A book for the technology leaders who want to retrospectively trade their computer science and software development degrees for psychology, sociology or anthropology. For the folks who spend all day wrangling people problems and long for time to ship code.
How minds change by David McRaney is one of the best books the Midnyte City crew have read in the last five years. It is a map of the psychological processes required to change perspectives. With simple execution instructions. More importantly, this book helps the reader to uncover, recognise and foster this process within themselves.
This book is so good we gave a copy to each of the wonderful people who took part in our services/market fit interviews.
To life long learning and continuous improvement.
An examination of what culture is, a framework for conversations we can have to make culture more explicit and tips to shape and evolve culture in our organisations.
The book shares the results of some eye-opening research on how managers see culture. How do they define culture? How do they go about improving it? The results suggested half of people leaders believe that culture cannot be influenced,
it just happens 🤯
Hatton then outlines 5 culture ‘conversations’ (with questions and facilitation advice) to have in teams:
The expectation conversation - make the unspoken spoken
The clarification conversation - make the invisible observable
The communication conversation - make the words a language
The confrontation conversation - make feedback less difficult
The celebration conversation - make recognition more meaningful
This was a quick read, and the questions and conversations suggested are super useful. Recommended for progressive leaders who recognise culture as an asset is attracting and retaining high-caliber knowledge workers.
An examination of the many reasons as to why our attention spans are decreasing, and a call to action as to why this is alarming and the impacts this could have longer term. Hari goes through 12 different reasons, each in its own chapter, as to the causes and possible solutions to our attention problems.
Of particular interest to the techies amongst us were the chapters that focussed on:
How our phone is changing how we use our attention (due to the increase in speed, switching and filtering that happens on your phone and the apps you use)
The rise of technology that can track and manipulate us (i.e. surveillance capitalism), this book references heavily Shoshana Zuboff’s work in this space
Hari provides some tangible advice as to small things we can do to help increase our own attention spans, however the main value of this book lies in it’s identification of the societal and industrial shifts that are causing this problem. For anyone who feels like they are struggling to focus for longer period of time, reading this book will change the way you think about it.
Data is fundamental to the modern world. Economic development, healthcare, education and public policy, rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. Yett o much data fails to take into account gender, treating men as the default and women as atypical, baking bias and discrimination into our systems. Women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.
Midnyte City highly recommends this book. Awareness and action are our roads out of this situation. Women are living in a world that just isn't designed for us...in so many ways. Pérez does an excellent job at wading through the data and creating an eye opening, easy to read book.
An enjoyable collection of interesting studies boiled down to book chapters revealing the wonders of different forms of animal navigation. They use everything from large focal points, the earth's magnetism, the location of the sun in the sky, the moon and the Milky Way, and olfactory senses (smells on both land and water). This book shows us how much we still have to learn about the incredible ways animals navigate this planet. For some of the most interesting animal navigation stories:
A brief and thought-provoking examination of ethics in business from Peter Singer. Is honesty for suckers? Or for those who want to maximise value over the long term?
These questions are at the heart of the disenfranchisement most millennials feel with work. Shareholder value is not a compelling purpose. Effective altruism is the new “Why?”
Read more: After VW: Ethical business and the question of honesty
A big thank you to Rich Durnall for introducing the Midnyte City team to Peter Singer and his incredible work on ethics and effective altruism.
Daniel Kahneman unifies psychology and economics uncovering the science behind judgement and decision making. His understated conclusion is the extent to which human beings are hardwired to make poor decisions.
Fascinating concepts for leaders to explore outside of these pages include framing (and it’s role in regret), choice architecture (essential for governance and management), the focusing illusion, (“nothing is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it”), the extent to which losses are felt as vastly more impactful than gains, the certainty effect and the memory tricks around duration neglect and the peak end rule.
