Episode 22 - 2023 Reading Roundup - Impactful Books and Learning Insights

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Episode 22 - 2023 Reading Roundup - Impactful Books and Learning Insights Video and Podcast Transcript

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Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Enterprise Minds. We've got the whole crew in today and just a fun quick little episode today. We're going to talk about kind of the, the top books that, that stood out to us in 2023 that either had an impact on the way that we thought about something or things that, uh, we could immediately implement.

So I guess. I can just start with that, you know, nothing too official. I will say given the year and all of the stuff that we've talked about with AI, one of my top books was a book called Genius Makers by Cade Metz and it he's a New York times journalist. And it's essentially. A history of what AI started out as in like a closet in New Jersey as a military thing to now all of the craziness that you see today and.

When you're, when you're watching the news come out, either on social or if you follow, you know, regular news these days, you know, you will see certain certain names just continue to pop up. Right? So you, you had Jeff Hinton who was the Google guy who quit because he wanted to be able to speak more freely about.

What do you thought the limitations of the concerns were on AI and essentially. The way that Cade, you know, describes it, Jeff Hinton is like a main player in, in that, that story, because, you know, born in England, professor in Canada for a really long time. And then he ends up selling one of his ideas to Google.

There is an enormous amount of people who are now in the AI game who were his students. Or his research associates. So that leads to, you know, a particular type of thinking in the AI thing. So, you know, guys like Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleiman Ilya Suskova, all of these names that you might recognize through paying attention to different things, all of them are, you know, inter linked and connected because they worked with each other on a particular project, or they had dinner together where, you know, deep mind was sold to Google or, you know, whatever it was It just provided a ton of context to me on the kind of schools of thought within AI, right?

This you know, closed model where all of the companies own the IP and, you know, implement it versus the open model. You know, the open source model like. You know what Facebook is doing, but Facebook is doing llama as an open source model exclusively because of who's in charge of AI at, um, at meta.

sO yeah, it's a fascinating read. I will highly, highly, highly recommend it just because it did it provided so much, so much context. And it also allowed a lot to, kind of know where the guardrails are in terms of like where they might try to push it, you know? So yeah, anyway, I would say, go, go read this.

If you have any interest in, in AI, marketing AI, who's behind all of it. And yeah, just the, just the history behind it. Cause it didn't just show up, right. It took 70 years to be suddenly successful.

Have you guys read this or anything like it or okay,

I'll put the link in the show notes

Alex Pokorny: so

Dave Dougherty: Should I do all three or do you guys want? Do you guys want to turn?

Alex Pokorny: Let's go around first. Did you wanna be next

Dave Dougherty: you can probably the most prolific of all of us So I'm interested to see what you come up with

Ruthi Corcoran: You know, I think I might just be the most vocal about reading the books Maybe not not so much that I read more than anybody Okay, so there's sort of two different camps of books in general that I read.

There's the types of books where it's getting information on a specific topic, and it's much more fact oriented or learning about a particular area. And then there's this other category of books where, you know, the authors introduced a main sort of topic and sort of gives different examples around that topic and those types of books.

I enjoy because it sort of gives me the space to think about different things. So, as I'm reading, I'm probably having a dialogue in my head about all the, all the related items or things I've encountered versus versus the books where it's you're reading about a topic that you've never heard about. And a lot of it is just sort of taking in information.

The 2nd category of the things I'm like, okay, how do I think about this? How do I apply to my real life? And so it's that 2nd category of books that, i, I've got my three in today and the reason I bring up that sort of two categorization is because you know, sometimes the topics that they're bringing up it's not very dense, you know, you're not hearing the different schools of thought and the history of that should might be a little bit.

I don't know if fluffy is the right word, but it just gives your brain a lot more reading room to breathe as you're reading where. Okay. Versus the books where you really have to sit and concentrate on every single thing that is being said by the author, which are good books, too. That's just not the category.

I'm introducing today. Okay. So the 1st, 1 in my book, my group of 3 is visual thinking by temple. Grandin this book. I read probably in February time frame. Perhaps, um, and. Quick synopsis. She, Temple Grandin, when she was in her 20s, realized that she was she thought only in terms of pictures, and a lot of other people thought in terms of words.

