Juggling Elephants: An Easier Way to Get Your Most Important Things Done–Now!  by Jones Loflin and Todd Musig ★★★★

Ah, business training parables. I have read too many of them. I guess I am more than a little cynical when I pick one up anymore. Most are contrived stories, about 100 pages of large font type, teaching some simple concept with the care and tenderness of a treasured faberge egg. While they teach the principle in an format that is easily digested, they don’t delve into the topic enough to provide much knowledge, background or depth. They tend to be like a quick sugar hit, the Krispy Kreme of the self improvement world.

Juggling Elephants follows this same format. We are told the story of a man who takes his daughter to the circus even though he is overwhelmed with everything in his life pressing down on him. He has so much to do, he feels guilt for taking time to take his daughter out for the evening, but knows he should be spending more time with her. As “luck” would have it, he ends up sitting next to a ringmaster from another circus, there to check out how a friend’s troupe is doing. The ringmaster instantly reads him and suggests that he needs to stop “juggling elephants” and get his “circus” in order. Naturally, the ringmaster invites the man back the next day to teach him the secret of being a ringmaster.

The rest of the story lays out how a ringmaster controls the show and how it applies to managing personal lives. The man quickly adopts the practices and becomes a master of controlling everything around him, becoming hyper-productive and accomplishing all his wildest dreams. He even loses all the weight he has always wanted and improves his marriage. Amazing.

The book is filled with little “pearls” of wisdom, each on its own page with a nice picture of an elephant. Some of these include:

The result of juggling elephants is that no one, including you, is thrilled with the performance.
The ringmaster cannot be in all three rings at once.
The key to the success of the circus is having quality acts in all three rings.
Every act must have a purpose.
Intermission is an essential part of creating a better circus performance.

So why did I give this short book four stars? I usually won’t give this type of parable more than two at best. Well, to my surprise, I learned a concept I find useful. I can only concentrate on one thing at a time. In order to have good performance, I should have a prioritized list of acts (multiple meanings to this word… get it?) for each ring of my life and be able to move between them with speed and ease. A ring represents an area of focus, such as career, relationships and self. GTD teaches this as well, using the weekly review as a mechanism to plan and prioritize the task lists. I like the concept of grouping the many areas of focus into three rings, though. That is a number I can keep in my head easier. Lining things up by priority puts the most important things on stage first. That is good thing to remember.

Juggling Elephants is a short read, a couple hours or so long. I think this one may be worth it.

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I haven’t been formally trained in the ways of Six Sigma, but I have been around it enough to know some of the basics. We used it at SuperValu/Albertsons. I saw it accomplish some amazing savings through several projects.  Simple, small process changes that were shown to save millions of dollars because of the scale of the operation. I worked closely with a few black belts on projects and their grasp of analysis was admirable. I always wanted to be one, but never got the chance.

One project I knew began with an idle comment from a vendor that the company purchased more small item shipping bins than anyone they knew. This was a huge expense each year. Why were the bins disappearing? That was the answer the Six Sigma team was tasked to find. Using several analysis tools, they quickly discovered the root cause was no process or procedure for returning the bins from the stores to the distribution centers. The bins were stacking up at the stores until the manager got tired of having them in the way and tossing them in the trash. A simple process change later and the bins were flowing back to the distribution centers on the empty trucks to be reused hundreds of times.

The Six Sigma Memory Jogger was recommended to me by my manager. It contains an alphabetical listing of all the tools and tricks the Six Sigma black belts use to do their work. Each tool and method is laid out in a concise discussion of what it is, why it is useful and how to employ it. It even includes a few examples of each. It is short, just 266 pages, but it has one of the most complete listings of analysis tools I have seen. Now that I have read through it, I can draw upon the multitude of tools, except for a few intense statistical functions that were beyond my brain. The rest, however, are useful in all sorts of settings. Having this handy reference close at hand means I don’t have to remember everything, but can do a quick review and get the results I need quickly. I have used several over the years in different situations and have found them invaluable. I

If you have to do any kind of analysis of business process in your job, this book is a great one to have in your toolbox. Recommended.

