Current Study Group - June 2025
Book
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Richard Nisbett Ph.D.
Sign-up
Signed up at the link below. It is recommended but not required to make a donation to help support Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. More information in the section below.
Book Description
Everyone knows that while different cultures think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking. But what if everyone is wrong?
The Geography of Thought documents Richard Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology and shows that people actually think about—and even see—the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China. As a result, East Asian thought is “holistic”—drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior.
From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that will span it.
When
- Starting June 13, 2025, weekly on Fridays from 1 PM to 2 PM Eastern.
- The meetings will last for approximately one hour for nine weeks.
Where
Microsoft Teams web meeting invites will be sent to enrolled attendees. I would encourage you to join via both webcam video and audio. I have found that this combination enriches our interactions and our discussion.
Format
Bookclub members will submit topics and questions you want to discuss before each meeting. The responses will be compiled, and we will then priority vote on the most popular topics to discuss in each meeting. This format is similar to Lean Coffee and helps ensure we discuss what is most interesting to the group.
About the Authors
Richard E. Nisbett is Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of Michigan and one of the world's most respected psychologists. He received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association and many other national and international awards. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why and Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count have won multiple awards and have been translated into many languages. Most recently, he published Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking and Thinking: A Memoir.
Next Book Club - September 2025
Sustaining Workforce Engagement: How to Ensure Your Employees Are Healthy, Happy, and Productive 1st Edition by Lonnie Wilson (Author)
This book explains the importance of employee engagement – It defines what it is, what it will do for your business, and how you can achieve it as well as sustain it. It covers the history of employee engagement along with why employees were formerly much more engaged with their work and company than they are currently.
The author explains, in depth, why employees want to be engaged but are not. He discusses the emotional, psychological and social forces that make engagement, the state that people naturally and continually attempt to achieve. Furthermore, he makes a compelling case that engagement is not only natural, but, when achieved, it also creates a happy and productive workforce where employees are not only emotionally but also physically more healthy.
You will learn exactly how a business can not only cause this engagement to surface, but also how to sustain it. He presents a complete discussion of the "basics and beyond" that are required to support a system of engagement. He explains engagement as a system and how to interpret and utilize a system diagram using the "high leverage points" to further fuel and sustain engagement.
The book then provides a critical and comprehensive series of discussions of precisely what management must do to unlock the power of a fully engaged workforce. In addition to learning how to measure engagement, there are detailed discussions, along with two confirming case studies, of how to improve your levels of engagement.
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Help Support Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library
While not required, a donation of $31 to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library is encouraged to reserve a seat in Lean Book Club. Dolly Parton's Imagination Library is dedicated to inspiring a love of reading by gifting books each month to children from birth to age five, free of charge, through funding shared by Dolly and local community partners in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Republic of Ireland.
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Designed to Adapt - 6/2018
Dr. John Kenagy's book, Designed to Adapt: Leading Healthcare in Challenging Times, is formula for saving healthcare one problem at a time is termed "Adaptive Design"; a set of methods, skills and tools designed to get healthcare back to the ideals of patient care by cultivating adaptability into the everyday work of the organization and its people. Dr. Kenagy explains how. Here's a preview:
- Learn the five characteristics of great adaptive leaders.
- Discover disruptive innovation. Will you be a disruptive innovator? Or will you be disrupted?
- Explore principles for creating a safe, effective, learning laboratory and innovation incubator in every patient care environment.
- Recognize the seven roadblocks to sustainable healthcare innovation and learn how to eliminate them.
- Learn the keys to financial strength and stability in 21st century healthcare. Does your strategy align?
The secret to success in 21st century healthcare is no secret: Get patients exactly what they need at a continually lower cost. It's the way to fix healthcare.
Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn - 8/2020
Katie Anderson is an internationally recognized leadership coach, consultant, and professional speaker, best known for inspiring individuals and organizations to lead with intention. She founded her consulting practice in 2013 to work with leaders at all levels and organizations of all sizes to achieve higher levels of performance. She helps leaders to develop clarity of purpose and align their processes and behaviors in service of that purpose.
Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn: Lessons from Toyota Leader Isao Yoshino on a Lifetime of Continuous Learning is a leadership book that defies generational or cultural divides, offering a refreshing, proven perspective for all those who dare to lead. Life is about looking back and reflecting upon experiences with the intention to look forward and envision where your life has the power to take you. Through each story, author Katie Anderson helps to share Isao Yoshino's experiences of leadership, learning, giving and empowering. Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn sheds light on what it means to weave a full life of purpose and intention - to pursue excellence and overcome challenges, to help others discover their best selves, and to develop our best selves at the same time.
Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap - 5/2021
Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap: 12 Questions to Understand What's Truly Underneath Your Culture by Patrick Adams
Seeking the best way to understand your company’s operations and leadership, hoping to finally see what’s truly underneath your culture? Take a trip with business performance coach Patrick Adams inside two different cultures -- one you’d like to avoid and one you’d like to emulate -- and then ask yourself the right questions. The answers may lead you -- and your organization’s various stakeholders -- somewhere extraordinary.
Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap: 12 Questions to Understand What’s Truly
Underneath Your Culture is a transformational book that weaves together the stories of two companies that, on the surface, appear to be quite similar. Underneath, however, they couldn’t be more different. There is a devastating distinction between being a company dedicated to continuous improvement and being one that’s about “continuous appearance” instead. The 12 questions that Patrick Adams outlines in his debut book for business leaders give readers the ability to assess their operations. At last, a practical guide to better understanding your company’s leadership and culture.
Humble Inquiry - 7/2021
Ed and Peter Schein's book, Humble Inquiry, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, is a worldwide bestseller offers simple guidance for building the kind of open and trusting relationships vital for tackling global systemic challenges and developing adaptive, innovative organizations—over 200,000 copies sold and translated into seventeen languages!
We live, say Edgar and Peter Schein, in a culture of “tell.” All too often we tell others what we think they need to know or should do. But whether we are leading or following, what matters most is we get to the truth. We have to develop a commitment to sharing vital facts and identifying faulty assumptions—it can mean the difference between success and failure. This is why we need Humble Inquiry more than ever.
The Scheins define Humble Inquiry as “the gentle art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building relationships based on curiosity and interest in the other person.” It was inspired by Edgar’s twenty years of work in high-hazard industries and the health-care system, where honest communication can literally mean the difference between life and death.
Change by Design - 10/2021
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities.
In this revised and updated edition of Change By Design, Tim Brown reintroduces design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. In short, design thinking converts need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem-solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and creative.
Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; it is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.
People Solve Problems - 1/2022
Jamie Flinchbaugh's book People Solve Problems: The Power of Every Person, Every Day, Every Problem Every person in every function of every organization is involved in solving problems. They show up in your email inbox, in meetings, in your own work. They are strategic and tactical, mundane and breakthrough, easy and difficult. Most organizations want to, and need to, improve their people’s problem-solving efforts, and so they offer them tools, templates, and training. Yet this is not where the leverage for impact is found. People Solve Problems: The Power of Every Person, Every Day, Every Problem explores the real leverage to improve your problem solving. +
Problem-solving effectiveness is critical to success for both the problems you already know about and those you have not yet experienced. People Solve Problems will help you, and those you lead, to be more effective now and in the future.
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question - 4/2022
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life by John G. Miller.
The QBQ! book is one you’ll want everyone you know to have—but you should read it first! Ever heard questions like these? Why do we have to go through all this change? When is someone going to train me? Why can’t we find good people? When will that department do its job right? Who dropped the ball? Why don’t they communicate better? Who’s going to solve the problem? If so, the QBQ! message of personal accountability is right for your organization—and maybe even for you, too. QBQ! is a quick 55-minute read, making it a marvelous book for the busy person—at work and at home. It is an excellent tool for teams, study groups, and as a giveaway at conferences. Full of fun, lighthearted, true-life stories, QBQ! and its message of personal accountability works equally well for corporations, academia, nonprofits, churches, and government organizations.