So, whereas myself, I've got sort of a stream of discussion going on in my head, and there's sort of things that are coming out verbally in my head all the time. In Tumble Grandin's case, she just thinks in pictures. There's no, there's no words. That was a pretty big revelation for her, as you can imagine.

And this book explores sort of the different types of minds with an emphasis on the visual thinking. Why, where, different types of minds might be better suited for different tasks. The implications how it's good to have lots of different minds and what our education system might be doing related to encouraging or discouraging different types of thought and activities and.

This 1 was pretty pretty monumental this year for a couple of reasons. 1 is it helped me think about my colleagues and my team members in terms of how might I be presenting information in a way that. Might be missing the boat just entirely for some colleagues or might be more well suited to other colleagues and I've been observing around the workplace, you know, different ways that people are presenting information and and how we might be missing parts of our audience.

And that's important. And then also, as we've had a lot more conversation around AI this year AI is, in a way, a different kind of mind. And so how do we think about different kinds of minds? And how do we think about collaborating with different kinds of minds to create better results? So that was definitely a big, big one for the year.

Dave Dougherty: So have you actually changed the way that you communicate? You know, because I mean, recognition is 1 thing, but putting it into practice is another.

Ruthi Corcoran: Yes. Or if I haven't changed the way I communicate, I'm much more active about partnering with somebody who communicates differently. Right so, if I know somebody is really good at documentation, I might partner with them because I'm much more likely to provide a visual presentation that might not hit the mark with somebody who cares more about documentation as an example.

So I would say it's, it's hard for me to communicate differently without a lot of work. It's going to be an ongoing journey. So in the meantime, what I can do is find the people who digest information or communication, communicate information differently and partner with them in order to. To create a better end product.

Alex Pokorny: That's a really smart method. What's that? That's a really smart method. That's a really good idea. I mean, because it is so hard to shift the way that you do things. Partnering with someone who you recognize is doing something differently than you working together.

Dave Dougherty: That's a great idea. It's interesting you say that because one of, I, I was given the task recently of, you know, for whatever reason, cleaning up my digital files and it is as arduous as it sounds, but you do find some interesting tidbits there where early in the year I was doing a particular project and.

I was getting asked for so many status updates that I ended up spending more time on status updates than I was actually doing the thing. So I ended up just creating an infographic with like the stages of the project. And I was like, you know, I put the, you are here. So if anybody asks, I just sent them the infographic and said, we're at stage three of five.

Here's what stage three means. Here's who's, you know, involved in that. And then that way I didn't have to say the same thing over and over again. And it was a quick visual of, okay, we're over halfway. And you know, I did it to save my own sanity, but it ended up being a really good communication thing that way.

To because then it was like, oh, yeah, I can put this in a PowerPoint. And doesn't this look great? You're missing the point, but okay. Sure. Yeah,

Alex Pokorny: I

Ruthi Corcoran: would say, as you were talking about the infographic, it reminded me of another. A shift that I've made over the last few months, which is now, as I'm going into conversations for onboarding or you know, introducing somebody to the work that we're doing.

My 1st question will be, how do you digest information? Because I'll present differently accordingly, especially in a 1 on 1 setting and it's. We have lots of resources available. So the idea of just quick finding a video versus an article versus a podcast is extraordinarily easy. And oftentimes content creators, like ourselves will put out content in multiple different formats.

And so it's very easy to find the exact same topic or content, just in a variety of different things. And I think I wonder if that's had far reaching implications for just overall gaining of knowledge as a whole is now that. You can consume information, however it is you find best and how how much that's allowed us to amplify all the different minds who perhaps, you know, books weren't the thing

Alex Pokorny: about the rise of audio books. I mean, there's some huge contract negotiations have been going on recently in the expansion of Spotify. Amazon. Everybody's trying to get into that audio book space to that's that's been 1 that's been really surprising to me of just. The desire for books. I never really understood how big of an audience that really was.

I just kind of figured it was that kind of a niche audience. It was consuming books, you know, more than one in a month, let's say, something like that kind of high frequency kind of state. But when you look at some of the audio. Book stats. It's astounding. I mean, long commutes. I get it. I mean, it's, it's convenient method, but you're right.

