For the better part of the last year, we’ve been running a “Strategy Club”, a long-running Anti-Book Club with a focus on a) learning and applying strategy and b) increasing the number and depth of connections between monastics and lay people. Here’s an excerpt from our charter:
Tiago’s Anti-Book Club model is great for learning about a topic with breadth and depth. By meeting on the same topic over many months and cycles, we compound that value.
The twist is that we’re not just passively reading books, or constrained to merely discussing them. We have a shared intention to apply the material in our projects and share our learning. Here’s how Ben Mosior, a founding member of Strategy Club, framed our version of model:
This has already had terrific effects:
- Monastics and lay people are meeting and developing connections, learning about each other’s worlds
- We’ve been exposed to new ideas about strategy, and have applied those ideas to our work
- People in our monasteries and workplaces have been exposed to ideas they might not otherwise have encountered
- We’ve shared valuable blog posts with the world, like Callum Flack’s summary of Ben’s notes on “Deciphering Sun Tzu“
We’ve had several people express an interest in joining. We’d love to have new members, but we’re maintaining a 1-1 ratio between monastics to lay people. That means that monastics are the bottleneck. As Daniel Thorson said half-jokingly, “Tired of waiting? Become a monastic and get bumped to the front of the line.” In the meantime, you can read our charter, or view the notes that we’ve created so far.
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