The Best Story Wins - 7/2022
Matthew Luhn's book The Best Story Wins provides fresh perspectives on the principles of Pixar-style storytelling, adapted by one of the studio’s top creatives to meet the needs of entrepreneurs, marketers, and business-minded storytellers of all stripes. Pixar movies have transfixed viewers around the world and stirred a hunger in creative and corporate realms to adopt new and more impactful ways of telling stories. Former Pixar and The Simpsons Animator and Story Artist Matthew Luhn translates his two and half decades of storytelling techniques and concepts to the CEOs, advertisers, marketers, and creatives in the business world and beyond. A combination of Luhn’s personal stories and storytelling insights, The Best Story Wins retells the “Hero’s Journey” story building methods through the lens of the Pixar films to help business minds embrace the power of storytelling for themselves!
The Man Who Broke Capitalism - 9/2022
David Gelles's book The Man Who Broke Capitalism covers the story of when Jack Welch took over General Electric and quickly rose to fame as the first celebrity CEO. He golfed with presidents, mingled with movie stars, and was idolized for growing GE into the most valuable company in the world. But Welch’s achievements didn’t stem from some greater intelligence or business prowess. Rather, they were the result of a sustained effort to push GE’s stock price ever higher, often at the expense of workers, consumers, and innovation. In this captivating, revelatory book, David Gelles argues that Welch single-handedly ushered in a new, cutthroat era of American capitalism that continues to this day.
Gelles shows how Welch’s celebrated emphasis on increasing shareholder value by any means necessary became the norm in American business generally. He demonstrates how that approach has led to the greatest socioeconomic inequality since the Great Depression and harmed many of the very companies that have embraced it. And he shows how a generation of Welch acolytes radically transformed companies like Boeing, Home Depot, Kraft Heinz, and more. Finally, Gelles chronicles the change that is now afoot in corporate America, highlighting companies and leaders who have abandoned Welchism and are proving that it is still possible to excel in the business world without destroying livelihoods, gutting communities, and spurning regulation.
Managing the Unexpected - 11/2022
Managing the Unexpected, Third Edition is a thoroughly revised text that offers an updated look at the groundbreaking ideas explored in the first and second editions. Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe's revised books reflects events emblematic of the unique challenges that organizations have faced in recent years, including bank failures, intelligence failures, quality failures, and other organizational misfortunes, often sparked by organizational actions, this critical book focuses on why some organizations are better able to sustain high performance in the face of unanticipated change. High-reliability organizations (HROs), including commercial aviation, emergency rooms, aircraft carrier flight operations, and firefighting units, are looked to as models of exceptional organizational preparedness. This essential text explains the development of unexpected events and guides you in improving your organization for more reliable performance.
Measure What Matters - 1/2023
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less - 3/2023
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs #1 New York Times Bestseller! Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive.
In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.
The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention
In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less - 3/2023
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less - 3/2023
Greg McKeown is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. He has taught at companies that include Apple, Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter and VMware.
Essentialism is more than a time-management strategy or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter.
By forcing us to apply more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy—instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us.
Essentialism is not one more thing—it’s a whole new way of doing everything. It’s about doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works - 6/2023
A Wall Street Journal and Washington Post Bestseller, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. A playbook for creating your company's winning strategy. Strategy is not complex. But it is hard. It’s hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future—something that doesn’t happen in most companies.
Now two of today’s best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy—explaining what it’s for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point.
A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G’s sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. Now, drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean, this book shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success—where to play and how to win.
The result is a playbook for winning. Lafley and Martin have created a set of five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors.
The Mistakes That Make Us - 8/2023
Mark Graban is an author, speaker, and consultant, whose new book is The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation
We all make mistakes. What matters is learning from them, as individuals, teams, and organizations. A culture of learning from mistakes spurs improvement, innovation, and better business results.
The Mistakes That Make Us is an engaging, inspiring, and practical book by Mark Graban that presents an alternative approach to mistakes. Rather than punishing individuals for human error and bad decisions, Graban encourages us to embrace and learn from them, fostering a culture of learning and innovation.
The Mistakes That Make Us is a must-read for anyone looking to create a stronger organization that produces better results, including lower turnover, more improvement and innovation, and better bottom-line performance. Whether you are a startup founder or an aspiring leader in a larger company, this book will inspire you to lead with kindness and humility and show you how learning from mistakes can make things right.
Corporate Rebels: Make work more fun - 10/2023
Co-founders Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree started Corporate Rebels after saying goodbye to a frustrating corporate job. Corporate Rebels: Make work more fun teaches 8 radical lessons from 100 of the world’s most inspiring companies. Today’s workplaces are broken. Badly broken. With 85% of employees disengaged, 23% feeling burned out and 37% believing that their job makes no useful contribution to society, work as we know it today is simply not working.
