pursue.

     

    Like this post? You may also like:

    Our pick for best leadership book of the year:  Reality-Based Leadership

    Our pick for best novel of the year:  A Fall of Marigolds

  • 2016 Book of the Year

    2016 Book of the Year

    At Horizon Point, we’ve been in the habit of providing end of the year book recommendations and reviews. You can check some previous ones out here:

    The Best Books of 2015

    10 Books Leaders Need to Be Reading

    The Best Book to Give Every Person on Your Christmas Gift List

    Book Review 2013

    We like books so much, we even provide book favorites off schedule like this Top 10 List of Leadership Books.

    But this year one book was so good that our 2016 recommendation is simply one:

    When Breath Becomes Air

    For us, a reoccurring theme seemed to emerge in 2016, and that is the importance of story.  Of an individual’s story, a company’s story and a community’s story.   As we worked to help individuals chart a career path or coach them to greater leadership success, as we sought to help companies guide talent management practices through values and innovative practices, and as we helped communities understand and grow their workforce, we realized that it all really begins with the story.

    As we wrote about in a blog post back in May of this year, “When you know the answer to ‘who’ can then better design the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.”   Stories help us do this.

    When Breath Becomes Air is a powerful story, a memoir, of a man who finds himself, at a point when he feels like his life and career is just beginning, diagnosed with a disease that is very uncommon in the young.  As he grapples with his illness, we find an unbelievably talented (more brilliant than most of us could ever dream of being) human being struggling to reconcile how to spend his finite time here on earth, given all the gifts and talents he’s been given and also cultivated through his own hard work.

    And although the book may be too philosophical, or even depressing, for some, and whether we know we have a short amount of time to live like Paul does in this story or not, we all deal with his fundamental question, “What makes life meaningful?”

    You will see in Paul the answer to this question really comes down to family and faith, and quite honestly, meaningful work.

    As 2017 approaches, we hope that you are first and foremost, healthy, and that unlike Paul in the story you aren’t faced with having to daily grapple with your mortality.  However, we do hope that you spend some time discovering what makes life meaningful for you and then pursuing it wholeheartedly. And we hope that in 2017 you explore your story and ask others about theirs.  Maybe this in and of itself is really what makes life meaningful- pursuing your story and helping others pursue theirs.

    What is your story?