Reviewing the week’s blinks

I’ve signed up for a new service, called Blinkist, a service that provides summaries of books in 15 minutes both in text and audio format. I was looking for a way to review a number of books that I’ve both read and not yet read, to either determine whether or not I should read them, or just something new to learn.

Here’s a review of some of the book summaries that I’ve been listening/reading to:

• Games People Play by Eric Berne – Humans play games all the time, acting in the role of Parent, Adult or Child depending on the “game” being played. We play games with different goals (safety, interaction, ) in mind although we cannot articulate them. Understanding the different roles people have when in a game gives insight into patterns of behaviour and this insight is useful in all relationships. We need to be particularly careful playing too many games in a personal relationship, as it is only when we stop playing games do you get to truly create deeper relationships.
• Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet – A leadership tale that describes a leadership style that made one of the worst performing naval ships into one of the best. A good summary of turning a command-and-control leadership style, into a leaders building leaders style as well as other tricks to create quality control and feedback without using punishment. I’ll add this to my list of books to read further.
• The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier – A nice summary that distinguishes between the difference of mentoring (where you are providing more advice/answers) to coaching (where you lead through asking questions). A good summary of the benefits to this leadership skill, and some good examples of open questions to stimulate good conversations.
• Getting There: A Book of Mentors by Gillian Zoe Segal – With a subtitle about mentors, I thought this book would focus more on how mentors helped people succeed and instead you end up hearing the stories of some successful people. Although still inspirational, I found the summaries didn’t focus very much on the role the mentor played.