The good news? There is a better way. And it's not just theory. It's already practiced in pioneering organisorganizationations around the globe. Drawing on Minnaar and De Morree’s visits to 100+ of the world’s most progressive organizations, this book gives direct evidence that you can make work enjoyable and rewarding, while boosting performance and success.
This book is for people who know workplaces could, and should, be better. Whether you’re in the leadership team, a rebel who has been suppressed by corporate dogma or a manager who is trapped in the broken system: this book is for you!
Atomic Habits - 12/2023
Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results
No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.
If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.
Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.
Wiring the Winning Organization - 4/2024
Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification. Forget vision, grit, or culture. Wiring the Winning Organization reveals the hidden circuitry that drives organizational excellence.
Drawing on decades of meticulous research of high-performing organizations and cross-population surveys of tens of thousands of employees, award-winning authors Gene Kim and Dr. Steven J. Spear introduce a groundbreaking new theory of organizational management. Organizations win by using three mechanisms to slowify, simplify, and amplify, which systematically moves problem-solving from high-risk danger zones to low-risk winning zones.
Wiring the Winning Organization shines an investigative light on some of the most famous organizations, including Toyota, Amazon, Apple, and NASA, revealing how leaders create the social wiring that enables exceptional results. This is not feel-good inspiration or armchair philosophy but a data-driven prescriptive playbook for creating excellence grounded in real-world results and proven theory. This is the rare business book that delivers concrete tools―not platitudes―to convert mediocrity into mastery.
Think Again - 6/2024
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know: Grant, Adam. Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions, when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We think too much like preachers defending our sacred beliefs, prosecutors proving the other side wrong, and politicians campaigning for approval--and too little like scientists searching for truth. Intelligence is no cure, and it can even be a curse: being good at thinking can make us worse at rethinking. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become.
Radical Candor - 8/2024
Radical Candor by Kim Scott has been embraced around the world by leaders of every stripe at companies of all sizes. Now a cultural touchstone, the concept has come to be applied to a wide range of human relationships. The idea is simple: You don't have to choose between being a pushover and a jerk. Using Radical Candor―avoiding the perils of Obnoxious Aggression, Manipulative Insincerity, and Ruinous Empathy―you can be kind and clear at the same time.
Radical Candor is about caring personally and challenging directly, about soliciting criticism to improve your leadership and also providing guidance that helps others grow. It focuses on praise but doesn't shy away from criticism―to help you love your work and the people you work with.
Bringing Scientific Thinking to Life - 10/2024
Bringing scientific thinking to life: An introduction to Toyota Kata for next-generation business leaders (and those who would like to be) Paperback by Sylvain Landry
Your team’s ability to learn and adapt is paramount, and scientific thinking is the key to unlocking this invaluable skill. The bad news: It's not our natural default position as adults. The good news: There’s a simple and proven approach to developing it in any organization or team—including yours—called Toyota Kata. Professor Sylvain Landry lays out a straightforward management practice that enables each level of your organization to apply scientific ways of thinking and working, to achieve whatever goals you’re pursuing.
Right Kind of Wrong - 1/2025
Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy C. Edmondson
We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.
With vivid, real-life stories from business, pop culture, history, and more, Edmondson gives us specifically tailored practices, skills, and mindsets to help us replace shame and blame with curiosity, vulnerability, and personal growth. You’ll never look at failure the same way again.
Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge - 5/2025
Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge by John Willis
From the birth of modern industry to winning WWII to Japan's Economic Miracle, W. Edwards Deming helped shape some of the most profound moments in modern history. Deming, an American engineer and statistician, is widely recognized for his contributions to the field of quality management. But his teachings go beyond quality management; they influence not only how we work today, but also how we can continue to succeed in the future.
Part business history, part biography, part journey into deep business sense, bestselling author John Willis captures the full picture of Deming's life and influence. Most importantly, Willis reveals the experiences that led to Deming's greatest discovery: the System of Profound Knowledge, a collection of fundamental truths that show how any system or process can be transformed into something greater.
What should we read next?
What should we read next?
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