5 books worth reading in 2024
Take a moment to celebrate with me? This is year number five of successfully reaching my reading goal! I didn’t read as many books in 2023 as I have in previous years, but I did spend more time after completing the book going back re-reading the text I’d highlighted on the tabbed pages. And there were a lot of them.
As I always do on CUInsight in January, I am sharing the top 5 books I read last year that made an impact on me. I hope you’ll give them a chance and feel the same way. Here they are in no particular order.
- Romancing the Brand by Tim Halloran: Often (too often) we look at what our peers in the credit union world are doing and “rip and repeat.” Sometimes you don’t need to re-invent the wheel that works. But when your credit union brand is facing extinction due to lack of growth you need something bigger. Lack of growth often times is due to lack of relevancy in the market.
Halloran has experience with national brands like Coke and Home Depot, and frequently finds himself reinvigorating a legacy brand facing extinction. He reveals what it takes to make consumers fall in love with your brand.
Step by step, he reveals how to start, grow, maintain and troubleshoot a flourishing relationship between brand and consumer: A young woman tells a focus group that Diet Coke is like her boyfriend. A twenty-something tattoos the logo of Turner Classic Movies onto his skin. These consumers aren’t just using these brands. They are engaging in a rich, complex, ever-changing relationship, and they’ll stay loyal, resisting marketing gimmicks from competitors and influencing others to try the brand they love.
Much of the book was information that I knew, but reading through it provided some good reminders of the process we should be going through for our clients. Perhaps it will inspire some new ideas in you for your credit union?
- Burn the Boats by Matt Higgins: This was a book that was half personal testimony and half blueprint to remove the victim mentality that keeps so many from success. Higgins went from a desperate sixteen-year-old high school dropout caring for his sick mother in Queens, New York, to a shark on Shark Tank and the faculty of Harvard Business School.
As far back as Sun Tzu and Julius Caesar to modern day Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Higgins talk about the bold and highly effective tactics seen throughout history when leaders want to (and need to) motivate their troops for success, they destroy all opportunities for retreat, and fully commit to the mission.
Higgins said this in a recent podcast: “One common theme I have for successful (leaders) is they refuse to accept things for the way they are. They just refuse to believe that this is how it has to be because this is how it’s always done.” When you burn the boats, you have no choice but to survive, and that means taking some risk – successful credit unions do this well.
- Master of Change by Brad Stulberg: With the many changes we implemented at YMC this year from our strategic plan, I needed to read this. As I read through, I shared many thoughts with my team to help them through the changes, too. Stulberg calls out the many changes we’ve experienced such as economic recessions and new technologies to personal disruptions like getting married or divorced. With each, we undergo change and transformation for better or worse.
Change will happen, but Stulberg reiterates just how hard many people try to resist change without success. We view change as a threat to our stability and sense of self. In the book, Stulberg introduces us to a process called Rugged Flexibility, where we acknowledge that skillfully working with transformation requires strength and agency (ruggedness) and letting go of resistance, rigidity and too much control.
“The goal is not to be so rugged that you never change. The goal is not to be so flexible that you passively surrender to the whims of life. The goal is to marry these qualities—to develop a mindset and practice called rugged flexibility.”
Think about legacy brands like Kodak and the taxicab industry that resisted change so passionately that they marched themselves toward death through irrelevancy. Let’s take care to make sure that doesn’t happen to credit unions.
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig: I’ll be honest, this one has been on my shelf for a few years. I picked it up when I first got it and got a chapter in and put it down. It was deep. It was weird. It had been mentioned in a book I just finished so I thought maybe I should give it another go.
This time I must have been ready because I couldn’t put it down. It challenged me in so many ways. Pirsig was on a quest to define Quality, which at one point he was so focused on that he ended up in a mental health facility receiving electric shock therapy.
The book is written after that instance and travels through his thoughts about his inquiry into values and Quality.
To try to explain this book would be impossible. Two thoughts worth sharing with you are these:
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- “The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.” So often we are focused on what we believed to be true we are not open to changing our mind when truth does show up.
- From a leadership perspective, this resonated with me: “If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.” How often might we think we’re trying to help someone by calling something out without actually solving the problem. We focus more on “what” the person is than what makes them that way.
- Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck: I thought this was going to be more of a pleasure read to take a break from my ‘learning’ reading. It was, but I still ended up tabbing and highlighting many pages.
The book recounts the adventure Buck had of building a watercraft much like those of the 1800’s and navigating it down the Mississippi River in modern days. One of the biggest lessons I took away from this book is not to listen to the naysayers who have no experience in a subject.
As Buck made stops in several towns in his flatboat before getting to the Mississippi, he was always met with people warning him of the currents that would drag his boat under the water and with such velocity shred him to the point it would “tear his underpants up.”
Needless to say, Buck made it to New Orleans intact, underpants in one piece. How often do we NOT do something because the legends of fear from others tell us how awful something is. None of those that warned Buck about the deathly currents had every been on that river. They heard spun tales from others that they modified and shared themselves. “Crazy-ass passion is the staple of life and persistence its nourishing force. Without them, you cannot cross the trail.”
I hope you might pick up one of these books and open your mind to what could be. Learn more about yourself and a new thought or idea that drives you to be a better leader.
“Peace of mind produces right values; right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.” – Robert Pirsig
