Feniks 15
For the first 15 minutes of each day, everyone at Feniks & Company reads a book.
We go “old school” in this, requiring a book in hand instead of a screen in eye. We spend all day in front of screens, as most people do in this age of electronic information saturation, and a book in hand offers a big difference in perspective by the little fact of its physical form.
We believe the physical act of handling a book and turning paper pages imparts learning in important ways different from phones and tablets. It pulls us away from the habit-game of phone scrolling and distraction-browsing which captures so much of our attention these days.
Pick up a book, grab a cup of coffee, keep your phone in your pocket, cozy up in a comfy chair, turn the pages, feel the paper, forget about the charger, immerse yourself for a while and feel a little better.
Communication is a high value in our company culture, and daily reading helps enhance each person's ability to communicate and comprehend. The books we read provide a common vocabulary which we put to use in our day-to-day communication. This is especially true when we have all read a book and thus share a perception based on a shared experience involving a shared perspective as presented by the book. In many ways this serves as a shorthand, and in other ways it provides depth of understanding.
We value personal and professional development, and we choose books to reflect this value. Melody chooses most books, but anyone can suggest a book. After a book is finished, each Team Member writes a brief book report or essay on what was experienced in the reading. These are discussed openly whenever a Team Member is comfortable with sharing their experience. There's nothing quite like thinking about what you've read and writing about what you think. This really sets the learning into you.
We keep a growing library of books to reference and revisit. Some books are jokingly referred to as “Dr. Seuss for business” because they are written in an extremely simple style, almost a nursery rhyme. Like Dr. Seuss, they also convey valuable insights we can apply. While more serious readers might feel almost offended with the simplicity of the writing, the value of the shared experience with the contrasting viewpoints about it is real and beneficial.
Other books are quite sophisticated and well-researched. Two favorites are Quiet by Susan Cain, and Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson. Quiet gives voice and good counsel to introverted personalities which are so often seen as “lesser” beings in a culture which seems to overvalue loud spectacle and blunt aggression. Surrounded by Idiots is known in the office as “The Color Book” because it sorts people into personality types according to their primary behavioral characteristics in various situations and assigns colors to those types. This provides us with a shorthand vocabulary for communicating about people in an interesting way. Julia might perceive someone, for example, as a “blue” and know not to present that person to someone in a “red” mood. The book title plays on the idea that we each at some time or another get caught in our own way of seeing and being and can't understand someone else's, and the book offers strategies to bridge that lack of understanding.
