Should companies help their employees learn? A recent article for the Harvard Business Review argues for lifelong learning in the workplace and offers three tips for cultivating it. We have this, as well as essays on meaningful work, book deserts, storytelling and literary quizzes in our most recent Weekend Reading.
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We are delighted to unveil our newest project: a short film introducing Books@Work in multiple voices, especially those of our partners and participants. This video captures the enthusiasm we see every day, helping us to share the Books@Work model, why our company partners choose to work with us and the experience of Books@Work from a participant’s perspective.
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At Books@Work, we enjoy a great deal of exposure to wonderful books—and to the conversations and insights those books inspire.
In the spirit of summer reading, here are a few we and our participants have been enjoying recently. Why not try one and start a conversation yourself?
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American author Willa Cather’s novels evoke the landscapes of the American west, from the plains of Nebraska to Colorado’s Mesa Verde, and they depict frontier life in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though she is primarily known for longer works such as My Ántonia, O Pioneers, and The Song of the Lark, Cather began her career as a poet and writer of short stories, and published many of them throughout her life.
“On the Gulls’ Road” (1908) takes place at sea rather than in the American west. Nonetheless, Cather’s short story attends to landscape and seascape, as well as the relationships between people, in a manner similar to her better-known works.
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The current issue of Harvard Business Review (July/August 2016) contains several articles explaining the reasons why workplace diversity programs simply don’t work. “Diversity training programs largely don’t change attitudes, let alone behavior,” writes Iris Bohnet, Director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-chair of its Behavioral Insights Group. “Start by accepting that our minds are stubborn beasts,” she explains. “It’s hard to eliminate our biases, but we can design organizations that make it easier for our biased minds to get things right.”
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Metaphors matter. They are not simply the stuff of Shakespearean drama or poetry or the SAT. We all use metaphors every day in an endless variety of ways. Metaphors are an essential element of how we think and engage with others at home, in our work and in all of our social interactions. But too often, we are unconscious of the metaphors we choose and the impact they may have on the quality of our life.
As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson observe, one powerful example is the way that many people describe argument as war and embellish that metaphor in extended metaphors.
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The past few weeks have offered us a lot to think about, including essays on how supporting parents helps foster noncognitive skills in young children, what makes work meaningful, and the power of poetry and listening. We’ve also included an essay on LeBron James and Homeric epic and a few unusual facts about reading.
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In surveys and interviews—nearly 350 to date—our participants’ stories confirm our aspirations: Books@Work provides a safe space to reflect and share, creating the conditions for effective collaboration and more diverse and inclusive organizations and community.
Books@Work is growing—and learning, which is why I am pleased to announce the release of our 2015 Annual Report. In it, we celebrate our learnings and discoveries. During the time this report covers—January 1 to December 31, 2015—we served 586 participants in 40 programs in both company and community settings, partnering with 87 professors from 25 colleges in 8 states. Collectively, our participants read 101 books and many short stories.
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Last week, Karen Nestor wrote about her experience teaching in a Books@Work special program with Veterans living at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center Domiciliary. Karen’s was an hour-long program for the entire residency—but, in partnership with Ohio Humanities and several individual donors, Books@Work has been serving this community with weekly seminars over the past six months. Each week in this program, a group of Veterans came together with a professor to discuss a short story. Recently, I had the chance to speak with Professor Peter Haas about his experience guiding these discussions. Peter is an ordained rabbi and served as a chaplain in the United States Army before entering academe. He retired in the summer of 2016 from Case Western Reserve University, where he was professor of Religious Studies and former chair of his department. Here, Peter talks about the power of the short story and the moving discussions he was able to lead and take part in at the VA Domiciliary.
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For most of my life I have believed in the power of literature to affect the human heart, but sometimes, a discussion of good literature provides an unexpected flash of understanding into the profound impact that stories can have. This week I had such an experience as each person in a room became a teacher and each person became a learner.
This flash occurred at the Veterans Domiciliary, a residential program that is jointly run by the Veteran’s Administration and the Volunteers of America, and that serves Veterans facing a variety of serious issues, including homelessness, trauma, addiction and other life-challenging hurdles.
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