Welcome to Book Club

As part of my wider reading I recently went through Tony Hsieh’s book ‘Delivering Happiness’. It’s a great read and I honestly couldn’t put it down. I started it on a train journey between Manchester & Edinburgh and finished it on the return – such was the extent to which it captured my imagination and interest.

Part autobiography, part corporate mantra, part motivational manual ‘Delivering Happiness’ is full of great ideas, some big, some small, some newer, some progressions on older models of motivation & psychological framing. But above all it’s a thoroughly enjoyable read with Tony Hsieh coming across as likeable, fallible and ultimately incredibly successful on his own terms. It follows him through his youth, college, early career through to his biggest success – the online retailer Zappos.

So beyond the plug for the book (I’m not on commission, honest) what practical outcomes did it have. Well, the first thing it’s inspired, based on the Zappos library mentioned in the book, was our very own book club. I’m no regular book clubber but I thought it would be great to offer up a way of not only reading some of the latest thinking on psychology, consumer behaviour, trends & business issues, but also a group of people to discuss, reflect, debate & challenge some of the views that reading brought about.

The first title we tackled was Mark Earls’ ‘Herd – How To Change Mass Behaviour By Harnessing Our True Nature’. While it’s a few years old now there were still plenty of ideas in there which elicited some strong reactions…from agreement & advocacy to counter-argument & dismissal of points made. The wide range of views we started with were great and through an hour spent discussing and debating the key points, we gradually started to pick apart the bits we thought were really interesting and those we were less convinced by.

What was really great was to have had the chance to debate the issues with colleagues we’re sometimes too busy to connect with in this way. We all came out with ideas to take back to our day to day work & in that sense the exercise was a great success.

But as with anything, there are lessons too. Some people struggled to finish the book in the two months we had, others just didn’t like the writing style so were put off from carrying on. Others found it difficult to crystallise specific actions they could take having read the book.

But all of these are surmountable & I’m really excited to think about what we’ll be tackling next. We’ve got a few nominees already & it’s proved a great excuse for people to read books they’ve been meaning to get round to but haven’t quite yet hit.

Oh, and if you’d like to see some of my thoughts on how we can apply Herd to what we do as researchers, then please feel free to take a look at the Prezi I’ve put together: http://prezi.com/1tdci3x72fof/lets-try-prezi/