Links:

Book your place on my February 2023 group coaching programme Time for the things that matter.

'Reclaim Time to Read' 2022 reading challenge:  https://www.helenbeedham.com/2022-reading-challenge

Helen's business book: The Future of Time: how 're-working' time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing

 4m 53s    - Book 1, The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz

 8m 29s    - Book 2, The Culture Code: the secrets of highly successful groups by Daniel Coyle

 11m 42s - Book 3, Four Seconds by Peter Bregman

 18m 5s    - Book 4, Machines like me, by Ian McEwan

 20m 11s - Book 5, Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

 24m 8s    - Book 6, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré

Transcript:

Hello! Welcome to episode 6 of this third series, and to mark the half way point it’s a slightly different episode this week. Instead of chatting to a guest, I’m sharing a few book recommendations from my 2022 reading challenge Reclaim Time To Read. As regular listeners and subscribers will know, while I was sitting in the pub with my family at New Year I came up with the bright idea (?!) of reading a book a week in 2022 for 50 weeks, giving myself 2 weeks off (or 2 weeks to catch up).  I’ve been alternating business and non-fiction books with fiction, and the week this episode airs will be week 43 of the challenge. So we’re heading towards the end, and the end of the year!

You might be thinking sceptically ‘well has she actually read all 42 books so far?’ And it’s a good question. There has only been 1 book so far that I really struggled to get into and I confess I gave up on it before the end. That was The History of Danish Dreams by Peter Hoeg, who wrote Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow which I thoroughly enjoyed. But I do plan to go back and try that book again. I’m also only now starting the book for week 41, Gillian Tett’s Anthro-Vision, because there was a mix up in the library transfers and I’ve only just got my hands on it. But aside from that, yes I have read all the other books and I’ve been loving watching the collection grow each week.

Going back to my whole motivation for this reading challenge, it was to stop saying to myself ‘I don’t have time to read’ and to carve out more time in my busy week to unwind with a book instead of motoring on to the next task on my endless to-do list. Some weeks that has felt easier to do than others; I try and read a couple of times during the day so I’m making steady progress throughout the week instead of being left a mountain to climb, or a whole book to race too fast through, by the weekend. I’ve been surprised at how do-able it is to read a book a week, although it does mean I’ve watched a lot less Netflix! But I have discovered some amazing new authors and ideas, tried different genres of novels and been pleasantly surprised at what I’ve enjoyed, so it has made me realise that some of my preconceptions about books and authors are unfounded and totally worth ignoring!

Reclaim Time To Read has also encouraged me to slow down more often; I don’t know about you but I’m a pretty active person, more into ‘doing’ than ‘being’, and I find it hard to just sit and read when my brain is nagging me about all the other things I need or want to be getting on with. So the reading challenge has become a way of practising stillness and helping me detach from all that endless activity. And as I get drawn into the book, it’s like taking a mental holiday and adventuring off into another world, so when I return to the here and now, I feel like I’ve had a very welcome break.

If you’ve been following the challenge over the course of the year so far, do let me know what books if any you’ve read and how you’ve found them, I’d love to hear from you. I’ve also got a few spaces left on the reading list for the final few weeks, so do let me know what your recommendations are and you might get a shout-out on this podcast!

Speaking of recommendations, let’s get down to business and hear about 3 business and other non-fiction books I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks. Here we go:

My first recommendation is The Lonely Century: a call to reconnect by Noreena Hertz, who’s an economist, author and Honorary Professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. I came across Noreena and her work whilst researching for my own business book The Future of Time.

Noreena defines loneliness as an internal state and an existential one – whether that’s personal, societal, economic or political. It’s not just a subjective state of mind, it’s also a collective state of being and she argues that it’s taking a huge toll on us individually and across society. And this largely due to capitalism that we’ve become ‘’competitors not collaborators, consumers not citizens, hoarders not sharers, takers not givers and hustlers not helpers’.

And it’s only by putting care, compassion and cooperation at the heard of capitalism and valuing these as much as money generation, will we properly address loneliness. This is relevant for our world of work too, as Noreena explains in her words: ‘If we want the workplace to feel less lonely, part of the challenge is explicitly valuing qualities such as kindness, co-operation and collaboration... finding ways to reward and incentivize such behaviour.’

Community is also important because it’s where we learn to live together, how to live together, how to practise civility and democracy, peacefully co-exist and manage different points of view.

