In a recent piece for the Harvard Business Review, Pat Wadors, Senior Vice President of Global Talent Organization at LinkedIn, argues that storytelling is key to belonging at work. Learn more about the case she makes for belonging. We also include stories on the key to listening well, employee-led learning, a poet-turned CEO, hope and living wisely.
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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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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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In his recent TED Talk, Princeton professor Uri Hasson investigates what he calls “a device that can record my memories, my dreams, my ideas, and transmit them to your brain.” Drawing on his research, Hasson argues that this “game-changing technology” already exists—that it has existed for thousands of years, though we are only now learning to understand how it works.
The technology is “human communication” and, most important, “effective storytelling.”
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We’ve written a great deal about the power of conversations on this blog. Books@Work professors have considered how our seminars create space for hard conversations in the workplace and how they help us bridge differences and share ideas. When writing our reflections—our “Musings”—we continually refer back to our own conversations with participants. Conversations, we recognize time and again, open the door to empathy and understanding. They bring us closer to one another—especially when we take the time to share our stories and listen to those of others.
Recent research confirms our sense that conversation has the power to transform people and their relationships with others.
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I’ve been leading seminars at Books@Work for a couple of years now, and the book I always find myself using is Learning to Swim by Sara J. Henry. It is a great book, a rich book, and I’m teaching it for the third time. Depending upon who is reading it, the book prompts discussions about intimacy, friendship, trust and compassion—and each time I share it with a different group, I see it anew. In fact, teaching this book three times has been enlightening, as it gives me a fascinating glimpse at how our own experiences frame the way we read and interpret a story. As a result, I’ve been privy to remarkably different conversations each time.
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We talk a lot about the powers that literature seemingly holds in our world. Literature can inspire, bridge gaps of time, place and experience and offer perspectives into people’s lives that are far removed from our own. As a Books@Work instructor, I have come to experience the power of literature to equalize and humanize.
The first Books@Work session that I led was for a well-established downtown law firm. As I walked into the imposing art-deco building, the faces of partners from decades past gazed out at me from gilded frames.
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In a rapidly changing world, many low-skilled jobs have given way to automation, replacing individual workers with machines and reducing workforces considerably. But are high-skilled jobs immune to such automation? No, says Ji Shisan, a media executive with deep background in neurobiology, in a recent and provocative piece in the New York Times. In fact, computers and artificial intelligence are replacing human engagement in a wide variety of contexts. These include the Associated Press’ Automated Insights software, which “[produces] thousands of articles about corporate earnings each year,” Facebook’s “virtual assistant,” which “uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer user questions” and “IBM’s Watson,” which “[determines] the best course of treatment for individual cancer patients.” All the programs require human supervision, but as Shisan notes, “white-collar workers are understandably starting to worry about the day when AI can go it alone.” But rather than underscore this worry, Jisan reassures us: “The future’s still bright,” he says, “thanks to our creativity – our unique trait.”
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I think that hard conversations reveal that we possess a fundamental sense of justice and responsibility and care. Hard conversations show us, experientially, that we are moral beings, and any education worth the name will allow us to reflect upon, and understand, that personal moral core. . . The last thing I would want my students to do is take a purely dispassionate approach to Chris Burden’s self-destructive performance pieces, the systemic, institutional racism and torture found in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, the traumatic historiographic ambitions of the World War II combat film genre, or the extremely graphic murders described in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
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