Bite-sized insights for curious leaders & learners every other Sunday.

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🗣️ "Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action." -Tim Ferriss

🗣️ "If you want to be happier, spend more time with living trees (nature) and dead trees (books)." -Alex Wieckowski

🗣️ “I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.” -Chaim Potok

🗣️ “I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour and every moment of our lives, if we will only tune in and remain so.” -George Washington Carver

​The Ultimate Guide to Reading Like a True Nerd​ How to pick great books to read, read more than ever before, save money on books, and remember what you read ​Read more​

​The Top 5 Business Biographies I've Read (and What They Taught Me)​ These leaders' lives taught me what to emulate—and what to avoid ​Read more​

​The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg​ ​Nonfiction: Personal Development Stulberg's thought-provoking book explains that accomplishing goals doesn't change your life, but striving for them does. Lessons from this book have come to mind many times while going about my daily life. ​See takeaways​

​Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams​ ​Nonfiction: Memoir, Company Profile Wynn-Williams was the director of global public policy at Facebook. Her tell-all memoir is a disturbing romp through the world of Meta, including their influence on global politics, the horrible way they treat employees, and the executives' reckless pursuit of money over anything else. Yikes.

🗣️ "The best business decisions are never made from the comfort of an ivory tower."

As a manager, every promotion gets you further from the company's core operations. That's why leaders often lose touch with elements of the day-to-day work and end up making poor decisions.

It’s no wonder a McKinsey survey found that 60 percent of executives felt their company made bad decisions as often as good ones.

I've seen this type of "Ivory Tower Syndrome" show up a lot in various companies, and I've fallen prey to its effects myself.

If you're a leader who's looking to stay connected to reality, I'd recommend the following:

1. Get your hands dirty. Find ways to involve yourself in the daily work. For example, if you’re a software manager, carve out a few hours every week for coding.
2. Delegate decisions to the ones closest to the client. Find ways to delegate more work to employees on the front lines.
3. Bring individual contributors into the planning process. When tackling major company projects, ask for volunteers or designate one of your top performers to join the group.
4. Ask your team for feedback once you’ve developed a plan. Doing so can help you avoid the embarrassment of launching a plan that doesn’t work when the rubber meets the road.

This weekend has been a blast. I've been able to kick it in the beautiful resort town of McCall, Idaho with my buddy Eric.

It's been a weekend full of deep conversations, great food, gorgeous hikes, and relaxing time by the fire. I live for weekends like this.

Visit me at BobbyPowers.com for more articles and book reviews about leadership, communication, and personal development.

You can also access high-res PDFs of my 1-pagers and cheat sheets here.

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