The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live–and How You Can Change Them by Richard J. Davidson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is absolutely fascinating. Author Davidson is the founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at UW-Madison. He’s gotten a lot of attention with his work doing brain scans on Tibetan monks while they meditate.

This book is an introduction to the work he’s been doing. He has come up with six different categorizations of types of mental/emotional styles that operate something like the Myers-Briggs type indicator. Each category places you on a spectrum between two extremes, which leads to an infinite variety of styles. Unlike Myers-Briggs, Davidson’s styles are based on actual neuroscience studies.

Davidson gives a great history of his work in the book, lays out the details of the emotional types and how they work, then provides a brief introduction into how people can work to modify their emotional styles. If I have one complaint with the book, it’s that the section on “how-to” could have been longer. I hope at some point in the future he will maybe devote an entire book to the practical applications of how the styles work, and how we can modify the workings of our own mind.

I especially love this book, and Davidson’s work, for it’s tight integration with Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has been a strong supporter of Davidson’s research, which I think is very cool. When Davidson’s new Center opened at UW-Madison, I was able to go to Madison to see a discussion between Davidson and the Dalai Lama facilitated by Daniel Goleman. It was unbelievably cool to listen to the Dalai Lama discuss the importance of scientific research for bettering our understanding of humanity (while wearing a Badgers baseball cap no less!).

This is a worthwhile read, and be sure to check out the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.

Buy this book on Amazon: The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live–and How You Can Change Them

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A few weeks ago we had the chance to spend a couple of days along Lake Michigan in Saugatuck and Holland. The tulips were in bloom in Holland and they were just amazing!

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GO SEE THIS MOVIE!

Bully is a documentary that tells the story of 5 kids who are victims of bullying. The kids range in age from 11 to 17. Viewers never get a chance to meet two of the kids, who committed suicide as a result of their victimization.

This is a powerfully produced movie. It has been the subject of some controversy due to the producers’ struggle with the Motion Picture Association of America over the final rating of the movie. MPAA originally chose to rate the movie as R, which unfortunately makes it more difficult for children to see. The producers had to choose to either go with that rating, or release the movie unrated, which would have caused many theaters not to carry the movie. After a long fight with the MPAA, a compromise was finally reached allowing the movie to be released with a PG-13 rating. (The mild-mannered Canadian rating group gave the movie a PG rating.)

This is a hard movie to watch. Wait, that’s not quite true. This should be a hard movie to watch, and it was for me. But we need look no further than Mitt Romney’s news clippings for the week to realize that some bullies won’t ever be willing to acknowledge the wrongs of their past, or even understand the depth of those wrongs. There are some who just won’t feel the impact of this film.

There is heinous behavior aplenty in this movie. It’s not just people talking about what’s been done to them. You see some of the abusers in action, which is one of the reasons the MPAA cited for the R rating. As is often the case with a documentary, it’s surprising how the photographers are able to capture real-life. You’d expect that people, even kids, would moderate their behavior while being filmed, but they don’t.

But the true villains in this movie are not the bullies, they are some of the adults. One assistant principal in the film admits that the school’s buses are “not necessarily safe places.” Two minutes later when she says “I’ve ridden that bus, those kids behaved like angels” I was ready to have a serious bullying moment of my own with her.

“Kids will be kids.” It’s said a number of times in this film, and I can attest from personal experience that it’s in regular use in school. And it simply is true. Kids WILL be kids. Kids are learning their place in the world. We all have the capacity for cruelty within us. Kids will test limits, they will see what they can get away with, and we needn’t blame them for that. It is their role in the world, especially pre-high school.

