It may seem odd, in reviewing a book, to begin by discussing a hypothetical different book that the authors didn’t write. But in order to illuminate and appreciate one major choice that Dr. Ron Wolfson and Dr. Jason G. Goldman made in crafting their new book on Jewish leadership, I hope you’ll indulge my oddity in doing just that.

If all I knew about a book were that its title was Jewish Communal Leadership, I might expect the book to be structured around things like:

Rules or principles for Jewish leaders to follow

Styles, personality types, or other general archetypes of Jewish leadership

Field-specific categories of Jewish professional leadership (rabbis, school principals, camp directors, JCC heads, Federation chiefs, foundation leaders, etc.)

Within these categories, I might expect that real people and real stories would be used to illustrate these rules, mistakes, styles, or positions. But the primary focus (in the hypothetical book I would expect) would be didactic, while people and stories would be roped in as secondary supports to the primary materials.

If I then learned that the subtitle was “Lessons Learned From Leading Practitioners” (emphasis added), then I would feel confirmed in my suspicions. “This book,” I would think, “must be structured around lessons.” Even if I then learned that the main research process for the book was interviews with ten leaders, I would assume that stories and case studies from these interviews would fill out a book structured mainly around lessons and concepts.

But the reality of this book confounded my expectations — and in a way that may be almost as instructive as the book’s contents.

Jewish Communal Leadership: Lessons Learned From Leading Practitioners is not structured around lessons. It is structured around individual leaders. Each chapter is not a principle, a rule, a style, or any other artificial construct — each chapter is a transcript of a conversation with a leader who is making an impact in the Jewish world.

Here are the ten leaders whose stories and reflections we read:

Barry Finestone [a non-voting member of Leading Edge’s board]

Daryl Messinger [board chair of Leading Edge]

It’s not that these conversations lack things like lessons, rules, principles, mistakes, styles, and information specific to various Jewish sub-fields. Each conversation is rich with both stories and conceptual insights, and my copy of the book now has many colorful book flags sticking out marking quotes and points I found valuable. Indeed, in a recent article promoting the book, Dr. Wolfson himself extracts ten generalized “takeaways” you can read right now. Still, what strikes me most about this book is that these takeaways and abstractions are never stripped of their narrative contexts. Instead, the personal stories and experiences of the interviewed leaders, with all their messiness, take primary focus. 

In choosing the messy and human over the streamlined and polished, and the personal and specific over the general and didactic, Wolfson and Goldman follow in the footsteps of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) itself — another book of “lessons” that enmeshes its legal codes and linear abstractions in a much larger web of complex narratives. The result is far more demanding of the reader than a simple, clean law book would have been — but also much richer and deeper in its potential for transforming the reader and the community. Discussing the Torah’s dual nature as law and story, the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztz”l wrote:

“Law is one thing, narrative another. Narrative answers the question ‘What happened?’ Law answers the question, ‘How shall I act rightly…?’ Why then does the Torah contain both? The answer goes to the heart of the Judaic enterprise… God wants us to know, not only what to do, but why… God's law is not arbitrary. It speaks to the human condition. It arises out of human history.”

That Jewish Communal Leadership focuses on individual specific leaders’ stories, then, is one layer of wisdom in its structure. But another layer is to present not only the interview subject’s words, but the conversation between the subject and Wolfson. For fans of Wolfson’s prior work — including Relational Judaism and the Relational Judaism Handbook — it should come as no surprise that the give-and-take of two human beings encountering each other receives such a central place in this book.

In that sense, this book’s title should be read as including a knowing wink. Jewish communal leadership (the actual practice, not the book title) can’t fit into a shelf of books, let alone a single volume. It’s something living and changing, which we can only apprehend in the form of breathing, changing people. As the brilliant Dr. Erica Brown says in her chapter:

“I cannot stand to give a talk about leadership… There’s no ‘talk’ about leadership. It’s the people in the room… You are the book; you are the text.”

Books, articles, words on pages can only ever gesture in the direction of the stories, the lives, the people who make Jewish communal leadership a reality. This book is a worthy invitation into that larger and more vital encounter.

In choosing the messy and human over the streamlined and polished, and the personal and specific over the general and didactic, Wolfson and Goldman's new book on Jewish leadership demands more of the reader than a simple, clean law book would have been. But the personal stories and experiences of the interviewed leaders also offer richer and deeper potential for transforming the reader and the community.

