What's in a book club?

The point of a book club is to read the book together and debrief thoughts, feelings, and ideas from the book. This is both a debrief as much as it is a collaboration. The groups’ members collaborate about the book and the book's story and information.

When a book club does not need to read a book, is it still a book club anymore? Is it a club? What if the goal is for half the people in the group to read the book and the other half to not read the book? Then the group collaborates on the ideas of the book. Half the group unbiased by the book and the other half of the group biased from the perspective of the book.

Or what if the point of the book club is to hang out, make friends, drink wine, and talk about a book? Some people read the book, some people started but did not finish, and some people didn't read it at all.

How about the book club where it is two people talking on a stage or in a video or on a podcast. Nobody else has to read the book. Is this even still a book club?

Book clubs have a certain mutuality, participation, and collaboration to them. The final idea is more than the book's content. It is a meta about the book as content for consumption through conversation. Thus people are making content about content and selling it to make money. Someone could even then start a club around the content the debrief and collaborate over. Thus having a club about the book club.

How are you labeling your meetings, content, projects, products, work, and free time? Are you giving them the right labels? Is your free time actually used for work? Is that meeting you are leading actually a meeting or is it an educational session? Are you putting the right labels on your work? Are you communicating the correct expectations?

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Accessibility Settings

Apple continually works to make their products more accessible to more and more people who would not normally be able to access their products. One way they have done so is their accessibility settings.

These settings can do a ton of different things from reading the screen to you if you are visually impaired or give you a button to perform commonly used functions or commands. You can even hook the iPhone up to hearing aids, zoom the screen/magnify or just plain make the text larger and/or bolder, to name a few.

These amazing settings make the phone easier to use for people who want to use a smartphone but they might need additional consideration.

In contrast, getting ahold of a company when I need product support, is almost impossible. For instance I was trying to call my cell phone provider recently and it took me multiple attempts and waiting on hold for a representative because they were experiencing ‘longer than normal wait times due to an increased volume of calls.’ Of course, I can give them my phone number and they will call me back later. And of course when they call later, I am in the middle of something and physically unable of answering my phone.

I am now left to call back again and wait. This time spending more time on hold and waiting for a representative despite the ‘longer than normal wait times due to an increase volume of calls’ ... again.

Which way have you positioned yourself? Are you more accessible or less accessible? Are you trying to find better ways for your customers and friends to be able to work and engage with you? Do you push your business and office to be more accessible to your customers?

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