Changing the medium a little bit. You open up to a new audience and maybe there's an audience there that likes the written word, but just due to circumstance or context, they switch to audio books because it's convenient because they're mowing the lawn or whatever it is that they

Dave Dougherty: happen to be doing.

That is a hundred percent me with. Work and kid and that's enough. I, the only time I had for quote unquote reading was when I had the dog for a walk and I didn't want all the commercials that were part of the the podcast I would typically listen to or cooking and cleaning the kitchen after dinner.

You know, that was a perfect time for this. So, you know I would say the vast majority of what I read, quote unquote, read this year was actually audio books for that very reason. yEah, cause God forbid I have to watch that same YouTube episode. Again.

So Alex what what, which one stood out for you? I

Alex Pokorny: mean, in previous episode, we had already talked about one book. So that was on grand strategy by John Lewis. Get us and the kind of synopsis for that one. If you're trying to take on a very large goal, large tasks, you know, long term kind of strategy, it helps you kind of reframe it in a way of how can I go after this and how have others gone after this and what's the method to get there.

BuT we've talked about that in a different episode, so I'll do a kind of a short pitch for another one. But it is not a book. There is a book, but I don't recommend it. I recommend the video. And that's Simon Sinek's How Great Leaders Inspire Action, or you can search for Simon Sinek Why Ted Talk. If you find one with really low resolution, kind of crappy video, that's the one.

All of us. know it. We've watched it even together at one point. It's a great way to think about the greater goal and to start thinking about how to get to there and define yourself around the greater goal of things instead of just how you happen to do something. So that one I would suggest. I have the book as well, but it's full of examples that just kind of continue to have the same point of what the video covers.

So I recommend the video.

Ruthi Corcoran: All right. This is first off the video is fantastic. So highly recommend, but don't dismiss the book too quickly because I think it falls into the second camp that I was talking about. There's books that are chock full of information where you have to focus and it's telling you new things and there's books that allow your mind to wander and think and sort of explore the idea and Simon Sinek's book falls into that camp.

I would say that

Alex Pokorny: that's his kind of continued method of writing. I own a number of his books and they fall into that same category.

Dave Dougherty: I will say, I, I am sympathetic to your view, Alex of, yeah, I mean, we've discussed, we've discussed it before you know, respect the guy, but it is just like a ton of examples saying the same thing which is why the this will be a little side tangent, little bonus recommendation.

SiMon Sinek's episode. interview on the Scott Galloway podcast from this year was really good. To the point where it, it became this like therapy session for Galloway. And it was. It was really just it was just really good. It stood out above and beyond a typical business podcast. It wasn't just the fluff of yeah, here's the five things to be successful because business You know, it actually got to what drives you what you know what leads you to do this and then you know When you can hear their voices start to break because they're actually getting to a core Feeling like it was really good.

It was really good. All like, like I said previously, I'll link to all these things so that everybody can share in you know, all of the tasty goodness of these topics. So speaking of which I have to thank you, Ruthie. For this next one. Ruthie got me into Rory Sutherland. Yep. That's the exact book.

And I've spent probably way too much time with this guy over the last year, because I found myself. listening to the the original Ted talks and going, Oh my God, this articulates so many of the things that I've been struggling with lately. So then I ended up watching like all of this stuff, like three times throughout the year, just like revisiting it, getting a little bit, something different, revisiting it, getting something a little different.

And then. Actually reading the book, um, which to Alex's point was a lot of the same examples that he used in his presentations, which, okay, I get the game. You know, you do the presentations, you, you have a certain, you know repertoire that you, you pull from. And it's all great because again, every time you hear it, you get a little bit, something different, but,

Ruthi Corcoran: listening and not able to see the book. I just flashed on the screen. Dave just gave you a fantastic pitch to read Rory Sutherland's alchemy. Correct? Yes. The dark art and curious science of creating magic in brands, business, and life.

Dave Dougherty: Right. And the thing that I love about it is There, there just seems to be such a sickness of logic in today's world.

