Ed Batista

Reading List

I was recently asked by a colleague to recommend some books on executive coaching, and the process of drawing up that list got me thinking about all the books that have had a major impact on my professional development.  This list isn't exhaustive--and by focusing on books per se it omits many articles, papers and chapters that have had an even greater impact than some of these books--but it hits many of the high points.  I may return later to add items or make comments or to sub-divide the list into categories, but at the moment I find that an alphabetized list strikes a nice balance between order and (seeming) chaos:

The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block

Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell

Changing for Good, James Prohaska et al

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke et al

The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub

Co-Active Coaching, Laura Whitworth et al

Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chödrön

The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Kerry Patterson et al

Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time, Susan Scott

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge et al

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Peter Block

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion, Peter Block et al

Getting Things Done, David Allen

Harvard Business Review On Managing Yourself

Harvard Business Review On Women in Business

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini

The Inner Game of Work, Tim Gallwey

Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker

The Masterful Coaching Fieldbook, Robert Hargrove

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson, Rich Teerlink and Lee Ozley

The Neurotic Behavior of Organizations, Uri Merry and George Isaac Brown

The No Asshole Rule, Bob Sutton

The Organizational Behavior Reader, Joyce Osland et al

Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership, David Bradford and Allan Cohen

Reading Book for Human Relations Training, Alfred Cooke et al

Start Where You Are, Pema Chödrön

Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton

The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel

Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, William Bridges

What Should I Do with My Life?, Po Bronson

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön

Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes (free download), Andy Goodman

Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones

The World According to Peter Drucker, Jack Beatty

Work Matters: Women Talk About Their Jobs and Their Lives, Sara Friedman

Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman

Photo by joguldi.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Why You Drink

From Le Grand Content, a brilliant and baffling 4-minute animated film by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit:

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

There's an obvious association with Jessica Hagy's Indexed (she lists Le Grand Content's URL in her blog header), but I'm not sure who's the Chicken and who's the Egg.

Thanks to Paul Hebert for turning me on to Indexed in the first place.

The General Design Company

What's a blog for if you can't use it to pimp your friends and family every once in a while?  The General Design Company is a graphic design firm just launched by my sister-in-law Soung Wiser and her colleague Scott Livingston.  The two of them have been the creative team at BatesNeimand for a number of years, and although they're keeping their day jobs, they wanted to strike out on their own in order to take on new projects.

Their site's still under construction, but I expect to see something very spiffy there in the near future.  In the meantime, if you're looking for a graphic designer, give them a call.  Soung is incredibly talented and totally cool, and I am not biased at all.  Not one bit.

I Was An Anticorporate Rebel

I was a Chuck Taylor devotee for many years, from high school to college to art school back to college, before finally giving them up at some point in my mid-20s.  Today's Wall Street Journal has an article by Stephanie Kang on Nike's efforts to extend the brand beyond its traditional image to appeal to more fashionable tastes.  (Nike acquired Converse in 2003.)  Kang dutifully finds a grumpy old skooler who keeps it real by dumping on the new models: "What's happening is that Converse has now gotten greedy... That's why these are not as cool."  Whatever.  The guy probably thought Converse was selling out when they unveiled the fantastically fugly day-glo orange model that I loved so dearly back in 1987.

The upmarket, fashion-forward Chucks being rolled out now won't be a huge success, but they're not intended to be--their purpose is to generate publicity (like right now) around the fact that Chucks don't just come in the six basic flavors (black, navy, white, "optical" white, red and all-black), but in 471 varieties.  (See for yourself at Converse's Flash-infested abomination of a site.)

And despite the grumbling of Kang's man in the street, I think that's wonderful.  Let a thousand sneakers bloom.  But our old skooler seems hopelessly entangled in the faux-utilitarian iconography that Chucks used to stand for.  As Kang writes,

[E]ven as Converse lost favor with pro players, it stumbled on a new fan base to court: Rockers Joey Ramone and Kurt Cobain were among the first slacker heroes to wear Chucks, influencing the footwear of millions of anticorporate rebels for years to come.

Let's ignore Kang's slightly slippery grasp on punk and pop-culture history and stipulate to the point she's trying to make: Chucks used to be cheap gear for proles, or rich rockstars who wanted to maintain a prole image, or anyone who was keepin' it real.  So how will Nike navigate these challenging waters?

The suits are following the script--"It's such an iconic shoe that we're trying not to overextend it," coos Nike CEO Mark Parker--but that hardly seems necessary.  If you're really an anticorporate rebel today, you're not buying Chucks--you're buying fair-trade, no-marketing sneaks made from organic hemp and recycled rubber.  And if you think your Chucks are making a statement against the Man, you're delusional.  (Although perhaps the delusional market segment is a big concern for Nike, I don't know.)