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For the college entrepreneur, being accepted to the the Harvard or Stanford Business Schools is the Holy Grail of Opportunity. Each year, thousands apply and only a few are accepted into these elite programs. The graduates are assured lucrative job offers and contacts for which others would kill. This book follows three HBS graduates who chose another popular route, entrepreneurship. These three turned down the six figure salaries for the opportunity of making something big on their own.

I picked up this book in the hopes of gleaning some information to feed my desire of someday having my own company. What I came away with was unexpected discouragement. I am sure this wasn’t what the author went for, but after tracing the route of these three Harvard graduates, I got the distinct impression a) I could only make it if I attended the Harvard Business School and b) if I didn’t create a multimillion dollar company in three years, I wouldn’t be a successful entrepreneur. The stories were interesting, the advice pertinent, but the loftiness unattainable.

The three chosen subjects each started Internet companies: The Ladders, Military.com and Bluemercury (an online cosmetics retailer). Each were successful through the tenacity and strength of their founders. Each survived through their contacts made at HBS. In fact, one of the lessons I learned from the book, intentional or not, is the value of high-powered contacts, both for advice and cash. It is discouraging to anyone who hasn’t gone to the elite schools to ever hope of meeting these kinds of players.

The chronicle of their respective business startups was very educational and interesting. The book is very engaging, the stories very well written. It is obvious Murphy is a reporter. His style and experience shows through – I cared about their problems and successes. I cheered inwardly as Marla made the shift from sinking online retailer to successful brick-and-mortar boutique. I applaud the success they achieved and grumbled at the poor people management decisions and bad behaviors.

I came away from the book with a fresh look at the hyper-charged life of the successful big entrepreneur, with multimillion dollar investments and even larger payoffs. What I didn’t find was much value for the small entrepreneur. It felt that the message was “if you want to be successful, you better go to Harvard or Stanford”. That just isn’t an option for me, so I was left wondering if I had any business even considering starting my own business. That wasn’t what I was hoping to find.

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After years of listening to the kids talk about the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, I finally got them from Audible and listened to them. I was amazed by the richness and depth of the world Sanderson created. In a medieval world where people gain special powers by “burning” metals inside them, he tells the story of overthrowing a centuries-old ruler with god-like powers. He doesn’t just leave the characters victorious, but tells the often overlooked story of what happens after the revolution. In fact, that part is the more interesting story.

In The Alloy of Law, Sanderson returns to the world of the Mistborn, but several hundred years later, at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Taking the special powers of the Mistborn and colliding them with the modern world of machines, guns and electricity is nothing short of brave for a writer. Fantasy and magic rarely hold up in a more modern world. However, Sanderson pulls it off and the two mesh believably.

The Alloy of Law, while set in the world of Mistborn, doesn’t deal with the large, sweeping issues of the previous books. In fact, those characters are hardly mentioned at all. Instead, this book is a mystery, complete with murder, kidnappings and unexplainable disappearances. The story is well put together, the clues well hidden and the characters engaging. The action scenes are well written and exhilarating. The investigation is thought provoking and moves the story along quickly.

My son, who is a budding writer himself, told me about a podcast, Writing Excuses, that is co-hosted by Sanderson. I listened to a few this week out of curiosity. Sanderson is definitely a teacher (obviously, as he teaches at Brigham Young University). One of the discussions they had was on how to write a successful mystery. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to his advice while seeing how he incorporated it into his novel. It made the book more interesting on more levels as I paid attention to how he revealed the story. He is a master. All of his books are highly recommended.

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I discovered Jasper Fforde years ago while looking for a book for the family to listen to on a car trip. We all fell in love with The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel  and soon listened to all of them. We immediately took to Jasper Fforde’s imaginative wit and storytelling.

Shades of Grey is a whole new universe, set in a far distant future, where the ideals of an Orwellian 1984 have come to pass in a bizarre twist. Everyone can only see one color. The social pecking order is based around what color a person can see. People who see purple are at  the top of the heap with the Greys at the very bottom. Society is tightly control and anyone stepping out of line is handed demerits and, if the balance goes too far into the negative, “reboot”. Eddie Russett, a Red and son of a Swatchman – who heals by showing the injured swatches of different colors, comes to the town of East Carmine and discovers things are a little different out on on the Fringe. It doesn’t help that on his first meeting of Jane Grey, she threatens to kill him.