There's the he articulates it in his, you know, rules for alchemy. The number one rule is just, I love this to give you a a taste of what the rest of the book will be like the opposite of a good idea can be a good idea. And not just a bad one, right? You know, a, a reliance on your models of, you know, different math and logic models allows for people to keep their job because nobody argues with you if you say, well, I plugged the things into this model and I got this output and, you know, aren't we smart?

But it might not actually be the right idea for the situation or the best idea for the situation. And so yeah, it's, it's just really about taking like behavioral economics and, and psychology and applying that to really smart marketing and business strategy and problem solving. You know, he talks about a flower is a weed with an advertising budget.

Which I just, I love that, you know, we talk a lot about biomimicry in, in research and development or some smart ways to put a lens on a particular problem. And I just I just love that because he puts it even in nature Nature seems to like pointless and inefficient displays that convey meaning, which if you take the antithesis of that, of what we typically experience in a business world, it's optimized the hell out of everything to the point where it's so optimized, there's no joy left.

Right. Yeah, I, I saw that look, Ruthie, but that's just, that's how I feel. I

Ruthi Corcoran: moved a spoon on my plate and it made a loud noise and the timing, my facial expression was just spot on. But as a quick interjection to your comment about, you know, the nature seems to optimize for, for things that are beyond just.

Fit fitness quick runner up on my list. The evolution of beauty by Richard from. It's a bit of a long one. So at least find a podcast on this topic with Richard from it's quite good. And it talks exactly to if you want to go more in detail about how nature oftentimes optimizes for things that are not just.

Dave Dougherty: Right,

Ruthi Corcoran: right. This is what I love about this conversation. It's just you're there's connections all over the darn place. And I'm like, Oh, what about this? What about this book? This book is great, too.

Dave Dougherty: Absolutely. And then, I mean, that's, I mean, that was 1 of the exact reasons to start this podcast was just the, you know, we always end up bouncing a ton of ideas off of each other.

So it's just it becomes a playground. Yeah. So was that the, the other book you held up? Was that your next next 1 that you wanted to talk about? Or what was it?

Ruthi Corcoran: It wasn't even on my list. Okay. Perfect. I'll go quick unless Alex, do you have any follow ups on that 1? No, I'll go for it. All right so my next book is a very short and sweet little book called excellent advice for living wisdom.

I wish I'd known earlier by Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly, it's sort of a interesting character to define. He's a tech maverick. I think is 1 of the ways he's described himself. He was 1 of the founding editors at wired magazine. So he's sort of been involved in the technology conversations since the beginnings of of the, the rise of the Internet. And what I really enjoyed about this book. So, first off, is that if you want something just to read quick before bed, it's great because there's just like little quotes and each page has, you know, 2 or 3 little advice snippets, like, you cannot get smart people to work extremely hard just for money.

Little things like this are wonderful, right? I just opened up a random page and that's the 1. so if you like that, you're going to enjoy it. And so a couple of additional thoughts on this. So 1 of the things I enjoyed most about this book apart from. Just reading those little snippets and thinking and chewing on them for a bit was listening to the podcast that he did in promoting the book and talking with other, other podcasters and about his advice about his travels about his past and the conversations that it brought out were just wonderful.

And so this was a nice multimedia experience in reading this book. He, on Twitter, he was sort of posting all his little bits of advice as well. And I think one of the. Quotes from the podcast that stood out most to me was everything good has already been said, but we just need to say it again. People weren't listening.

And that's something I think a lot about this type of book. It's like, yeah, there's a little bit of advice and a lot of it. You can kind of go, ah, yeah, duh. But oftentimes you need the reminder.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And the, the, the, the couple of sentences on each thing is kind of a nice format. Kind of refreshing because otherwise it's, you know, 700 pages of here's everything I've learned throughout my career. And you're like, Oh man, okay, let's get to it.

Alex Pokorny: If you've ever read any it was rework and remote by the creators of base camp or signals 47, they have a book that's very similar to that where basically every page. Page is a chapter and it basically is one point one quick little snippet on it the next point the next snippet on it And it just the whole book runs like that makes it a very very quick read if you're reading from start to finish But it also has just a lot of very insightful very summarized points.

