EMBA的小眼睛

Pick three

If I could suggest just one thing you could do that would transform how 2014 goes for you, it would be this:

Select three colleagues, bosses, investors, employees, co-conspirators or family members that have an influence over how you do your work. Choose people who care about you and what you produce.

Identify three books that challenge your status quo, business books that outline a new attitude/approach or strategy, or perhaps fiction or non-fiction that challenges you. Books you've read that you need them to read.

Buy the three books for each of the three people, and ask them each to read all three over the holiday break.

That's it. Three people, nine books, many conversations and forward leaps. No better way to spend $130.

I still remember handing copies of Snow Crash to my founding team at Yoyodyne. It changed our conversations for years. And years before that, Soul of a New Machine and The Mythical Man Month were touchstones used by programmers I worked with. When the team has a reference, a shared vocabulary and a new standard, you raise the bar for each other.

[If the Pick Three approach makes you uncomfortable, because you're not allowed to do this, or not supposed to, you have just confronted something important. And if this feels too expensive, it's worth thinking about how hard you're expecting to work next year, and how you plan to leverage all that effort.]