Reading Edge: “You Are the Text”: Dr. Ron Wolfson’s “Jewish Communal Leadership”

Book reviews on leadership, talent, and culture.

Books

Zeynep Ton, an MIT professor of business operations and co-founder/President of the Good Jobs Institute, specializes in good jobs, and in this thoroughly practical book she persuasively and robustly lays out both the why and the how. 

You can’t afford low pay. One obvious part of a good job, of course, is good pay, and Ton argues that good pay doesn’t mean pay benchmarked to the market, if the market is systematically underpaying people. “Nothing else you do will make up for low pay,” writes Ton. Good pay means pay that allows even the lowest-paid workers to be free to the kinds of worries, stressors, and vulnerabilities that harm their ability (cognitively and logistically) to do their best work.  

Furthermore, “If you are thinking, ‘But some people may not be worth $15 an hour,’ … you are not alone… But… a worker’s worth is not fixed. Ability itself is affected by low pay... The important question is not whether a particular worker is worth $15 an hour or whether a particular job is worth $15 an hour, but rather whether that person’s work — the job — has been designed to contribute $15 an hour.” 

Good jobs are about operations. But where The Case for Good Jobs most shines is in its discussions of operations. “People often see the title of my earlier book — The Good Jobs Strategy — and assume it’s an HR book,” Ton writes. “But the secret sauce of the good jobs strategy is operations.” “Invest in people” lies at the heart of Ton’s “good jobs system,” with that investment referring to compensation, benefits, and professional development as well. But “Invest in people” is flanked by “four operational choices” that make that investment pay off.

Focus and simplify. Do fewer things — only what’s most important — and your employees will be less overwhelmed and more able to focus on providing the highest value. 

Standardize and empower. Make the jobs easier and more standardized such that employees can have a fuller understanding of the big picture of the business, and then empower them to use that knowledge to make choices on their own (e.g., offering customers a discount) without constantly needing to check with management. 

Cross-train. Give employees the skills and perspectives needed both to perform well and to have a career path forward. 

Operate with slack. Smooth out work schedules, provide everyone enough (predictable) hours, and manage the flow of due dates and deliverables so that people aren’t operating at full capacity, with all the fragility full capacity entails. 

Eating the elephant. Another strength of Ton’s book, relative to many workplace-oriented works, is the level of attention she gives to the transitional phase. You can’t create a good jobs system out of a very different status quo overnight. Ton: “As one executive aptly put it, ‘How do you eat the elephant?’ Well, one bite at a time, but where you take the first bite makes a difference.”  

For example, it’s extremely risky to raise pay and expectations both sharply and instantaneously, with the pay held out as a reason for sudden changes to performance — especially not before you first address the non-pay-related reasons they’re struggling. As Ton puts it, “You can’t hang lead weights on people and then offer them a bonus for the high jump.”   

Rather, Ton explains, the best starting places are subtractions — the “focus and simplify” operational choice. Subtracting costly but low-value workflows can be more doable, when you look for opportunities, than you might think, and making jobs less overwhelming can be a high-leverage place to start a virtuous cycle that drives higher productivity toward higher revenue, higher ability to pay, better employee engagement, more employee empowerment, and off to the races. 

There is much more in this book, including plentiful examples from real businesses driving incredible results with a good jobs system, discussions of how to make the case and align the leadership and management layers of an organization, and further ideas for planning implementation. This book is an excellent resource for leaders and talent managers of nonprofits and businesses alike. 

In "The Case for Good Jobs," author Zeynep Ton champions the idea of providing good jobs with fair pay, dignity, and growth opportunities, arguing that this approach is not only ethical, but also a smart business strategy. Ton offers practical guidance on implementing a "good jobs system" and, perhaps surprisingly, suggests that "subtractions" are the ideal starting point during the transition process.

Reading Edge: The Case for Good Jobs

When did you first begin to feel overwhelmed at work? Reader, your mileage may vary; it’s even possible that your answer is that you don’t, personally, feel overwhelmed at work. In which case, lucky you! But many people do feel as if their working lives are a firehose, a hamster wheel, or, at least, a bit much sometimes. 

