Book Club

I’m back at work today, trying to implement all the things I had a chance to think up during my vacation and I’m facing a bit of a reoccurring problem in trying to improve my staff. Once upon a time we had a book club – everyone in the business side of the house (basically all of Orlando) was required to read a book and present information they learned from the book. This could be remarkably powerful, but people bitched and moaned – so we tied it to compensation and nobody read a book since. 🙁

So today, I made it mandatory.

Here is my problem: people that work for me aren’t idiots. They could fake skimming as reading very easily.

Further complicating the issue is the fact that they were profiled and hired based on their hidden ability to run a shady used car lot. It’s my backup plan in case this computer thing doesn’t work out, I’ll just sell my car collection 😉 But that’s besides the point.

How do you get people to actually read a book, and verify that it’s getting done?

The best idea I came up with is to get daily reports on what they read. Basically, read 30 pages today and sum up what you learned and how this could be implemented to help OWN. Problems: 1) They could just skim pages in advance and just paste bits and pieces of the summary on a daily basis. 2) Since everyone is reading the same book there can be a collaborative non-proliteration (ha!) agreement where one person reads only one piece and they submit variations of the summary and its implementation in their department/role 3) Business books are mostly common sense mixed in with case studies that tend to be summarized for you anyhow so it’s easy to BS.

So how do you teach old monkeys new skills?