Books with enormous impact (at least on me)...

I've talked about a few books that have had a significant impact on how I view the world.  For example, I mentioned the book Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Countries by Geoffrey West in a post earlier this year.  It's also one of the ten books on the 2024 Leadership Reverie Reading List.  

I wrote about two books from my childhood and adolescence years that had a huge impact on my choice of career (see "What's Up Doc?" from March 5, 2017) -  Life in a Log by George and Bernice Schwartz and Competitive Swimming Manual for Coaches and Swimmers by the late Indiana University Men's Swimming Coach James "Doc" Counsilman.  The former really solidified my interest in the life sciences, while the latter led to an interest in both sports science and exercise physiology (one of my undergraduate majors).  

Along those same lines, I would be remiss if I didn't add Jeffrey Blumer's A Practical Guide to Pediatric Intensive Care to the list as well.  I purchased this book as a fourth year medical student to help me during one of my rotations, which happened to be my first experience in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).  During my pediatric residency training, we really couldn't afford any of the other major pediatric critical care textbooks, so I kept going back to this one throughout my training.  Compared to some of the other textbooks out there (one of which I was honored to serve as an Editor: Pediatric Critical Care Medicine: Basic Science and Clinical Evidence), this one is more general in nature and was a perfect introduction to the field.  While reading through this textbook wasn't the only reason for why I chose to enter the field of pediatric critical care medicine, it certainly had an influence.

I would absolutely have to add J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy to that list, mostly for the pure enjoyment that both books provided me all through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.  I've read both a number of times throughout my life, and I actually recently picked up The Hobbit for the first time in several years.  Notably, the late actor Christopher Lee (who played Saruman in the trilogy films) read the trilogy every year of his life, prior to his death in 2015.  Similarly, I would definitely add my favorite book of all time to the list, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (listed on the 2021 Leadership Reverie Reading List).  It's just a wonderful story that I've enjoyed ever since I picked it up off my parents' bookshelf sometime in early adolescence.  As a matter of fact, it's probably time that I replace my very well-worn copy of the book!

If you haven't read Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, you are missing out on a great book.  The book focuses on the age-old argument - is it better to be a generalist or a specialist?  You've probably heard that old saying that labels anyone claiming to be a generalist as a "Jack of all trades, Master of none".  Most of the time that this particular phrase is used, it is not meant to be a compliment.  However, did you know that there's a second part of this old proverb?  The complete saying is actually, "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."  The complete saying actually is suggesting that being a generalist is not such a bad thing after all.  And that's what this book is about!

I posted about a similarly themed book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool (see "Peak" from January 31, 2022), which is also on my list.  The fundamental question here is whether individuals are born with some genetically-determined talent or develop it over time through hard work, practice, and collective experience.  K. Anders Ericsson is a strong proponent of the "nurture" theory (which led to his theory of deliberate practice - Malcolm Gladwell popularized the "10,000 hour rule" in his book Outliers based largely on this theory).  Regardless though, Ericsson himself wrote, "The clear message from decades of research is that no matter what role innate genetic endowment may play in the achievements of ‘gifted’ people, the main gift that these people have is the same one we all have—the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.''  That should be a welcome statement for all of us.

While my professional interests in the last 15-20 years or so have focused primarily on quality improvement and patient safety (particularly in the context of the theory of the High Reliability Organization), that wasn't always the case.  Our PICU Medical Director then pushed me to take an internal course offering on improvement science (called I2S2), and one of our assigned texts was a book by Donald Wheeler (no relation) called Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos.  It's a short book (it's just over 150 pages in length) with a powerful message about statistical process control.  After reading it, I was absolutely hooked!  Shortly thereafter, I read the principal book on High Reliability Organizations, Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, two of the leading authorities in the field.  There are now three editions of this wonderful book, and all three are on my bookshelf in my office.

Lastly, while I have mentioned The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership by Sam Walker in a number of posts in the past (see "Turn slow, exit fast" and "Lovable losers once more..."), I've never really talked about it at length, even though it was one of the 10 books on my 2022 Leadership Reverie Reading List.  The tagline to the book says it all - The secret to winning is not what you think it is. It’s not the coach.  It’s not the star.  It’s not money.  It’s not a strategy.  It’s something else entirely.  Walker found that it is the team captain.  But it wasn't just any team captain, it was a certain phenotype of team captain.  

Walker started by developing a formula to analyze over 1,000 teams throughout history and across all sports, ultimately settling on sixteen of the most dominant teams in sports history (which included, among others, the New York Yankees major league baseball team (1949-1953), the Montreal Canadiens from the National Hockey League (1955-1960), the Boston Celtics from the National Basketball Association (1956-1969), Brazil's men's national football team (1958-1962), the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League (1974-1980), the Soviet Union men's national hockey team (1980-1984), U.S. national women's soccer (1996-1999), France's national men's handball team (2008-2015), and New Zealand's All Blacks rugby team twice (1986-1990 and 2011-2015).  He found that these teams had the best team captains who were usually not the team's superstar (in fact, they usually played the role of a supporting player), nor was this individual necessarily the best role model. These individuals rarely got up in front of the team to make a big speech, but rather they would sit one-on-one with individual players to motivate them to play their best.  These dominant teams always had a self-sacrificing captain who wasn’t afraid of risking a negative public persona or putting his body on the line for the sake of the team.  It's just a great book that I thoroughly enjoyed and learned a lot from reading it.  

There you have it - that's my list, at least for now.  I am sure that I've probably missed one or two books from the past, but these were the ones that almost immediately came to mind.  They've all had a great impact on how I view the world, and I highly recommend all of them!