So that's always a fun one my next one is one that I end up reading all the time, which is kind of funny. It's called the three meter zone. tHe author is J. D. Pendry, P E N D R Y common sense leadership for NCO, so it's a non commissioned officer. Basically someone who in the military, they'd be kind of rising up through the ranks of just, they've been there for experience or like you know, expertise, they eventually got into a leadership role.

So they kind of fell into a leadership role. And this is advice for those people. When I first wanted to go in a career trajectory towards management, I was looking for books on management and my gosh, if you Google search that there is astounding number of books on management that don't tell you anything about how to manage people.

And it was very frustrating that I picked up and it was somebody's basically autobiography and they just started talking about themselves. And it's like, Okay, that was very useful in the 50s, 40s, whatever it is for the particular book, but it was not really useful for today. This is the only one that I really have found that is very, very tactical in terms of these are things that you can apply.

And it's odd. It's I was not in the military, never have been, but it is very, very easy to translate into any workplace because there's a lot of exercises that the book goes through talking about what are your leadership principles. Think about this list of 10 kind of write on that and think about how you want to present yourself different experiences of how to introduce yourself as a leader.

to others or to another leader. Do you write down kind of your list and present that and just be transparent of saying, hold me to this list. This is who I am. This is what I will do for you. It, it, it's really interesting. It was really fascinating. It eventually made sense to me that this very large, especially with the U S very large military organization that does exist out there.

They have literal degrees. and leadership and small group and team leadership because they have studied it so much. And there was so much material that they produced on how to be a leader of small teams, large teams, large organizations, small ones interacting with other types, specialist types, you name it.

They've developed some sort of manual on it. And the book kind of leads you through these in a number of exercises. And just kind of a personal note, I always leave a placemark in it with the business card of the organization I was working with at the time. So there's a number of different ones of where I start from the beginning and start reading through it on the particular problem that I'm having at work.

And I find the answer and eventually stop basically at that point. And it, I think, has most of my different business cards throughout the years shoved in the book at some place because it always has something that can apply and can be useful towards the issue I'm facing.

Dave Dougherty: That's an interesting memento kind of thing where, yeah.

Finding out which ones you run into. That's actually I'll have to check that one out. That that will be seems to address stuff because you're right. It does turn a lot of that consulting business management stuff ends up being just that it's the the ticket for consulting or other things instead of conveying good information on a topic.

Well, I wrote a book on this, so that's why you should hire me at 1, 000 an hour. No,

but you did kind of queue up my next book. And this is the only one that well, aside from. Alchemy. This is the only book that after reading the, um, audio book version, I went out and got the physical one because I wanted to come back to it. So it's principles by Ray Dalio. And if you're unfamiliar with Ray Dalio, he started the most successful private.

 Investment company of all time Bridgewater associates, he's the one that came up with that radical transparency idea for company structures and, and that kind of thing, which, you know, it had its moment when everybody was trying to implement that, but then they realized, actually, I don't want to tell the truth all the time.

Or the, the existing structure just didn't fit that. piece, but it is autobiographical. He has a wonderful New York accent which I know might be grading to some people, but I happen to enjoy it. So it kept me interested in it, but he is very clear on, I tried this, I totally screwed up and here's what I learned from it, or I was going down this path and three people came up to me and said, you're off your rocker.

And I had to deal with that, you know, so it was like all of the things that he learned over the course of his career and starting the company, trying these new things where there wasn't research to his liking, he funded it, um, you know, like with, with universities and, and reputable sources and the, the cool thing about this too, is it's not just about.

You know, work principles. It's also his view of, you know, here things to be successful life principles. Here's, you know, where the, the 2 of them blend, right? Because you spend so much time at work that it's such a huge part of your life. You should, have them in concert with one another, but not necessarily you know, add odds or, or fighting or, you know, too much, right?

Like everything should be balanced, but so he has, he has like these nine principles for a successful life, which, you know, I can grab off of his LinkedIn or his own site and, and put into the thing, but one thing that I absolutely want to call out is the number, number four and number eight.