There's a larger story to be told here about 1) the end of authenticity (or more accurately, the end of perceived, manufactured and marketed "authenticity"), 2) the resulting decoupling of phony and ineffectual connections between the personal and the political, and 3) the individual's liberation from the herd--not just within the mainstream, but (and especially) within smaller, often politicized sub-cultures.  Whew--but that's a whole more than I have time for today.

tags: chuck+taylor chuck+taylors converse nike stephanie+kang

Jane Jacobs, RIP

Writer and activist Jane Jacobs died yesterday, just a few days short of her 90th birthday.  She was a hero to all of us who love cities and the unique richness of urban life, who prefer walking to driving, and who believe that individuals left to their own devices will typically make a better world than top-down, bureaucratic planners.  (She also deserves acclaim simply for her ability to be both an influential theorist and an effective activist while working independently, without the support of a university gig or some other cushy sinecure.)

She wasn't perfect, and I don't think all of her theories hold water, but we're all in her debt nonetheless.  Her work became popular in the early 1960s, just as opposition to urban freeways began to grow in cities throughout North America.  Local writers such as Allen Temko and activists such as Sue Bierman were ultimately responsible for blocking those freeways here in San Francisco, but Jacobs' writings played an influential role in the larger movement.  And as I look out my window at the Panhandle, a beautiful park that was slated to be turned into an eight-lane highway running right through the heart of my leafy, tree-lined neighborhood, I'm so grateful to her and her contemporaries for their efforts.

UPDATE: Leonard Gilroy of the Reason Foundation has a great piece on Jane Jacobs in the May 2 Wall Street Journal:

Given urban planners' almost universal reverence for Jacobs, it is ironic that many have largely ignored or misinterpreted the central lesson of "Death and Live"--that cities are vibrant living systems, not the product of grand utopian schemes concocted by overzealous planners...

[Contemporary] planning trends run completely counter to Jacobs's vision of cities as dynamic economic engines that thrive on private initiative, trial-and-error, incremental change, and human and economic diversity.  Jacobs believed the most organic and healthy communities are diverse, messy and arise out of spontaneous order, not from a scheme that tries to dictate how people should live and how neighborhoods should look.

She felt it was foolish to focus on how cities look rather than how they function as economic laboratories.  "The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop--insofar as public policy and action can do so--cities that are congenial places for [a] great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish," Jacobs wrote.

There's a thread running through these ideas: "messy," "diverse," "spontaneous," and perhaps most importantly, "unofficial."  As I noted earlier, Jacobs believed that individuals making choices on their own will build a better world than any bureaucracy, no matter how well-intentioned, and when we act independently, without formal authority, things get messy.  And that's an essential element if a city is to function as an economic and social marketplace, if it is to have life.

tag: jane jacobs

San Francisco: Hallidie Plaza

Yesterday SF Chronicle urban design writer John King proposed starting over at Hallidie Plaza, and I sent the following in response:

Dear Mr. King,

Many thanks for your thoughtful Feb. 2nd column on Hallidie Plaza.  I've lived in San Francisco for 16 years, and for most of that time I've worked within a block or two of Hallidie, including three recent years at the Flood Building.  Passing by and through the Plaza several times a day, I became familiar with its mix of tourists and locals, and the means by which human activity is shaped by our built environment--often for the worse.

Hallidie could and should be the city's crossroads, with so many physical vectors and social currents converging on one place.  Fifth and Powell and Cyril Magnin.  The cable cars and BART, the glorious F line and every sullen bus that trudges down Market.  Union Square and SF Centre and Virgin and the Apple store and the Metreon and all the crowds they attract.  Ladies who lunch and knick-knack vendors and sullen teen punks and mad chess geniuses and shivering Euros and big suburban families and bargain-hunters laden with bags and Filipino retirees and the steel drummer and and the tap dancer, always dancing, and the hostile shoe shine guy who takes your scuffs as a personal insult.

There's so much life, so much action and chaotic vitality.  It's one of my favorite places anywhere.

But that huge, dirty, wind-swept, pigeon beshitted hole runs through its middle like a scar.  It kills me.  Pushing everyone away from what should rightfully be the center of activity, forcing us onto crowded narrow sidewalks along Market and in front of Forever 21.  The only people who appreciate its empty space are the desperate and the drunk and the dealers, who have their own reasons for preferring privacy and darkness to mixing with the rest of us.

And yet despite that architectural tragedy, despite all the petty and not-so-petty crime that pervades the place, we refuse to let Hallidie die.  On a good day, we can even make it sing.

You propose filling it in, and that might be a good start.  But planners seeking to design for urban liveliness should follow Hippocrates' example: First, do no harm.

Could we guarantee that the City wouldn't make Hallidie worse if they were to undertake such a project?  Of course not.  Look at the awful screen that they installed to "beautify" the BART elevator a few years ago.  It stands there like a rusty knife plunged into Hallidie's heart.  The only useful purpose it serves is to act as a warning to anyone who'd invite the City to try to improve a social environment.

