Fall Recommended Links and Recs

Plus bonus commentary on Elizabeth Gilbert's new memoir

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Hi all!

The links and recs will be published 6x in 25-26: Fall, Late Fall (Nov), Winter (early Jan), Mud Season (March), Spring (May) and Summer Reading (mid/late June).

All subscribers will get one or two links and the rest will be behind the paywall for premium subscribers.

I will provide a brief description for all links or recs and anything I share is suitable to share - I particularly keep trustees and senior team members in mind when I look for helpful reading material.

Before the paywall is a link from HBR about leading your team in a toxic organizational culture

After the paywall there is an excerpt from Jeff Selingo’s new book Dream School - a clear eyed assessment on how the demographic cliff will unfold at the college level, what groups it will most impact and what strategies might help or hurt. It’s not pretty, I’m afraid to say, and it’s not a 1-1 analogue but schools would be wise to pay attention. If people don’t see college as the endgame, what will that do to independent school enrollment?

Then there is another HBR article about keeping morale up in anxious times - it’s not revolutionary but it reinforces good practices.

Finally, there are two AI articles - one making a serious case for colleges to go tech free (and I think this one is worth a discussion even if you’d never consider it in reality!) and another, more moderate approach.

First - just for fun - indulging my inner critic…

A brief review of All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

I took a few days off this week and I was anticipating being entertained by the new Elizabeth Gilbert memoir. Eat Pray Love is such a cliche now but when it came out there was a reason it got so popular. She is a genuinely good writer with an irresistible, fun authorial voice full of both self-deprecation and insight. I’ve also appreciated her work on creativity but she hasn’t written another pure memoir since EPL and as you can’t escape the hype leading up to it, I was looking forward its release.

Well - it’s not another “pure” memoir. It’s basically a reflection/meditation on addiction recovery and in particular, the recovery path provided the 12th steps. Yes, there are very dramatic parts about her intense and destructive relationship with the person by the end she refers to as her “best friend,” Rayya Elias. But most (maybe all of it as I think about it?) is told in summary, not in fully developed scenes, so both Gilbert and Elias often come across more one dimensional figures who are delivery system for the ultimate message.

There’s a lot of talk about honesty when it doesn’t feel all that honest and at several points Gilbert is clear that she won’t be sharing the childhood trauma that created the conditions for her addiction or really anything about her marriage that continued on as her intense friendship and then romance with Elias took shape over a decade. And the most intriguing thing she did not fully share is that apparently in 2008, she tried to literally hand out money to the merchants in her small NJ town to keep them going in the recession and it created nothing but havoc - some people still can’t look her in the eye. THAT is a story I want to read! (There is definitely a thread she only lightly explores about her deeply conflicted relationship with the money she’s made through her work - but it felt underdeveloped to me.) She also tells us in a very general way how hard it was to make amends with some people in her recovery journey - think about the memoir that would be “five stories in making amends!”

I don’t think you have to open a vein to write a good memoir and she certainly reveals many unexpected and unflattering things, most of which you can read in excerpts floating around. But unexepcted, dramatic and unflattering don’t always add up to “meaningful.” I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about what goes into creating “authenticity,” what is overly crafted or sentimental or trying too hard to be insightful or profound in terms of leadership presence or connecting with a donor or writing essays. And this memoir often felt overly crafted, sentimental and trying too hard to be insightful and profound.

Protecting Your Team in a Toxic Organizational Culture

It could also be titled “Silos are Sometimes Helpful.” This Harvard Business Review article has clear, actionable steps to take in order to shelter your team even if the rest of the organization is struggling. (gift link)