The story is a little slow off the line, but gathers speed to the end. True to form, Fforde has created a bizarre world complete with flesh-eating trees, perpetuate pavement that clears itself of debris and a society that prizes spoons above everything. By presenting this skewed use of our universe, Fforde lays out a masterful story that is well thought out and rich in texture. It is the quirkiness of the mundane detail that keeps me coming back novel after novel. The premise of this book took me a little more time to warm up to and I quite enjoyed the last half of the book. There is a big setup for future books to investigate. I will be back to East Carmine. And I’ll bring my spoon.

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When I was very young, one of my favorite books to read every Christmas (and several times throughout the year) was a short little book about Nicholas. I didn’t know where it came from; it was just on our bookshelf at home. Years later, I found myself wishing to reread it every holiday season. I figured it was lost in the stacks of books my mother has. As she started downsizing a few years ago, she gave us kids first crack at the books before many were sent off to Deseret Industries. Since it was July, I didn’t think about this book. By Christmas, I had given up hope of ever finding it again. I couldn’t even remember the title by this point. All the Google searches didn’t help, either.

This year, as I had every year, I made an effort to find it. I know this sounds obvious, but it wasn’t until this year I thought to ask Mom if she remembered it at all. She could only remember that it belonged to my sisters and they had claimed it back when she was downsizing. I immediately called my sister. She still had it and gave me the title and author, but warned me it was probably out of print.

Wonder of wonders, Amazon had it. It turns out it was out of print for decades, but demand was so high it was republished in 2006. Further, it was available on the Kindle! I was so excited, I immediately bought it and was reading it three minutes later, just as Amazon loves to promote.

The Adventures of Nicholas is the story of Santa Claus. In this fictional telling, Nicholas was orphaned when he was young and the village decided to take responsibility for him, passing him from family to family each year, with the change being made on Christmas. Nicholas was grateful and began to make toys for the children of the families who were so kind to him. When the town woodworker took his turn, he taught Nicholas to be an expert woodworker. When the mentor died, Nicholas took over the business, continuing to make toys for all the children in the town.

As the story unfolds, each of the Santa Claus traditions are explained in delightful narrative: reindeer, the red suit, chimneys, stockings, even milk and cookies. The magic of the season is woven in and I can’t help but shed a few tears along the way. This is exactly who I want Santa Claus to be. I love this tender fable. If my kids were younger, I would read it to them every Christmas. I guess I have a book for the grandkids. I am just so glad I found it again.

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I am a checklist kind of guy. I have used checklists for the last twenty-five years. When a colleague suggested The Checklist Manifesto, I wondered if there was something new I could learn. It didn’t take long to realize I was in for a master’s course in checklists.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon in Boston. He was asked to sit on a panel for the World Health Organization, with the charge of improving conditions in hospitals in some of the poorest conditions. The story of how he came to introduce checklists into the surgical theater unfolds in a riveting, entertaining and quick read.

I was surprised to learn how, prior to Gawande’s work, success relied heavily on the surgeon as supreme commander, solely responsible for all aspects of the event. The surgeon was required to remember all the steps and sequences, dosages and diagnoses. However, everyone seemed unwilling to admit the surgeon is simply a well-trained human, capable of missing simple steps that make a huge difference in the survivability of the procedure. Gawande began by researching the studies of causes of post surgery mortalities.

His research found a high percentage of deaths were the result of post-operative infection. Believing this to be a problem unique to the most disadvantaged regions of the world, he initially believed a new manual would be the answer. However, someone at the WHO showed him the pallets and pallets of new manuals produced by previous commissions. He dove deeper into the data and found not only had the new manuals not made a difference, but the problem was wider spread than he had thought. Infections were the biggest causes of post-operative deaths in his own hospital in Boston. Most of the infections were traced back to preventable causes, such as incorrect timing of administration of antibiotics, poor communication within the operating room staff and improper draping of the patient.

