Bookworm - Big Ideas for Busy People

Parenting Gen Stress: Culture Toxicity, Parent Anxiety and the Pursuit of Excellence

by Laura Kastner, Ph.D.

Dr. Kastner hasn't actually written this book yet - I heard her speak last night at our local high school - but I hope she does soon!  She has written a couple of other books that I haven't read but have heard great things about: The Seven Year Stretch: How Families Grow Together Throughout Adolescence and The Launching Years: Strategies for Parenting From Senior Year to College Life.

She opened her presentation with the point that hysteria over college admissions has become the tail wagging the dog, distracting parents from elementary school on up from the critical task of confident, well-balanced parenting. This pervasive anxiety has a very real biological impact. Like all anxiety, it causes parents to become more concrete and narrow in their thinking, e.g. my child's success and well-being in life will be assured only if their next stop after high school is the safe port of a highly selective college.

She said there are three myths about college that need to be debunked:

Myth #1: College admission personnel recommend packing your high school resume.

Instead, admissions personnel are urging that we not make high school pre-college. They are seeing too many burned -out freshmen and are dealing with unprecendented levels of depression .

Myth #2:  Attending a top name college is insurance for the future.

In fact, studies show that it doesn't predict any increased opportunity in later life. Even making good grades in college doesn't predict success in later life!

Myth #3:  Students should be encouraged to go to the most prestigious college they can get into.

The problem in our culture is that 80% of students apply to 20% of the colleges. Really we should be thinking about finding a good match between individual students and colleges. There are 2,000 other four-year colleges beyond the coveted top 20%, many of which might suit a given student better than one of the most competitive ones. The "match" seems to determine what makes students thrive and reach their potential more than any particular college.

Here are some other critical points Dr. Kastner made:

1) The #1 predictor of anxiety, depression and substance abuse is the student's perceived academic pressure from their parents. If your kids think " all my parents care about is my grades" - you have a problem.

2) The most powerful predictor of positive adolescent adjustment (e.g. low risk taking, school achievement, etc.) is parent-child connectedness and family cohesiveneness.

3) Here's a quick way to evaluate whether there is a trusting relationship between parents and a child. How would your teen respond to these five statements (true or false)?

    -   My parents accept who I am.
    -   My parents respect my feelings.
    -   My parents want to know my point of view.
    -   I want to know my parent's point of view.
    -   When I'm bothered about something, my parents are concerned about me.

4)  There is not a linear relationship between more inputs, advantages and enrichment and a better outcome. Instead, there are often "backfire effects", e.g stress illnesses, underachievement, distrust and disconnection with parents. More is usually not better.

5) The pursuit of the holy grail in academics and athletic excellence has a dark side - less investment in children's social, emotional and moral competence.

6)  The Big Ten: These are the critical assests for optimal adolescent development and the successful transition to college and emerging adulthood:

• Motivation and drive
• Practical reasoning and judgement
• Moral attentiveness and character
• Emotional awareness
• Healthy habits
• Self-control and affective regulation
• Social skills
• Communication skills
• Intellectual interests and abilities
• Spiritual awareness

She reminds us to focus on the development of the person, not the resume.

If you live in the Seattle area and have a chance to hear her speak, do it. She is really excellent.

Welcome to Bookworm!

Thank you for checking out Bookworm. I started this "weblog" because two of my favorite things are reading and having my thinking shifted - seeing the same old thing in an entirely new way or being exposed to breakthrough ways of thinking. The combination - and my life which requires a certain amount of flexibility and portability - has turned me into a non-fiction junkie. I'm forever saying to the people in my life "you know, I just read this book . . ."

Bookworm is designed to share those wonderful, potentially mind-changing books with people who don't have the time or inclination to spend countless hours reading! And in this era of sound-bites, I like giving people the opportunity to efficiently consider big, well-developed ideas for a change - whether you end up agreeing with the ideas or not. It's my small way of working to make the world a better place.

Many people have asked me "what's a blog?" Great question. A blog is a web-log, kind of an on-line diary. It's like a website but it's more dynamic and interactive. One of the things blogs do uniquely well is create an on-line community around particular issues or topics.

One of the fun things to do on a blog is comment. It is a great way to start a conversation about something that strikes you, or to ask a question if you're wondering about something. If you scroll down to the end of this post, you'll see the Comment feature. Give it a try!

If you have any questions or comments, you can use the Comments feature or email me (see the email link on the upper left) and I'll get back to you.

Also, in addition to posting new summaries, I wanted to archive the book summaries I sent out via email over the past year. Most of those older summaries can be accessed through the Categories (e.g. Parenting, Social Commentary, etc.) on the left. Many of the individual categories contain summaries for multiple books.

In addition to great books, I'll occasionally add my two cents about various things that capture my interest. For now, those can be found under Current Enchantments.

I'm glad you are here - and happy reading!

Cradle to Cradle - Remaking the Way We Make Things

by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

Last year I read Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver which, in a series of essays, eloquently describes many of the environmental challenges we face. It’s sobering to come face to face with the reality that our very way of life is depleting and destroying the planet. That is why I found this book so incredibly inspiring. William McDonough, an architect, and Michael Braungart, a chemist, come at this vexing problem in a fresh, new way that filled me with a sense of optimism about our environmental future. They challenge our “typical” beliefs about how to help our environment and describe an out-of-the-box approach that promises to have an enormous impact.

"Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As McDonough and Braungart argue, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask.

In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are).

They share a number of examples from their work with companies like Nike, Ford Motor Company and Herman Miller. My favorite is the transformation in a small, Swiss textile factory where the entire process of making commercial fabrics was redesigned to be consistent with waste=food. At the outset, the company was grappling with the regulatory reality that their fabric trimmings were considered hazardous waste, creating thorny and expensive disposal issues. By redesigning their process and choosing inputs that are harmless biological nutrients – a huge detective task involving some of the biggest chemical companies in the world – they are now producing award-winning fabric that can be composted after its useful life is complete – and the water leaving the factory is cleaner than the water that enters it.

They are using this kind of paradigm shifting thinking to usher in the next industrial revolution – one that uses the natural world as its inspiration and acknowledges that being “less bad” environmentally is no good - it only gets us to the same devastating place, just more slowly. They are proving it is possible to use these natural design principles to create products, services, buildings and industries that are inherently good because they were designed with that as their ultimate intention.

If you’d prefer the movie version, you can order the DVD “The Next Industrial Revolution.”

Check out McDonough and Braungart’s firm.

Good to Great - Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't

by Jim Collins

“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study (of companies that make the leap from good to great and stay there) fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”

I love books that take conventional wisdom and turn it on its head. And this book, while focused on business, offers fabulous lessons for organizations of any kind. Jim Collins says about himself “We all have a strength or two in life , and I suppose mine is the ability to take a lump of unorganized information, see patterns, and extract order form the mess – to go from chaos to concept.” He and his team spent five years doing just that - and the result is a unprecedented understanding of the inner workings of good to great.

Here’s a very quick summary of the characteristics they found in companies that had made the leap from good to great:

Level 5 Leadership

“We were surprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy – these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.”

First Who . . . Then What

“We expected the good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then figured out where to drive it.” The old adage “People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.

Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)

“We learned that a former prisoner of war had more to teach us about what it takes to find a path to greatness than most books on corporate strategy. Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call the Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity Within Three Circles)

“To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. Just because something is your core business – just because you’ve been doing it for years or perhaps decades – does not necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at it. And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business can’t form the basis of a great company. It must be replaced with a simple concept that reflects deep understanding of three intersecting circles: what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be the best in the world at and what drives your economic engine.”

A Culture of Discipline

“All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.”

Technology Accelerators

“Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. They never use technology as the primary means of igniting a transformation. Yet, paradoxically, they are pioneers in the application of carefully selected technologies. We learned that technology by itself is never a primary, root cause of either greatness or decline.”

The Flywheel and the Doom

Loop

“Those who launch revolutions, dramatic change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap from good to great. No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembled relentlessly pushing a giant heavy flywheel in one direction, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.”

If you're interested, read  this Fast Company interview with author Jim Collins. It’s a great overview of the book:

Moral Politics - How Liberals and Conservatives Think

by George Lakoff

Everyone’s writing about politics. What is unique about this book?

Lakoff says contemporary American politics is about worldview. Conservatives simply see the world differently than liberals, and both often have a difficult time understanding accurately what the other’s worldview is. He uses cognitive science to illuminate the unconscious thinking behind these differing worldviews.

Cognitive science, Lakoff’s area of expertise, studies how people conceptualize the world. It is a broad discipline, covering everything from vision, memory and attention to everyday reasoning and language. One of the most fundamental results in cognitive science is that most of our thought is unconscious – not unconscious in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but unconscious simply in that we are not aware of it. We think and talk at too fast a rate and at too deep a level to have conscious awareness and control over everything we think and say. We are even less conscious of the components of thoughts – concepts. When we think, we use an elaborate system of concepts, but we are not usually aware of just what those concepts are like and how they fit together into a system.

 
How did this book shift my thinking?

Lakoff gave me the missing key to understanding the political landscape and especially political rhetoric and positioning. His book Don't Think of an Elephant, which is a highly condensed version of Moral Politics, has become very popular since the 2004 election.

What’s his main idea?

To conservatives the positions taken by liberals seem inconsistent and immoral, and liberals view conservative politicians as cynical and self serving. Yet each group thinks of themselves as trying to do what is right, what makes common sense.

Lakoff suggests that the answer to these apparently contradictory positions lies in the moral underpinnings of conservatives and of liberals. Lakoff’s recent work has centered on two components of conceptual systems: conceptual metaphors and categories. A conceptual metaphor is a conventional way of conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another, often unconsciously. He maintains we use the conceptual metaphor of the family and in-family based morality as the basis for our political worldview and that we do this because we use the common, unconscious and automatic metaphor of the nation-as-family in which the nation is seen as a family, the government as a parent and the citizens as children.

His thesis is deceptively straight forward. Conservatives, Lakoff explains, tend to a view that favors what he calls the "Strict Father Model" of the family. Liberals, on the other hand, prefer the "Nurturant Parent Model." Each model implies a system of beliefs that determine how conservatives or liberals judge the morality of a situation. When the models are applied to the nation, the conservative and liberal politics result.

For the full summary Download moral_politics.doc