Noreena offers many specific suggestions as to what we can do in our own lives, at work, in our communities and at the national level to turn this tide of loneliness and reconnect better with others. For example she talks about the kinds of jobs we need to create, how we should harness technology differently in future, how we should design cities and buildings, and encourage more citizen democracy in action. 

And I loved this recommendation for one of many, small things as individuals we can do differently: ‘we also need to rush less and stop and talk more, even when we’re feeling overloaded and busy’. All those micro-interactions we have are opportunities to connect more meaningfully with someone else. We don’t have to stop for an hour’s chinwag, but we can do more than avert our eyes, keep our heads down or headphones on and pretend we haven’t seen someone we know. It’s advice that has stuck in my mind ever since I read her book and I do try to put in to practice more often.

This is a beautifully written, poignant and hard to forget book. It captures perfectly the world we are living in and how we are living in it, the damaging effects of our lonely existences and the huge potential we have in our hands to reconnect in more enriching ways.

Let’s turn to book #2, and I’ve chosen The Culture Code: the secrets of highly successful groups by Daniel Coyle. This was published in 2019 and has been recommended to me a few times by clients and colleagues because I’m fascinated with work cultures, how they are shaped and how we can transform them. The book’s cover says it ‘reveals the secrets of some of the best teams in the world - from Pixar to Google to US Navy SEALs - explaining the three skills such groups have mastered in order to generate trust and a willingness to collaborate’. It was a really fascinating read; early on he states the perhaps obvious but critical point that people need to feel safe and connected in order to perform well as a group, and that sense of belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced. 

So how we do we create and sustain that sense of belonging? Coyle argues that it’s through a pattern of interaction consisting of many little moments of connection – these can include small courtesies, humour, few interruptions, lots of questions and short exchanges instead of long speeches. He uses the term ‘collisions’ to describe serendipitous chats that help foster creativity and cohesion and he says we need to pay particular attention to ‘threshold moments’, when we enter a new group for example. 

Coyle also stresses that highly successful cultures are not always lighthearted, happy places; they exist when people are energised but focused on solving hard problems together and this involves giving and receiving honest feedback and sometimes uncomfortable truth telling. 

And if you’re wondering, well that all sounds great but how do we change the culture where we work, to become more like one of these high performing team cultures? Daniel’s advice is this: ‘just hearing something said rarely results in a change of behaviour. They’re just words. When we see people in our peer group play with an idea, our behaviour changes … that’s how culture is created’. He says we need to ‘find different ways to make it comfortable and engaging for people to share what they’re really thinking about’.

If you’re looking for a practical handbook, then this book doesn’t really offer that but it does contain an illuminating and genuinely insightful set of examples and he also helps you think about whether you are trying to create a high proficiency environment, where you’re aiming to deliver clearly defined work in a very consistent way, or a high creativity environment, where you’re creating something new, and the behaviours that will help you succeed in either case.

My third and final choice of business/non-fiction book is Four Seconds by Peter Bregman, published by Orion. Bregman is probably better known for his prior bestseller Eighteen Minutes which was published in 2012, which describes itself as ‘the most important business/self-help book since Emotional Intelligence and The One-Minute Manager.

I didn’t have any particular expectations before reading this book, it was a bit of a spontaneous grab from the library bookshelf.  I think it’s a bit misleadingly named, and it contains more wisdom and genuinely helpful advice than the title alludes to. It’s called Four Seconds because he talks about taking a few seconds between stimulus and response to decide how you are going to act or what you are going to say. It’s a very personal, almost autobiographical book in many ways, he draws on lads of different examples from his own day-to-day life and his own family life, that illustrate his points very well and he relies far less on external research and data points.  It's structured into 51 short chapters, just 2-3 pages long each, which are grouped into 3 parts, each one looking at a different ‘sphere’ of life, followed by a conclusion. 

I found it a surprisingly rich and rewarding read, with several comments and pieces of advice staying in my memory. For example, he talks about worrying about what others think, asking for feedback and seeking external validation and to this he says the following: ‘there is a simple remedy to the insecurity of being ourselves: stop asking. Instead, take the time and the quiet to decide what you think. That is how we find the part of ourselves we gave up. That is how we become powerful, clever, creative, insightful. That is how we gain our sight’. Wow, that is so well said.

And this applies to rituals in our work lives too, where we can pay better attention by stopping for a moment, noticing what we’re about to do, ot what we’ve just done, or both and this way we can make the most of a particular moment.