So number four in his principles is be open minded and assertive at the same time. That is absolutely necessary. I have found in my personal and my work life. So that definitely resonated with me. But then also number eight, pain plus reflection. Equals progress. You know, there's only so much you can control throughout your life, either work, work life or personal.

And I think through talking with you guys and seeing just how some other coworkers deal with with things. I don't think enough people actually take the time to reflect. I mean, even if it's just a cup of coffee and staring at the wall. You know, to just be like, okay, who, what, where, when, why it can just be so powerful for that.

And if you are new to that kind of thinking or want worksheets or whatever else Dalio basically has given all of the apps that He created for people management in his company or the research that he's thinking. He's made all of them free and available. All of the worksheets that are in the book are free and available to download.

And it was just such. an aha moment. Like every time I would be walking the dog, I would have to stop and like capture a note reading this book because it perfectly articulated exactly, um, the massive frustrations that I found with my situation at the beginning of the year. So to realize that I wasn't alone, it was probably just a cultural thing.

And here's a new way of thinking about things was massively impactful. So I'd highly recommend it. He's got some amazing like quick animations on his YouTube channel that he's done with this. So yeah, highly, highly, highly, highly recommend it. It's good.

Ruthie last one. What you got? That's one.

Ruthi Corcoran: I'm stealing and cheating and adding to okay. Teeing off of some of the. Some of the things Dave, you talked about with Rory slanted about, you know, there is sort of an alchemy when it comes to marketing because oftentimes spreadsheets can only get you so far spreadsheets and an efficiency are oftentimes more about optimizing than creating brand new spaces or taking risks and.

This has been a sort of a subplot of my reading journey this year has been taking a taking a little of a sidetrack on. Okay. What is it that marketers do? That is important and impactful. This is something I've struggled with for a long time, which is. Boy, sometimes I don't like telling people I'm a marketer.

It feels kind of squeamish. It's like, oh, they're the, they're the ones who are making, you know, my TV shows interrupted with commercials. You know, they're the advertisers out there, which is definitely something Rory Southerland pushes against. So, to that vein, there's sort of 2 books that have helped me reframe a little bit how I think about my role as a marketer.

Both externally with customers as well as internally. All of us have a role in some sense as a marketer of ideas within our internal company. As we think about how we're trying to promote a new initiative or a new way of doing things or some sort of change. So the 1st 1 is Seth Godin's. This is marketing.

You can't be seen until you learn to see and I would say, even in just the 1st, few pages are just littered with a whole bunch of very good. Reframing and arguments for what the unique role of marketers is, and it's, it's, it's oftentimes comes down to solving problems and finding different ways of communicating what those problems are so that you can find better and new solutions.

so That's sort of the runner up. I think the big 1, though, is emotion by design by Greg Hoffman have mentioned on this podcast before he is the former. CMO at Nike, and this book is. A wonderful look into the different experiences he's had at Nike, how their teams built some of the most amazing moments within sports history from a marketing perspective, how they've really taken Nike to a new level and sort of what all went into that.

And a lot of it is. Creating the right spaces, not just for your customers, but also internally. How do you make the spaces so that people can be thinking differently? And then creating experiences that have that emotional connection. How do you, how do you think about that? How do you, how do you reframe or how do you get to those really important insights that are going to give you that extra connection with your customers?

That you can't necessarily get with a spreadsheet or by just having a catalog of your shoes up on a website. That's not why we buy Nike's. We don't buy Nike's because because of the list of specifications on them. We buy them because there's there's a deeper connection there and he goes in to great detail about how they created some of those connections that we hold near and dear to our heart.

Dave Dougherty: Interesting. Yeah, you've brought that up enough that I feel like it's almost required reading at this point. For me, I mean,

Ruthi Corcoran: every page I would read, I'd have a page of notes. So anytime I've got books that invite so much thought and excitement, I've gotta share 'em with the world because other people, I want to feel the same thing that I have

Alex Pokorny: felt.

Exactly. I definitely appreciate you guys sharing your books and the different people that you followed. Rory Sutherland, Dave, you had brought him up. It's been fantastic seeing a few of his presentations as well. So I gotta check some of these people out and see what, speaking of different formats, but I'll find something that fits what I like.

