October Book Review Week
Next week on our adviceblog section I will review these five books:
Monday
Ozan Varol’s “Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life.
Tuesday
Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Wednesday
Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Thursday
Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game
Friday
Dan Heath’s Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They happen
Look for them on Recent Entries, Tweeter, and Linkedin. Hope you like them.
Jim Johnson
Biden v. Trump: Who Makes a Better Project Executive Sponsor?
opinion of the level of competency of both men. Would Joe Biden be a Good Executive Project Sponsor?
Jim Johnson appraises Joe Biden’s skills at being a good sponsor using Our Good Sponsor assessment system.
Take a look:
Who Inspired You?
Sometimes you never know how people will change your life or who will inspire you. I often get asked, “How did you get interested in a 
career in computers and software”? I was recently reminded of an incident when I was 13 years old (1960). My doctor’s office (Dr. Lu) was in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. I was in his waiting room when an Asian man in his forties was also in his waiting room. He started asking me a lot of questions. One of questions was “what do you want to do with your life”. As I recall, I gave him some typical adolescent answers. He looked at me and said the future is in electronic machines that help people. That was the first and last time I was face to face with Dr. An Wang (Wang Laboratories). Later when I got to Lowell High School, I volunteered to work in the new IBM Room that housed electronic accounting machines.
Can you name the person who most inspired you in your current career? Tell us in 50 words or less who or what inspired you. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-inspired-you-jim-johnson/?published=t
Good Mate Workshop
Want to be more influential with your work mates and help make team projects more successful? We can come to you and create your own workshop at your place or work or other venue. Evan Sorensen, Jim Johnson, or other Standish staff will present an overview of over 65 years of research from The Standish Group (on project team performance) as well as the Gottman Institute (on personal relationships). The workshop will highlight our new book The Good Mate: How Understanding Team Relationships Can Make You Happier and More Productive. This workshop is neither a team-building exercise nor a technical workshop. It is focused only on how individual team mates can develop better relationship skills for cohesive, productive, and happier teams.
In this interactive session we will explore:
· 10 Relationship Principles
· 50 Mechanical Relationship Skills & Habits
· Benchmarking Your Relationship Skills
· 3 Skills You Should Improve
· Charts from the CHAOS Database
The session will include presentations and talks from Jim Johnson, and Evan Sorensen on video or in person. Each participant in the workshop will also receive a free copy of The Good Mate Book*,a Good Mate Benchmark & Assessment, and a Life-long Learner Certificate.
The target audience for this workshop is team mates on Scrum, Agile, or self-directed/managed teams who want or need to improve their relationship skills. We recommend that you send at least two people from your team. And note: We’re not restricting this workshop to team members only. Based on what we learned in our last workshop, you may a find the experience also helps improve non-work related relationship in your life.
For more information and quote, contact Jennifer Lynch (jennifer@standishgroup.com). *Currently, the Good Mate book is only available at the workshop.
