These books came into my leadership journey at moments when I was learning something essential: culture isn’t built in the big offsites or the annual strategy decks, it’s built in the patterns of daily work.
And the work of leadership gets substantially easier when you design practices that empower your team, reduce unnecessary friction, and help people feel enrolled in the work. This is especially true in scientific environments, where independence of thought, intellectual rigor, and high-stakes decision-making are core to advancing the mission.
Managing for Happiness
Managing for Happiness, by Jurgen Appelo, came to me at a point in my career when I needed to scale myself. My team was growing, the work was accelerating, and I could no longer be the gravitational center for every decision or conversation. This book gave me pragmatic ways to build systems where people could thrive without feeling like I needed to be “in” every decision, and where autonomy, clarity, and shared ownership weren’t ideals but defaults. It reframed “team motivation” not as cheerleading, but as conditions design.
Where the Action Is
Where the Action Is, by J. Elise Keith, became indispensable during one of the most demanding leadership moments of my career: leading a mission-critical core team with a newly acquired company. I knew I needed to up my game. Meetings were no longer routine touchpoints; they were the operating system for how two cultures, two workflows, and two sets of expectations would come together to deliver.
This book changed everything about how I prepare, facilitate, and follow up. It helped me redesign meetings as leverage points with clear decision rights, deliberate sequencing, and the connective tissue needed to prevent swirl, rework, or misinterpretation.
It also gave me a new diagnostic lens: the realization that what looks like interpersonal tension is often just poor meeting design, unclear decision flow, or broken communication architecture.
Rituals Roadmap
Rituals Roadmap, by Erica Keswin, gave me permission to lead with more humanity. It reminded me that rituals aren’t fluffy or indulgent, they’re structure for connection in high-intensity environments. Small, repeatable practices shape belonging, meaning, and team identity far more than grand gestures ever will.
These ideas became especially powerful as I scaled Discovery across locations and new hires. We were spread across time zones, functions, and scientific domains, yet rituals helped us feel like one team.
These books changed how I think about the everyday work of leadership. They taught me that ways of working are not trivial operational details. They are culture, they are strategy, and they are the invisible architecture that determines whether people feel connected or isolated, aligned or confused, energized or depleted.
And when designed with intention, they make the whole system feel more human, more coherent, and more capable of doing truly great work.
One theme I am working with in my professional life this year is approaching work with a more expansive perspective, using a lens of abundance, possibility, and collaboration instead of scarcity, limitation, and competition. However, we’re seven months into the year, and if I were evaluating my success so far on this effort, I would have given myself a B-. That is until I read The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.
The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life is a beautiful guide to unlocking creativity and potential in all areas of life, drawing heavily on the worlds of classical music and personal development as it presents twelve practices designed to help readers shift their perspectives and embrace a mindset of possibility.
Let’s pause on this phrase ‘mindset of possibility,’ because many scientists, myself included, have an aversive reaction to this sort of phrase. It usually draws to mind ideas about ‘manifesting possibility in the world’ and feels a little too woo-woo for my analytical brain. Luckily, that is not what is meant in this case.
In the words of the authors, “This is a how-to book of an unusual kind. Unlike the genre of how-to books that offer strategies to surmount the hurdles of a competitive world and move out ahead, the objective of this book is to provide the reader the means to lift off from that world of struggle and sail into a vast universe of possibility. Our premise is that many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view. Find the right framework and extraordinary accomplishment becomes an everyday experience. Each chapter of this book presents a different facet of this approach and describes a new practice for bringing possibility to life.”
In this book you find practices that resonate with modern management thinking around growth mindset and psychological safety before any of these concepts became buzzwords.
Mindset of Possibility
Most books on management and leadership fall into two categories. The first category is comprised of overly theoretical tomes written by professors who have limited experience actually managing in the real world. Interesting frameworks; hard to apply. The second category contains tactical advice offered towards specific scenarios— how to give better feedback, how to create more compelling presentations, how to collaborate more effectively. Highly useful when brought to bear in the right context, but not usually transformative.
The Art of Possibility falls into a unique third category, one that opens up new ways of framing the world that allow for more effective patterns of interaction and thinking. While expansive in their goals, these patterns are offered in set of 12 practices, making them approachable and practical to put into use in the context of your choosing. The end result is something both useful and expansive, and I am so incredibly grateful to have encountered this book.
Practical Implementation
I will let the reader explore the 12 practices in the book themselves, but I want to touch on how I applied the practice of ‘Giving an A’ with my team recently.
The “Giving an A” practice is about shifting from a mindset of judgment and comparison to one of possibility and empowerment. Instead of evaluating people based how well they can match their performance against a set standard, you start by assuming they are already capable and worthy of an “A.” Individuals are still encouraged to reach their full potential, but without the fear of failure or judgment holding them back.
This practice originated from an observation that Benjamin Zander made among his elite music students: the high-achieving students often felt so anxious and inhibited by the pressure to perform perfectly that they weren’t fully developing their musical talents because they weren’t taking risk. By giving them an automatic “A,” he created an environment where they felt free to take risks, express themselves, and grow. But he didn’t just give them an automatic ‘A.’ He required every student to write from their future self a letter dated at the end of the course about what they had done over the course of the year to deserve that ‘A.’ Through the process of writing the letter and connecting with the vision of their future selves, students showed up in class as ‘A’ students.
I’m not a teacher and don’t award grades, nor do I work on time scales of semesters or academic years. Nonetheless, the practice of imaging the person you want to be in a year’s time helps us all see more clearly the behaviors and activities needed to get from here to there, and help us show up differently in our day-to-day interactions in a way that supports reaching our goals.
With that in mind, I took my team through a version of it as part of our mid-year development practice. Technically, what I call ‘mid-year development practice’ is actually my company’s mid-year review cycle, but I have long felt that referring to these practices as a ‘review’ is counterproductive. Using the word ‘review’ sets a tone of evaluation instead of collaboration. If you are managing well, any performance issues should be part of ongoing conversations, not presented in twice yearly processes. As a result, in my organization, we use these ‘review’ cycles as an opportunity to make sure meaningful professional development conversations are happening. The practice of ‘Giving an A’ fits nicely with this perspective.
In a recent team meeting, we set aside our usual agenda of reviewing progress and looking at data, and spent 30 minutes ‘alone, together’ working independently on such letters from our future selves. I did not require anyone to share these letters, but am hoping that the development conversations that ensued were richer and more inspiring as a result.
Of course, during this exercise I was forced to reframe my B- into giving myself an A. And I’m looking forward to earning that A this year!
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