So I will

Dave Dougherty: say, you know, in, in, in cheating quickly a couple of honorable mentions, I think, based on our podcast one of the thought leaders that has come up a bunch. But doesn't make the cut because I didn't read any of his books this year is Clayton Christensen. The, the job... In Invader's

Alex Pokorny: Dilemma,

Dave Dougherty: for those at home.

Yep. And he also wrote, right before he died a book on... Work life balance and happiness as a business person and marketer. And, you know, thoughts on that, like applying the same rigor. Of problem solving to what it is you want your home life to be too, because the thing that he said triggered it was going to all of the alumni, the Harvard alumni meetings where all of a sudden.

The audience kept getting smaller and smaller and you'd find out that, Oh, so and so got divorced because they're at work too much. And now they don't want to show up to the, you know, kind of alumni public things, cause things kind of went off the rails or, you know, like all of these types of things where it's just like, yeah, you had all your eggs in one basket and didn't work out the way you thought you know, over time.

It's just a good reminder. Keep things in perspective. My other, my other one would be Satya Nadella's Hit Refresh. Again, with that organizational design and having a plan for the future. Like, that book is kind of old, but it It does show you kind of the framework of where he's thinking Microsoft will go even when he first took the CEO role, and a lot of what he said then is still exactly what he's executing now.

 And but the importance of culture and challenging the cultural norms and you know, reframing what has always been. Especially at such a large incumbent organization. It's such a massive lift, you know, that it has to come from the CEO. So him talking about what he wanted to do with Microsoft and then what then happened with the cultural change.

I mean, obviously it's biased cause it's his book, but you know, it's at least one, one lens toward that. It's another good one if you're interested in. You know, organizational culture and, and putting a flag in the sand for something. So, all right, Alex, I interrupted you. So thank you for that little side tangent.

And yeah, what's your, what's your last one?

Alex Pokorny: Last one is rubies in the orchard.

Dave Dougherty: What is that of this

Alex Pokorny: 1? tHis is Linda Resnick. So the creator of palm pomegranate juice wonderful pistachios, telefloral, the Franklin mint, who produces all those collectible things, Fiji water, same person no marketing degree, but my gosh, she is a brilliant marketer and that's the book is basically looking through a very pure marketing sense of how do you take a product, fashionable.

And make it something that a market wouldn't want. And it's a fantastic read for trying to think about that in so many different contexts. I mean, like that list, that's a very odd list of different things that I just mentioned of things that she's the company that she has. And each one of them has a very different spin on it of how she took this existing business or existing product.

I mean, even down to a pomegranate being the product and trying to turn it into something else and marketable. Fantastic read. It's 1 that I always suggest and 1 that really shows you that there is a mindset that is around marketing. It is not something necessarily that you have to go to school for.

There is a mindset there,

Ruthi Corcoran: you know, it strikes me as you talk through. That particular book, there is a red thread throughout a number of the books we've talked about today about the marketing mindset and people who are speaking about that marketing mindset and how to think differently than perhaps the accounting department often thinks about marketing.

And that might be one of the important skill sets that we all cultivate as we enter in this new world of AI and its various productivity tools and shifts in the way we work is knowing those different skill sets within marketing so that we can best utilize all these fancy, fancy new AIs and LLMs. So

Alex Pokorny: Ruthie, you're saying the what's not so important, the why is?

Ruthi Corcoran: Nice. Nice. Simon said a call out there, Alex. Very nice.

Dave Dougherty: One, find the why.

Alex Pokorny: All right. Well,

Dave Dougherty: now that we've completed the narrative structure and we have finished where we started we will end. Thank you. Everybody for listening to this episode like I said, show notes are on the website and in the description, let us know what you've been listening to reading, watching that's had an impact this year always looking for recommendations and yeah I think we have a a couple of followup episodes potentially on the marketing mindset and yeah.

Ruthie, you're rather brutal question of what do marketers actually do? That's useful and impactful. So let's maybe tease that one out and you know yeah, mull that one over. So every thanks to everybody. We will see you in the next episode. Take care.

Ruthi Corcoran: Cheers.