The problem occurs when adults in a position of authority use “kids will be kids” to absolve themselves of the corresponding notion that “adults should be adults.” When kids cross a line, they should be corrected. When a child just learning to walk reaches for a hot stove, we stop them and we correct them. We realize that this is new knowledge to them, and it may physically or mentally harm them to obtain this knowledge without our stepping in. No reasonable person would stand by and watch a toddler touch a hot stove, and yet in this movie we’re treated repeatedly to film of the bus driver watching in her mirror as children hit the young Alex, poke him with pencils and slam his head into the bus seat. And we know, from news story after news story, that this kind of thing happens every day, in every school. And we know that some of these kids will commit suicide, and some of them will be scarred in ways that impact their lives well into adulthood as a result of their treatment. We need desperately to develop an understanding that bullying is abuse and it is wrong for an adult to stand by and watch it happen.

In closing (for now), I’ll say two things. One – go see this movie! It’s a story that we should all see. It’s knowledge that we should all have. Second, I have to say a huge thank you to the kids and families who agreed to let their stories be told in this movie. I’ve no doubt that as a result of the movie these kids have suffered even more abuse. I think it shows incredible courage to welcome cameras into your life and share your story the way these families did. But these stories need to be told if people are to begin to understand the impact of bullying. This movie has given me a push to start writing some of my stories, so hopefully you’ll be seeing more in this blog in the coming months.

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Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers by Jeanne Liedtka

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is a good introduction to applying design thinking principles to business. While it’s focused mainly on business growth, I think it can easily be applied to any facet of business.

Design thinking entails a set of skills different from what most business people use on a daily basis. The authors lay out an easy-to-follow set of steps that can be applied to any business problem. The steps walk the users through soliciting ideas from a wide-ranging group of people and using those ideas as building blocks for creating something new for their business, be it a business process or a new product.

As a wanna-be designer, I found the authors’ approach to be easy to understand, I can definitely see how I’ll make use of some of their suggestions on my own projects.

Buy this book on Amazon: Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers (Columbia Business School Publishing)

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Flying Leap: A Novel in Perspective by Ralf Oliver

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. It’s of the genre “lost person meets guru and gets life lessons.” But it’s a neat twist that the guru is a pigeon. Most of the lessons discussed fit pretty well with Buddhist teachings. Books like this always help me to step back from the craziness of day-to-day life and examine what I’m doing. Oliver has quite an easy-to-read style of writing. Highly recommend this book!

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Flying Leap: A Novel in Perspective

by Barry Moltz and Becky McCray

(Full disclosure: Becky is one of the organizers of #140conf Small Town, where I’ve spoken the last two years. She was kind enough to provide me with a review copy of her book.)

This book, subtitled “How Big Brands and Small Business Can Prosper in a Connected Economy”, is a great look at the unique attributes that can make small town and rural businesses successful. Because social media has made it so much easier to build communities of any size online, the authors make the case that all business must now work like small town business to be successful.

I first met Becky McCray at the National Rural Assembly in South Sioux City, Nebraska in 2010, then got to know her better at the #140conf Small Town that she co-hosted with Jeff Pulver in Hutchinson, Kansas. Becky is a small-town business owner, blogger and speaker who teaches people how to do effective tourism promotion in rural areas. She’s a lady that knows her stuff, and it shows in this book.

The book offers seven rules for doing business the small-town way, including my favorite, “Treat customers like community.” But even better than the rules, for me, were the chapters highlighting small town business success stories. In these days when big multi-national corporations dominate the news, it’s good to see someone trumpeting the achievements and dedication of people who have started and grown companies in rural America.

You can learn more about the book at their website at http://smalltownrules.com/, or click the link below to see the book on Amazon.

Small Town Rules: How Big Brands and Small Businesses Can Prosper in a Connected Economy (Que Biz-Tech)

This morning I’m giving a talk for the Dunn County Economic Development Corporation on “Business Use of Social Media.” You can find the resources for this talk here.

I’m in Green Bay this morning to present at the Leadership Wisconsin 2012 Conference, Rewriting the Rules. My talk is on social media analytics and tools, “Is Social Media Working for Us?“

• Diagrams

  Working on a PowerPoint? Now you can buy diagrams and art from the folks who created Al Gore’s Incovenient Truth presentation.

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I’m in Superior this morning to speak at the Click Here for Customers event set up by the UW-Superior Small Business Development Center. You can find the references and slides from this talk here.