Gawande goes on to explain the personal journey of discovering the usefulness of checklists, the difficulty in development and resistance to acceptance in the medical community. He spent hours researching other industries where checklists were central, such as construction and aviation. He learned how to develop a checklist that would be unobtrusive, yet effective, from Boeing flight safety engineers. Each step in Gawande’s quest to bring order to the operating theater is chronicled and fascinating.

The results of his work are astounding and not to be missed. The journey is not uncommon for bringing a disruptive process into a hierarchical structure. There are many lessons to be learned in this short book. By the end, I was seeing my own job in a whole new light, understanding where checklists could improve my personal and professional world. I easily convinced my boss to add this book to the team library.

Gawande successfully tackled a potentially dry subject and made it entertaining and engaging. The educational value of this book is easily distilled through his expert use of experience, research and stories. This is one book everyone can benefit from reading. Highly recommended.

Sherry Turkle is a psychologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying the effects of technology on people and has written several books on her findings of the past thirty. In her latest book, she tackles how technology has effected the way we interact with each other. Ranging from robots to texting, she demonstrates that recent innovations have changed how we look to technology as an extension, or even a replacement, for the ways we communicate and care for each other. She discusses the impact she sees beginning to take place. It isn’t pretty.

Turkle has studied technology for over thirty years and has had a fascination with robots and robotic toys. She has taken them into situations ranging from schools to retirement homes and watched the way we interact. As the technology improved, from Furby to My Real Baby, she has watched as people identified more with the robot and formed bonds. Naturally, children formed very strong bonds, believing the toys to be real and placing themselves as the teacher/protector. The robots are programmed to learn from the environment and it responds to the children’s input and develop some semblance of a personality. However, when the robot breaks or has to be reset, it never quite acts the way it did before, and the children recognize the differences to the point they say the robot has “died.”

The elderly also accepted the robots quickly, losing themselves in the illusion of life. Turkle found robots readily accepted as companions, especially to the lonely. They would talk to the robots, confide in them and treat them as if they were real babies, tucking them in and shushing loud talkers. When she began asking the children what they thought of robots becoming caregivers to the elderly, the dichotomy of technology began to be evident. The children at first thought it a great idea for their grandparents to have a robot to help them keep from getting lonely. However, the very next thought was the worry that the grandparents would like the robot more than them and no longer love them. They firmly believed, after their own experience with the robot, it was capable of replacing real people in the lives of their grandparents.

This theme of replacement continued throughout the book. She thoroughly investigated texting as a medium of communication. I found this section most helpful in learning why my own children are more comfortable in texting their friends instead of calling them. I would become frustrated at their reluctance to just pick up the phone and take 30 seconds for a conversation instead of 30 minutes of thumb tapping. Turkle explained their reluctance for direct interaction as result of the discomfort and uncertainty direction communication can cause. They like the opportunity to edit and think about the response before hitting the Send button. In a verbal conversation, that opportunity doesn’t exist and that terrifies the inexperienced. Of course, the more texting is used, the less experience is realized and it becomes a self perpetuating problem. Having this knowledge has helped me interact with my children more and continue to draw them out beyond the texting. I have also become more comfortable with the various forms of electronic communication as a result.

Turkle’s concern for the future is very evident. She fears the direction of healthy human interaction, the lack thereof. The more we separate ourselves through the barrier of technology and electronic communication, the more we become alone. She sees the signs of it all over. When plugged into our devices, we become completely oblivious  to those around us. As children see parents reading and writing email at dinner instead of talking to them, they feel isolated and retreat into their own electronic worlds of Facebook and Second Life. Her concern, I believe, is well founded and cause for action. I know I have made a conscious effort to change my level of interaction. I haven’t been very successful yet, but the predictions she makes are quite disturbing.

I highly recommend this book for everyone who owns a smart phone, computer or spends a regular amount of time plugged in. It has helped me understand my dependency and failings in an electronic world. As a society, we have to learn how to unplug and connect with each other. The stakes are too high. Turkle does an engaging job of warning of the problem. Will we listen?

