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September monthly round-up
Hope you all had a nice September. It's hard to believe we're three-quarters through the year, but I'm certainly ready for the holiday season to start soon. This month was a pretty good one, with two book summaries and four blog posts (three related to the books I summarised):
Book summaries
- Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
- The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz
Blog posts
- Why you have so many unnecessary or ineffective meetings. Death by Meeting got me thinking about some of the many reasons why meetings are so often ineffective (only a few of which were covered in the book).
- Why I write criticisms of books. I kind of fell into writing criticism posts about many of the books I read because I think I'm naturally rather critical. Here I offer up an explanation of my thought process, so that hopefully my posts aren't taken the wrong way.
- Why should you want to be a satisficer?. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains that satisficing, as opposed to maximising, is correlated with stuff like happiness, optimism, self-esteem and life satisfaction. The implication is that satisficing causes all that good stuff. I question that assumption.
- Can maximisers become satisficers? If so, how? Even if you want to be a satisficer, it's easier said than done. This post considers whether it's even possible to change our maximising/satisficing tendencies and explores how you might go about it.
October will likely be a quieter one, as I'll be travelling. But I have a summary for Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant almost done, which you can expect to see next week.
Until next time,
To Summarise
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I summarise non-fiction books with more detail and critical analysis than you'll find elsewhere. Join my newsletter to get new summaries delivered straight to your inbox!
My latest summary is for Kaput: The End of the German Miracle by Wolfgang Münchau. The book argues that Germany’s decades-long model of neo-mercantilism has failed, and that the country now faces structural decline. This is a topic I know very little about, so I fact-checked this one more heavily than usual, and wrote up a separate post with the errors I found. As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link above. KEY TAKEAWAYS Germany’s economic...
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