Week 25-26: Books and celebrations
Well, I had a nice introduction written for my first bi-weekly week notes, so I will skip that part for now.
What's something I enjoyed?
I enjoyed both the book club sessions. In the Mendix book club, we discussed Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing. The consensus was that this could have been a blogpost series rather than a book. The author analysed text in various books to predict the authors, to check for gender bias, most common cliches and even analysed book covers to see how the font size of the author's name changes with their growing popularity.
In the leadership book club, we are discussing Resilient Management by Lara Hogan. We discussed the difference between mentoring, coaching and sponsoring. We talked about job titles, when does one decide to move to the next title, feedback styles and making work visible. As I am writing this, I just realised how much I have learnt about the culture at Mendix by joining these biweekly discussions. As someone who has joined the company during the pandemic, I for sure miss a lot of contexts. I definitely recommend this book club as a way to make time for professional growth.
What did I do differently?
There's a lot of work to be done and I guess that's not going to change. What can change is the way I pick up the work, the way I scope and set boundaries, and the way I can identify the impact of organizational maturity.
What am I summarising at the moment?
We are wrapping up research synthesis for a project at work. We used a framework that was proposed by the Product Manager before the research and are now enriching it based on insights. I also finalised the outline for the Mendix World talk with help from the organisers - helps to talk to people from a very different discipline.
Celebrations 🎉
Most of us have got our first vaccine shots.
I am excited and nervous about my talk slot at Mendix World. It’s right after our CEO’s Keynote!
I reached my book goal for this year! I wanted to read 26 books :)