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First off, what is it with everyone giving their books longer and longer subtitles? Just saying…

I first heard of David Gold on the Getting Things Done Virtual Study Group. He spent one our sessions giving his insight into the many uses of Evernote for implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. His enthusiasm for the topic was contagious and I bought his ebook on the spot.

The basis, of course, is Evernote, a collection application that stores all kinds of information and provides powerful ways to retrieve it across any platform instantly. I am a new-comer to Evernote, just really starting to investigate it a month or two ago. The concept intrigued me, so when I heard Gold’s descriptions of how he pushes it to do everything in his task management system, I was hooked. I have used many tools over the past thirty years. Could this finally be “the tool?” I hoped this book would be the key to understanding how to use it better.

However, I was to be disappointed. Gold’s book did not provide what I was hoping to see – detailed explanation of how to do some of the basics of task management in this rich and well featured tool. In fact, I think I got more specific ideas on how to set things up from the podcast than I did the book.

It is a short ebook, barely 40 pages. The writing is energetic, bright and in need of an editor. Gold knows his stuff, but needs to spend a little more time on explaining how things are set up. The explanations that are there could use a little spicing up, a little more organization and step-by-step instructions. Unless one is already familiar with how to do some of the tasks referred to, it is easy to get lost and confused.

I don’t doubt that Gold is going to clean the book up over time and make it into what he intends. He states the book is going to continue to evolve – something that ebooks hold as an advantage over their print cousins. I hope the feedback he receives is incorporated. He has a great start. More “how to” descriptions would help me have the courage to make the leap to Evernote. The ideas that are presented there are helpful. However, the ideas he discussed in the podcast resonated more with me. I am going to go back and listen to the recording again very soon. For me, it was better than the ebook.

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I have heard good things about The War of Art for many years. Several of my friends sing its praises. It had been on my list for a long time. Finally, after nearly a decade, the time was right. I needed to read it this week. Had I read it when I first heard of it, it may not have had the same impact on my life.

Steven Pressfield is the author of bestseller novels, including The Legend of Bagger Vance. He departs from his normal fiction to write this small book on winning the inner creative war. He discusses how he came to break from his “normal” career and embark on his journey to create novels. However, the book is much more than that story. It is how to break free and have the courage to create.

Pressfield begins by naming the force that keeps us from starting something creative – Resistance. It is the force that causes us to doubt and put off what we long to do. It feeds on fear and magnifies it to crippling heights. Resistance, in literary circles, can be known as writer’s block. In others, it is procrastination. It is most happy when we do things that are not creative. In short, often in one page mini-essays, he defines Resistance in detail so we can recognize it in our life.

In the second section of the book, Pressfield describes ways to combat Resistance. He calls this “turning professional.” He talks about the discipline of creating art. He details his habits in how he lives each day, structured and rigid so as to provide space for his muse to direct his writing. He discusses how the amateur will write when the feeling strikes. The professional treats it as a regular habit, beginning at the same time each day, much as the rest of us start our jobs. He describes the attributes of the professional, such as seeking order, demystifying process, acting in the face of fear and not taking failure and success personally. Again, the format is in short essays.

The final section is about going beyond Resistance, examining where art comes from. Pressfield admits he is a spiritual man, firmly believing in angels and muses. He believes God puts us on Earth to be creative, not drones. Therefore, to fulfill our destiny, we must learn to create, take off the blinders on our souls and invoke angels and muses to aid us.

I understand the concept of Resistance. It keeps me from writing here as often as I desire. I have many creative ideas circling inside my head, eager for space to land and take root. Resistance keeps me from letting these ideas out to the light. Doubts, fears, poor choices and other excuses have bottled me up for years. As I read this book, I found the naming and descriptions helped me relax and gain confidence in myself. I haven’t fully overcome Resistance yet, but I have been breaking down the walls I have built over the decades. It isn’t easy to overcome the habits I have built.

I highly recommend this book, especially if you have feelings of creativity that are being suppressed for whatever the reason. Pressfield kindly doesn’t condemn, but shows the way – the way to win the War of Art.

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