Something that has really stuck in my mind is his comparison of performance vs experience. Being fixated on performance particularly in our work lives, means doing things perfectly or for the approval of others and it is a recipe for stress and unhappiness; whereas being focused on experience means being in the mode of lifelong learning, experimentation and accepting that failure is just part of life’s rich experience. So next time you’re about to step outside of your comfort zone, take a risk or speak up in a way that feels daunting, I recommend Peter’s advice to immerse youself in the experience by saying ‘this is what it feels like to ….’. This way we’re really rooting ourselves in the here and now and we’re more likely to accept however things turn out and to learn from it, instead of simply judging ourselves as having succeeded or failed.

I also loved his advice for saying ‘no’ more often. He says to ‘build your no muscle’ by practising on easy low-risk situations. If someone makes an unreasonable demand or request, give them the benefit of the doubt and resist the urge to react. Probably something deeper, unsaid is going on. So true, its’ often the way. He recommends asking a question instead of reacting defensively, because it’s far more likely to diffuse the situation and we may well learn something valuable and we’ll likely save time arguing and recriminating.

Most of all, I found these words really encouraging: ‘life is a process and while one stellar moment – be it a success or a failure – can make a difference, it’s far more likely that the steady production of many adequate moments over a significant period of time will make a much bigger difference’. So if you’re feeling frustrated at the lack of overnight success, don’t give up, keep on building up those adequate moments and making that steady progress.

So those are my 3 non-fiction/business book recommendations, let me know if any of these strike a chord with you or whet your appetite to dive in and read them? Or if you’ve read them, let me know how you found them and what stuck out in them for you?

Moving on now to fiction books, and I had a hard job picking out just 3 to share with you today. I’ve opted for: Machines like me, by Ian McEwan; Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo; and the classic that is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre, which narrowly edged out the historical novel Birdcage Walk by the highly accomplished writer Helen Dunmore. So there, I’ve managed to squeeze in a fourth mention there!

I tend to pick books by female authors so I’ve been challenging myself to read books by male authors that wouldn’t normally leap off the shelf at me. And I opted for a classic novel to ring a change from the more contemporary fiction I usually read.  I ended up loving all these books, for reasons I’ll share now.

Although I’m fascinated by the future of work, I find futuristic  novels a bit of a turn off, if I’m honest. I’m not really into sci fi or alternative worlds at all. So I took a deep breath when I picked Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan.

It’s set in the 1980’s but not the 1980’s we actually experienced, instead an alternative reality has unfolded where Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. 
The main character is Charlie, who drifts somewhat aimlessly through life avoiding full-time employment and who is in love with Miranda, a bright student living in the flat upstairs and who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans and with Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever and a love triangle soon forms, testing the individual relationships between them. As Miranda’s secret unfolds, so too does a deep moral dilemma.

The book is absolutely riveting, it’s a page turner but it also asks genuinely provocative questions like: what makes us human? Are machines capable of emotion? Of love? To what extent should we treat robots with the same courtesy and moral standards as humans? It’s not a bleak, foreboding warning about dabbling with artificial intelligence, it’s far more subtle and nuanced and richer than that. I found it really compelling in terms of how quickly and smoothly we might adjust to integrating AI robots into our homes and our families, and some of the benefits they might bring us (although I’m sure there’ll be a law against using AI to cheat at gambling, if there isn’t already).  For me there was also that rippling undercurrent of uncertainty, of the threat of physical aggression or loss of power, control and independence.

How Adam’s character develops over the course of the book is fascinating and amusing at times, the things he develops a taste for and the rate at which he absorbs and processes information from around the world. It made me ask myself whether I liked him as a character: he certainly had my sympathy at times, and yes it feels odd saying that now about a robot with an off switch!

I’m not going to reveal any plot developments or hint at how the novel ends, I’ll leave that to you to discover for yourself. But I definitely recommend reading this even if it’s not your usual cup of tea.

Ok, book 5 and next up is Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. Bernadine is an Anglo-Nigerian author and academic, she’s Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University. She has written 8 books so far and describes herself on the inside back cover as a literary activist for inclusion. This novel, Girl, Woman, Other,  jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making Bernadine the first Black woman to win this prestigious award. The Booker judges described it rather breathlessly as ‘passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humour’ a must-read about modern Britain and womanhood … dazzling’. And I have to say, for me that description is spot on.

There are 5 chapters in total; in the first 4 chapters, 3 different women each tell their story in the first-person.  Chapter Five is called the ‘after party’, and an epilogue follows. There’s not a lot of punctuation, it’s fairly free flowing narrative so if you’re a stickler for capital letters, full stops and speech marks then you’ll definitely have to adjust your expectations. By page 3, I’d stopped noticing this style and was already deep into the characters and their stories.