If anyone could ignite a campaign to improve Hallidie, you could.  I hope you do it, and I'd gladly volunteer to help.  But bear in mind that although Hallidie falls far short of perfect, those of us who love it have found a way to transcend its structural flaws and to breathe life into it.  If you start the Wheels of Redevelopment turning, your first responsibility will be to make damn sure that the City doesn't come up with some godawful Master Plan that will crush all the life out of Hallidie in the process.   Destroying the Plaza in order to save it, if you will.  First, do no harm.

Thanks again.

Ed Batista
San Francisco

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The pic above is from San Francisco CITYSCAPE, which in October 2004 discussed another Chronicle article on potential plans for Hallidie:

The Chron quotes unnamed designers on the need for "a pedestrian-friendly layout (like those) used by all celebrated plazas around the world" — so far, so good — "including perhaps a green space or park." Listen, folks: Cityscape worships nature as much as any Northern Californian, but the world's great urban open spaces are plazas, not parks. The new Union Square, up the street, was transformed from a homeless encampment into a space welcoming to all comers when its hedges were replaced by hard surfaces. Of course, nor is it empty like Hallidie's red-brick, modernist-makeover-of-Market Street kin, United Nations and Justin Herman plazas. Cityscape likes the idea a friend had, to just accept that Hallidie Plaza really should be the Times Square of San Francisco and to give over this one corner of the big city to bright lights, to "sheer whimsy, a gee-whiz display of light and sound and technology in a public plaza unlike anything available in any suburb. ... a very tall, very modern, very thin tower, clad with digital displays, jumbotrons, colored lights, strobes, and neon tubes — all sponsored by famous local Bay Area tech and Internet companies. A beacon of the future in a historic old place. A slice of Blade Runner in the cool gray city." Or, at least, we could bring the whole place out of hiding and up to street level.

Some great ideas there.  No half-assed "pocket parks" at the city's crossroads, please, and no empty brick plazas either.  I don't know about a tower per se, which would take the focus off the street-level action which makes Hallidie such a vital place.  But I do like the idea of "sheer whimsy," of spectacle.

But could the City pull it off?  As noted above, I'm not optimistic.  I'd love to see Hallidie achieve its full potential, but first, do no harm.

Fauxtilitarian: Hoover Z700

Hoover's rolling out the the Z700, "the World's First Sport Utility Vacuum," the very latest in fauxtilitarian design.  (And yours for just $550!)  How dirty does your house have to be to feel the need for something like this?  Apparently the Hummer Alpha was just the beginning...

tag: fauxtilitarian

Ten Years of ESPN

Take a walk down memory lane with ten years of ESPN.com home page designs.  (1995-97 are guaranteed to make you feel old, no matter what your age.)  Although I applaud their willingness to continually try to improve the site, I think they've been a half-step behind SI at every turn.

Fauxtilitarian Design

Hummer is taking out full-page ads for the Alpha, which features the "Duramax 6600 Turbo Diesel" engine and the "Allison 1000" transmission, making it "the new benchmark in off-road exotic vehicles."  It's a new benchmark, alright--the very latest in phony utility.  It's fauxtilitarian!

I love solidly-built, well-designed objects that are intended to be used hard and last a lifetime.  And I'm as susceptible as the next consumer to the lure of an aspirational purchase.  But when Hummer's touting the "Duramax 6600" on the back of the Wine Spectator (see the Dec. 15 issue), well, fauxtility has officially exhausted itself as an aesthetic.  I'm expecting a return to flashy superficiality any day now.

tag: fauxtilitarian

Human Rights of Users

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox explores the two sides of usability: empiricism (i.e. "conclusions and recommendations grounded in what is empirically observed in the real world) and ideology (i.e. "the belief in a certain specialized type of human rights").  He stresses that both sides play an important role:

As a user advocate, you need both perspectives: usability as empiricism and usability as ideology. Each perspective requires a particular approach.  

When taking the empirical approach, you must be unyielding and always report the truth, no matter how unpopular. If something works easily, say so. If something will cause users to leave, say so. The only way to improve quality is to base decisions on the facts, and others on your team should know these facts.  

In contrast, when viewing usability as an ideology, you must be willing to compromise. Sometimes decisions must be made that will lower the design's usability quality, either because of limited time and budget or because of trade-offs with other desirable qualities.

I agree wholeheartedly, but I'm particularly fascinated by the idea of the Human Rights of Users, which Nielsen enumerates:

• The right of people to be superior to technology. If there's a conflict between technology and people, then technology must change.
• The right of empowerment. Users should understand what's happening and be capable of controlling the outcome.
• The right to simplicity. Users should get their way with computers without excessive hassle.
• The right of people to have their time respected. Awkward user interfaces waste valuable time.