For many of us, that sense of fatigue dates back some years — before recent geopolitical upheavals, before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Zoomification of many jobs, and even before the rise of smartphones and social media. Computer scientist and popular author Cal Newport argues that our pervasive sense of burnout  goes further back than that — back to the advent of email. Email made communicating easier. That sounds good, and, in many ways, it is good. But when something gets easier, we do it more. And now, well… We do it a lot.

To review Cal Newport’s A World Without Email (2021) this year, just after Newport released Slow Productivity (2024), is a little like reviewing Taylor Swift’s album Evermore (2020) even as The Tortured Poets Department (2024) only just dropped. The comparison between Cal Newport and Taylor Swift is invoked advisedly; Swift’s global community of fans may be several orders of magnitude larger than Newport’s following, but the latter (shall we call them Newporties?) might well rival the Swifties in passionate devotion. The average Cal Newport reader tends to be positively evangelistic about Newport’s ideas, which help people find not just success, but also sanity, in their work and personal lives, in a technologically complex world. Still, this reviewer (already a steadfast fan of, return reader of, and constant babbler about Newport’s 2016 book Deep Work) decided to read the 2021 Newport work before moving on to this year’s bestseller — partially just to take things in order, but also because the 2021 topic seems more squarely aligned with the interests of Leading Edge. Slow Productivity, like Deep Work, seems oriented most toward the individual, whereas A World Without Email has a lot to say about teams, team culture, and how our communication practices affect the workplace experience.

1. Beware the “hyperactive hive mind.”

If we don’t take control of our communications and admin practices, they will take control of us — subjecting us to a never-ending barrage of pings, pop-ups, and interruptions. This always-connected, constantly switching between conversations, rapid-back-and-forth style of communication has become a default environment in knowledge work, and Newport refers to it as “the hyperactive hive mind.” 

“To be fair,” writes Newport, “the hyperactive hive mind is not obviously a bad idea. Among the benefits of this workflow is the fact that it's simple and incredibly adaptive.” And yet, “although natural,” he argues, it “has turned out to be spectacularly ineffective… This constant interaction with the hive mind… requires that you frequently switch your attention… [C]ontext switches, even if brief, induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy—reducing cognitive performance and creating a sense of exhaustion”.

Newport has many ideas for alternatives to the hyperactive hive mind, and he freely admits that all of them are to some degree, inconvenient, unnatural, counterintuitive, complicated, and difficult. Yet, he persuasively argues, the hyperactive hive mind, precisely by means of its ease, lulls us into accepting enormous hidden costs; achieving better mental health (along with better productivity) is a prize for which it’s well worth paying those more obvious costs in terms of convenience, time, and simplicity. “Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term,” Newport notes, “but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.”

2. Distinguish between “work” and “workflow”.

Have you ever finished a long day at work — a day full of Zoom meetings, Slack messages, email, and updating your Asana/ClickUp/Monday/Trello/Notion/calendar/bullet journal/stack of Post-its, only to feel as if you spent eight hours working, but didn’t get any honest-to-goodness work done? You may be right. You may have spent all those hours not working but managing workflow. Both of these activities are important for knowledge work jobs, but they are different tasks.

As Newport observes, the hyperactive hive mind, with its constant interruptions, will never naturally suggest that it is time to stop doing workflow and start working. Time for concentrated, high-value work (“deep work”) needs to be set aside and protected. Yet, Newport argues, workflow management isn’t mere fluff — it is the vital work of coordinating projects across teams and his point isn’t to disparage it; to the contrary, he argues that workflow management can also be done more effectively and efficiently when it is systemized and taken seriously as something worth doing well.

The biggest enemies of good work and good workflow, Newport writes, are mid-context attention switching and communication overload. Minimize these, and we’ll improve our work, our workflows, and our work experience.

3. Workflow change can’t be top-down; teams need buy-in and some measure of control.

Change — even good change — is just hard. “Imagine you want to make a major change to your own or your organization's workflow,” writes Newport. “How can you avoid the inconveniences associated with this experimentation? You can't. You must instead adjust your mindset so that you no longer fear these annoyances.” For one person, a mindset shift can be hard enough. But to lead a mindset shift on a team is a challenge on another level. As Newport observes, “people don’t like changes they can’t control.”

Newport breaks this challenge into three steps:

Education — Help the team understand why change is needed and why the inconvenience will be worth it.