Each woman tells the story of her life, her roots, her upbringing, her family, her work and her relationships. Gradually, as the book unfolds, you start to spot connections between the characters and their stories, and they start to weave together.  Among them weave themes around growing up, parental expectations, finding your own path in life, social realities, confronting prejudice, discovering other people’s failings, and fighting for your own truth and independence. The women are imperfect, feisty at times, and unapologetic about the paths they have taken and what matters most to them. 

The language is bursting with energy, humour and originality – I literally felt like I was living these women’s lives with them in their homes and their places of work and watching their relationships unfold. It’s a glorious novel that captures the dizzying and sometimes damaging nature of today’s society; it’s honest and searing and also uplifting at times too. I quite literally couldn’t put it down, it was a good job I was reading it during a week off, and I’m itching to read some of Bernadine’s other books now I’ve discovered her work.

Finally here’s my last book recommendation and it couldn’t be more different from Girl Woman Other! Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was written by a male author, John Le Carré in 1974 and set in the then-very male world of espionage. With the Cold War as its backdrop, the main character George Smiley, a semi-retired spy nearing the end of his career, sets out to unmask the Soviet mole at the heart of the British Intelligence Service. The novel was made into a film in 2011 starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Kathy Burke and Benedict Cumberbatch plus many other A list actors, I haven’t watched the film yet but it’s on my Friday night film list for this winter.

At first, I found the novel quite opaque and almost uncomfortable to read. There were so many insider references about the intelligence service that I felt like a complete outsider reading it, trying to make sense of what they were saying. I had to keep asking my husband (who read it some time ago), what bits meant and whether I’d understood them right. He made the excellent observation that this confusion is deliberate; John Le Carré is making us, the reader, experience what it feels like to be immersed in a world where we only have access to limited information and where we don’t know the full truth, or what information we can even trust. So we somewhat blindly follow George Smiley as he visits different intelligence characters in turn to tease out their past experiences and uncover details that enable him to slowly piece together the most likely scenarios.   Another reason why I felt excluded as a reader was because almost all of the main characters are male. Their language, their world view, their interactions  … they just felt very foreign to me, I couldn’t identify with any of it. 

However, the book totally drew me in as the chapter unfolded. The detail of the surroundings, the characters, and the plot nuances were gripping, and I found myself being sucked in and thirsting for the next revelation or clue. It was also genuinely fascinating from a historical point of view, as I was born in the early 70’s and so wasn’t really aware first hand of the Cold War as I skipped around my primary school in blissful ignorance of the wold outside its gates. So I learnt a lot about Anglo/American/Russian relationships at the time and got to understand how pervasive that sense of mistrust and deception must have been in many different aspects of society.

I gather that George Smiley reappears in other Le Carré novels, as do many of the other characters, and this seems appealing to me – reading Tinker Tailor has left me curious to dip back into the world of espionage again and enjoy more of his work.

Right, a quick mention of what’s coming up in the next couple of weeks with my Reading Challenge. This week I’ll be reading the business book Create a gender balanced workplace by Ann Francke, a business leader and CEO of the Chartered Instititute of Management. I’ve heard Ann speak at City events and greatly admire the Institute’s ethos and professionalism, so I’m keen to hear her advice in this short book that’s one of a number of titles in the Penguin Business Experts series.

The following week I’ll be taking a leaf out of my 11 year old daughter’s reading habits and picking up a crime novel. I’ll be reading Girl A, by Abigail Dean, which was a Sunday Times & New York Times bestseller when it launched in January last year. Abigail, a former bookseller and now lawyer for Google, was lauded as ‘the biggest literary fiction voice of 2021’, so I’m keen to see if her debut novel lives up to the hype, it’s described as ‘incendiary’, ‘terrifyingly gripping’ and ‘the biggest mystery thriller since Gone Girl’.

All the books in my reading challenge are listed on my website at www.helenbeedham.com/2022readingchallenge, so have a browse if you’re looking for something different to the 6 I’ve talked about today. I share regular updates on social media too so do post a comment or a tweet to let me know which recommendations you’re enjoying – or otherwise!

Next week it’s back to my usual interview format and I’ll be welcoming businesswoman, master coach and now first-time-author Geraldine Gallacher to the show. We’ll be chatting about her career, her new book Coaching Women and how we can help more women to succeed in the workplace. Do join me.