GSG Book Club: A Forum for Smart Reads
The next chapter in professionals reading more, sharing more, learning more and building more.
To professional literary lovers everywhere,
Stop now, we know four things if anything about you…
- you like to read (or read more)
- you like to learn (or learn more)
- you like to share (or share more)
- you like to build (or create, venture, make)
Yes? If so, what is to follow might be interesting to you.
We have now hosted five professional book explorations as part of GSG Book Club over the last year (see visual of all of the books below) and speaking for myself I have really enjoyed the discipline and enlightenment of knowing every month+ reviewing and discussing a book of relevant subject matter and consequence as a group of smart, passionate professionals.
I. Oh yeah, who the %^^&**& are we again…
The sponsoring group behind this book club effort is the Grey Swan Guild greyswanguild.org .
Founded by myself Sean Moffitt and Rob Tyrie, since 2020, our mission has been to try to make better sense of the world together through four things:
- deeper experiences/events (50+ per year and 4 marquee ones),
- better intelligence (8+ per year)
- elevating global community (11,000+ members) and
- bolder ventures (10 on the launch list).
Naturally given this mission, we have chatted about a book club forever and we actually finally launched our effort 2024, accomplishment check
- this is now our next step.
We’d love your involvement and reaction. View or Read on.
Choose your path:
More wise (and sometimes unwise) calories get expended in this Guild on how we communicate effectively. So… to digest what we are doing and how we would love you involved — two options (call it my country or rap version of getting the word out):
Option #1 — for the written word inclined, read the below note
Option #2 — for the visually inclined, watch me on video for a few minutes Book Club-splain
Did you know? “According to a number of studies*, business people who read at least seven business books a year earn over 2.3 times more than those who read only one book per year. A study by Bersin & Associates** found that while 74.9% of all managers understand the correlation between reading and competitive advantage, they simply don’t have the time to read more books. This is directly impacting their careers — and incomes!”
II. Purpose of this GSG Book Club Note:
Fourfold the reasons for this post …
Canvass: we are outreaching to 60+ of you that have expressed an interest in our club in the past or I postulate that you could be interested — we would like 20 of you to be a central group of GSG Book Club participants (read below: VI. Scouts)- it is designed to be one of the most intelligent book discussions on things that matter to your work life. Hopefully we can keep all of you others engaged as participants, ambassadors and as an engaged audience.
Pivot: Ralph Mercer has been invaluable for lifting this professional Book Club off but has had other priorities come into play, Ralph will still be involved but at reduced levels given his time commitments (see V. Pivot below)
Elevation: We have learned a lot from our experiment this year — moving forward we want to elevate the level and caliber of our venture via a few simple methods (see VII. Elevation below)
Next: We want to let you know what are we doing with the Book Club and related literary festival that arrives in December (with hopefully your input — see VIII. Next below)
III. Our GSG Book Club Vision (consistent)
Together we seek to broaden our understanding and enrich our worldviews through the power of literature and meaningful dialogue
“Reading to the mind what exercise is to the body”
IV. GSG Book Club Elements
Here are the key elements of what we are doing, some familiar and some new:
- Community/Event (consistent) — a hard core group of literary souls (Scouts) and extended others who want to foster intellectual curiosity and critical thinking through recent professional book offerings 8–12x per year
- Summary (new) — provide a synopsis of both our ingoing views and discussion via long form review
- Interview (new) — involve the featured author more deeply into our review by requesting audio interview or at minimum a Q&A
- Podcast (new) — deliver a book club podcast post-event that provides a high caliber curated discussion of the book, its abstractions and implications
- Website (new) — have an area where the schedule, article and podcast archives exist set up in time for our next book October 23
- GSG Book Festival (extended) — once annual book festival that will be hosted each early December — exploring 8–16 authors in a full day tour — this years is December 6th — don’t miss it
V. Pivot
- Leadership: Ralph has a number of professional and personal commitments (including his own book, yeh), I will now steward this group through a transition period I’d be grateful for the inside commitment of two others to help spearhead our efforts, and potentially want to lead in the future — the idea is to be agile, no BS, think AND Do group, with one year+ committed people, and not be an administrative time suck
- Schedule: we experimented by creating value in the event and announcing our next book at the event right before the new book, but this did not allow enough time to prepare and get people to read — we want to operate on a three book cycle extending out four months giving ample warning and time for planning
- Audience: we had designs on creating larger audiences to funnel into the guild, given the targeted nature of our books, we think it’s best to focus on the hard core, the caliber of conversation and quality of the output (and let the audience find us)
- Topics: to-date, we have focused on books about technology and AI, we need to broaden the aperture to include other Guild interesting aspects — culture, workplace, leadership, futures, humans, impact, learning, economy, sensemaking, innovation, marketplace and yes, technology
- Genuinely Read AND look Around: we have had people take big roles in our discussions that had not read the book — we need to ensure the key parts of the event discussion and outputs are based on having perused the actual pages AND scanned the web and not go only ankle deep in review — you learn something more by turning the printed/Kindle page.
VI. Book Club Scouts
The Roman legions needed scouts so do we….