Buy-in — Generate specific ideas for new processes from discussion within the team (not by imposing them from the top down).

Adjustment — Create easy methods for improving the new workflow processes when issues arise. “In practice, you might be surprised by how few changes are actually suggested. It's the ability to make changes that matters…”

The book has far more detail, of course, than this review can capture — including nitty-gritty taskboard tactics; why office hours can be better than asynchronous messaging; why changes to your personal (non-team) workflow habits should be executed quietly, without announcement; and why phone calls are better than text messages to serve as emergency backup systems (texts could be a path to backsliding into hive-mind mode, whereas people will be hesitant to call each other unless truly needed). 

Whether you want to work with your team to improve collaboration together, or make personal changes in your workflow that help you perform better and simply breathe again, A World Without Email is worth your time.

For many of us, the sense of workplace fatigue dates back to the advent of email, which made communication easier but also more constant. "A World Without Email" is Cal Newport's exploration of how the "hyperactive hive mind" work culture, fueled by email's ascent, has led to widespread burnout, decreased productivity, and diminished mental health. Rich with practical insights, the book is a worthwhile read for anyone seeking to work more effectively and sustainably in our digital world.

Reading Edge: A World Without Email

The Song of Significance is a loving anthem to what Godin calls “significance,” and what Leading Edge calls “employee engagement.” What would it mean, Godin asks, if we did our work not just for the paycheck, or because the boss was watching? What if our jobs were about “work that matters created by people who care”? For us at Leading Edge, no question could be more central in the professional world.  

I have long been a fan of Seth Godin — especially his book This is Marketing, his pithy daily blog, and his podcast, “Akimbo.” But both the beauty and the limitation of much of his work is that it is — as this title advertises — a song. Which is to say, this book is not an action plan. It’s densely packed with wisdom, beautifully worded, and soars high in the clouds of abstraction. It’s long on poetry and short on practicality — and, to some extent, even internal consistency.  

The paradox lovers among us will appreciate this; some will find it frustrating. I count myself in both those camps at once. I found myself nodding vigorously along while reading, often enraptured, and yet I finished the book feeling not at all clear about how one might make all of its gorgeous principles into realities in my actual job. Now, it’s okay to ditch practicality for inspiration — more than okay! As Simon Sinek said, “Dr. King gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech.” Still, for so professionally oriented an author as Godin, I wonder if he couldn’t have done more to hit both marks at once.  

To take just one example, Godin wants leadership to be central and decentralized at the same time. As the bee pictured on the cover foretells, Godin uses bee metaphors many times in the book: 

“Bees aren't self-organizing. They're simply organized, aware of what the other bees are doing and each bee's role in the journey of the hive. They have a culture of peer-to-peer awareness, not top-down authority. The same is true of all resilient, decentralized human organizations.” 

Yet Godin also returns, over and over, to the importance of top leaders setting the tone and culture, leading to creating these “leaderless” cultures. Strong horizontal cultures need strong vertical leadership; that strikes me as true, and also strikes me as a paradox, or, at least, a polarity. Godin discusses both sides of this polarity, but never directly acknowledges that the two poles are in tension or sets them up in the kind of dialogue that would help us manage their coexistence. The problem isn’t contradiction, per se, as much as avoidance of conceptual confrontation. 

But perhaps this is too harsh an assessment. Wisdom, after all, isn’t simple, and no amount of hand-holding from Godin could have made it so. Perhaps his project is to present readers with wisdom, in all its complexity and paradox, and leave us to find our syntheses and solutions for ourselves. 

Godin’s greatest talent may be aphorisms; nobody is more virtuosic or generous with them. Here are just a few of my favorites from this volume:

“Significant organizations are team-centric... The purpose of a beehive isn't to make honey; honey is a by-product of a healthy hive.” 

 “What actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes, and perceptions of the people who do the work.” 

“In-person meetings are now like caviar, rare and precious. And yet we waste them.” 

This book, too, is like caviar: rare, precious, and — it must be said — not for every taste, but, for those who appreciate it, well worth savoring.

"The Song of Significance" is a loving anthem to what Godin calls “significance,” and what Leading Edge calls “employee engagement.” What would it mean, Godin asks, if our jobs were about “work that matters created by people who care”? For us at Leading Edge, no question could be more central in the professional world.

Reading Edge: The Song of Significance 

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