Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about how to become a better reader, mindfulness, hard-won leadership lessons, taking advice, and another approach to change.

From Self-Development Secrets: How to Become A Better Reader and Read More Books

“You can acquire information when you’re scanning text or watching a video, but it’s not the same as reading a book. Deep engagement with the text is an unparalleled mental enrichment exercise. Quite simply, reading is the skill of civilized adults: it imparts the necessary body of knowledge required in modern society and builds the brain’s capacity to understand and use it.”

From Chadwick Matlin: I Was A Skeptic Of Mindfulness … Until I Tried To Make My Case

“But as FiveThirtyEight’s science team assembled the junk science we wanted to shed in 2018, I started to wonder whether mindfulness really was bunk. So I dove into the scientific literature and discovered I was wrong: There is some limited evidence to suggest that meditation might help with some ailments and may produce measurable changes in the brain.”

Thanks to Smartbrief on Leadership for pointing me to this story

From Charles Leiserson: Lessons in Leadership to Last a Lifetime

“AFTER 18 YEARS on the MIT faculty, I thought I knew a thing or two about leadership. After all, I was tenured and had supervised dozens of students seeking undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. But in 1999, at the height of the Internet boom, I took a two-year leave of absence to serve as director of system architecture at Akamai Technologies, an MIT start-up located here in Cambridge. That position humbled me and taught me lessons about leadership that I still use today, some 20 years later.”

From Dina Gerdeman: Ignore This Advice at Your Own Peril

“Refusing to act on advice from a respected colleague or mentor can backfire and damage your working relationship, a new study says. Hayley Blunden explains the career implications of seeking counsel from others.”

From Ed Batista: Building Blocks (A Tactical Approach to Change)

“We tend to think about change in broad, sweeping terms. We grow dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives or ourselves and we proclaim that THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT FROM NOW ON. But having coached hundreds of senior leaders and MBA students at Stanford since 2006, I’ve observed that broad, sweeping change is rare–and this way of thinking about change is at odds with the practices that make successful change efforts more likely.”

Book Suggestions

The Leader’s Bookshelf by Adm.James Stavridis

Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) by Chade-Meng Tan

Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude by Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin

Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness

Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More by Morten T. Hansen

Every week I share some recommendations of business books that I think are worth a look. Follow this link to the most recent list.