- Target: as mentioned, we are looking for 20 people (and 3 especially committed people) to guide, host, curate, read, author and.or promote our offering
- Divide and Conquer: by accepting, hopefully you can be the front row of five shepherding the discussion on every fourth book — that might be 3 per year
- Time Commitment: in many months, this means less than two hours per month beyond the option of reading the book and every third of fourth month investing more deeply in the book (10+ of read and prep).
- Recognition: as scouts, we want you to play a central role in the direction of our book club — you will be publicly listed on our web page with your own profile, build your brand through our podcast and have first right of refusal on new opportunities and our involvement in our book festival , from time to time, free books may also be involved, plus you will meet interesting others from around the world — reading can be a lonely endeavour — let’s fix that.
VII. Elevation
As we move into 2025, here is how we want to elevate this program
Advance warning — as mentioned, a three-four month cycle
Mini-wedges — accountability resting with five invested readers ach edition
Dedicated website — to explore and profile all the people, inputs and outputs of what we are doing
Outreach to publishers: after doing one or two of these
Best authors: not going to just people we know, but the best authors
Content drips: so much great discussion and energy , but nothing synthesized, we need to ensure the scouts can easily pull together the fragments easi\iy
Special Editions: profiling guild and Scout efforts when they author books (fyi my solo venture is happening next year)
Personal Recognition: ensuring our most committed members get profiled and recognized, have the vote for new books and influence on future Club direction
Three channel communication: web page for schedule and content, email for the important and official stuff and whatsapp for fluid communication among the scouts
Structure — have some expectations going in. for what a Book Club experience and outputs should be with committed members
VIII. Next: GSG Book Club
We have reviewed some really excellent books in 2024:
GSG #1. Noise by Daniel Kahneman (January)
#2 — The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman (March)
#3 — AI Needs You by Verity Harding (April)
#4 — Wise Animals by Tom Chatfield (May)
#5 — How Data Happened by Wiggins and Jones (July)
Next…
October 23nd 12pm ET — looking for 5 scouts here:
#6 — Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI
by David De Cremer (lead scout Ralph Mercer)
The Book: https://a.co/d/9iln4Us
The Event:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0rc--prDIpG9c6eyLI_1iV6lGNfFZYjcQO
November 15th 10am ET — looking for 5 scouts here
#7 — On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver (lead scout Sean Moffitt)
The Book: https://a.co/d/8E0Ivwu
The Event:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcof-Gqpj4sHNN4DNj6QdMKQMd1FAO6E1IX
December 6th 7am ET to 7pm ET -
GSG Book Festival III
- looking for 7 organizing and hosting sans here
Our third annual cavalcade of books and their authors, twelve (12) sessions dedicated to professional literary a-has, deep thinking and discovery.
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMtceitrzkuHtZwKS8OWOSkasbuMg1Nhq1e
Suggestions encouraged — authors must have published book in last year or have one upcoming?
2025
#8 January TBD book needs to be announced by end of September
#9 March TBD needs to be announced by October 22nd
#10 May TBD needs to be announced by November 15th
#11 June TBD needs to be announced by December 6th
#12 August TBD
#13 September TBD
#14 October TBD
#15 November TBD
December — GSG Book Festival IV
Special Editions: GSG Publishing productions (2 or 3 books)
Solo books by Guild authors TBD
Podcast and dedicated web page to launch by October 22nd.
IX. Respond
This will be fun educational and hopefully beneficial to all of us as professionals and humans, without the complexity of some of our other Guild endeavours. It’s a book, read it, make notes, talk about it, summarize it, rinse and repeat.
Please get back to me personally (info@greyswanguild.org) if you would like to be involved by next week (and hopefully right away).
In the interim, join our LinkedIn group:
Parting Inspiration …
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Happy reading and clubbing …and would love to hear from you.
Author: Sean Moffitt, Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures
Grey Swan Guild — The Calls to Action
If you have an interest in responding to uncertainty, our pain point chasing and our particular Guild view on the world. You have a few options.
First, join our Grey Swan Guild LinkedIn page Grey Swan Guild — we post daily, usually surfacing interesting observations that respond to our pain points, giving you a first view of what’s upcoming, telling you how to get involved, or recapping what cool things we have just done.
Secondly, if you want to get higher up on our radar and profile your interests, declare your intentions and potentially take on a leading or contributing role in the Guild, there is only one way to do it. Become an official member. Here’s the form.
If your enthusiasm still remains whetted, and you love going below, around and above the surface of our world’s biggest issues, become part of our standing panel of 400+ analytical and observational minds. Become a Global Sensemaker. Here’s the form.
Not satisfied with just thinking, but would rather solve these pain points too. We have designed a ventures wing to our guild called Cygnus Ventures that has embarked upon twelve different ventures to get after solutions and opportunities that tackle making better sense of the world through our well-defined pain points. Become a Cygnus Venturist. Here is the form.
Trying to find the central thread and on-ramp to participation and still have questions? Each and every month, usually in the first week of the month, we host new member onboarding Regattas, where we meet you face to face and share in why we exist, what we do, who you are, explore some interactive queries and answer every one of our queries. Join us at our next regatta in September. Here’s the link.
