Recommended Reading: October 2020

As a part of our continued commitment to providing the best resources for leaders to better themselves and thrive, for our October Reading List, we recommend these three books: The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni, Titan by Ron Chernow, and How I Built This by Guy Raz. These books provide diverse perspectives about entrepreneurship and self-improvement through the lens of effective narrative structures.

THE IDEAL TEAM PLAYER - HOW TO RECOGNIZE AND CULTIVATE THREE ESSENTIAL VIRTUES - PATRICK LENCIONI

In his book The Ideal Team Player, Patrick Lencioni provides actionable tools on how you should invest in your current team and hire going forward. At PFD, we share Patrick Lencoini’s passion for having healthy work environments. Since becoming CAPA Pro members, we have been able to share Lencioni’s foundational tools with our clients, and we have found that the ideal team player exercise has been worked well during this time of continued uncertainty. The ideal team player is a compelling framework for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players, talking about that these people are happy, humble, and aware of their impact on other people. The applications of this framework span all areas of life, from how we better ourselves, how we hire and develop our current team, how we parent, etc. It is an insightful and useful book, and we can’t recommend it enough.

TITAN: THE LIFE OF JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, SR. - RON CHERNOW

Ron Chernow’s Titan creates a captivating portrait of an entrepreneurial giant - John Rockefeller. The biography details two sides of this imperfect but brilliant figure in history: one side being the businessman whose aggressive practices created an empire, and the other of a philanthropist who donated bountiful amounts of money and was committed to educating marginalized populations. We recommend this book during this time because we find that it is important to tell stories of really strong leaders of different times and draw from the lessons that they have to share. This book is relevant today, because it shows how one leader navigated a time of political uncertainty in US. Further, by reflecting on Rockefeller’s life, we can critically think about the legacy that we are leaving behind, incorporating Rockefeller’s brilliance and commitment to philanthropy into our legacy, but also taking heed to not repeat the more infamous parts of his history.

HOW I BUILT THIS: UNEXPECTED PATHS TO SUCCESS FROM THE WORLD’S MOST INSPIRING ENTREPRENEURS - GUY RAZ

This book from Guy Raz tells stories of entrepreneurial brilliance. Raz is the mind behind and the host of NPR’s podcast by the same name, and it tells stories of innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the movements they built. This book is based off of that podcast, which is the top business podcast on iTunes, with over 200 million downloads to date. By telling these stories, this book offers insight to entrepreneurs on wisdom on how to overcome every problem, and it inspires us to strive for the same level of determination. We at PFD recommend this to our readers to broaden their perspectives and learn lessons from professionals who spent years learning these lessons themselves.

Our Finest Hour

We live in a time that is undoubtedly marked by fear.

There have been several events in recent memory that have instilled a culture of fear in our society – the most recent of which is, as we all know, the emergence of Covid-19 as a global pandemic. Further, in America, we have seen the second economic recession in twelve years, contributing to thirty million unemployment claims filed since mid-March. The fear we feel might well be justified, but it is also disempowering to everyone.

We also all know by now that Covid-19 will be in the history textbooks. While we might want to dwell on the magnitude of the situation, we should also remember that history not only remembers the large, defining events but also the leaders that stepped up to face those challenges and empower others to do the same. We remember the terrible Civil War, but we also remember Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman. We remember segregation, but we also remember Martin Luther King Jr. Despite the hardships and difficulties of their times, we remember incredible leaders like Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Nelson Mandela for their bravery and service to others.

Source: The International Churchill Society

One particular leader that inspired us during this time is Winston Churchill. When we talk about an era that is marked by fear and anxiety, a quintessential example is Great Britain during WWII. To the left, you will see the ending of one of Churchill’s most famous speeches – “This Was Their Finest Hour”. Preceding this speech, France was overtaken, and the United States had not joined the War effort yet, essentially leaving Great Britain to fight the Nazi empire alone. As the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Churchill had to stiffen his resolve, to fight, and to inspire his nation to do the same. Eighty years later, this is still widely regarded to be one of the best and most important speeches ever given. Even though we face different circumstances, we decided there was great wisdom to be gleaned from Winston Churchill.

In this era of Covid-19, we asked ourselves, “What can we do, so that someone, one thousand years from now, could say that this was our finest hour?” In our community, we have seen many examples of how people have made this ‘their finest hour’. We see how our healthcare heroes and our frontline essential workers show us every day how to make a difference. We greatly enjoy seeing John Krasinski’s weekly installment of Some Good News, and the positivity that is spread through that. We are inspired by the parades of cars throughout the neighborhoods celebrating our local high school graduates. We know that there is incredible power within communities where people support one other. We wanted to be a part of that movement.

At PFD, we decided to gamify our positive impact. We know the power of Quarterly Themes and how they can strengthen morale, so we decided that our theme this quarter is “Our Finest Hour”. We set a goal for ourselves, even in this time of self-isolation, to positively impact 1,000 lives. We made the visual you see to the right, modeled after WWII propaganda posters to pay homage to our inspiration and to track our progress.

To meet our goal and to make this “Our Finest Hour” we decided:

• We can coach our clients so they can navigate the uncertainty and make the best possible impact on their employees. We are so blessed to work with a wide range of CEOs that truly care about their teams and their community.

• We can rally entrepreneurs in our area to buy meals for our healthcare heroes – both supporting a local business and our healthcare workers

• We can support our own team by investing in tools that allow them to work safely from home and encouraging them to practice self-care. The person who is writing this blog post, Emmalee, has asthma, so she is especially grateful for this one.

• We can keep our commitments to our summer interns, so that they don’t have their work cancelled like so many other college students.

• We can launch a CEO Growth Forum using proven strategy and execution frameworks to create confidence and clarity for entrepreneurs that are navigating an especially challenging portion of history.

• We can work intently and creatively to figure out how to hit our revenue targets for this year, so we have the resources to also hit our corporate giving targets to support non-profits that were hit especially hard by the recession.

• We can be a voice of positivity and empowerment. This is not to diminish the hardships of our time, but to offer a way forward through this crisis and to support and recognize the ingenuity and spirit of humanity.

Our Quarterly theme printed, so our progress can be tracked & shared

We might facing difficult circumstances that will alter the course of history, but history will also remember the great leaders of our time that rose to the challenges. We want to be among the leaders that step up to face the challenges of Covid-19 and empower others to continue to do well by their community. We know that business can be an incredible platform with which we can transform lives, and we want to be just one company that intentionally creates that impact. We are so incredibly humbled and inspired by the tenacity and altruism of our clients and community, and we are very excited to continue to serve them, no matter what lies ahead.