Book Club

A company sacrificed a beautiful client relationship to hit an internal year-end metric. People quit—not because the work was bad, but because they didn't believe in the place anymore. That's the cost of measuring output instead of impact.

This final book club session tackles the most practical chapters of The Outward Mindset: how systems invite inwardness, how to measure what actually matters, and how to build your personal action plan for turning outward. Participants from government, healthcare, education, and corporate settings share the metrics that drive their organizations—tickets closed, publications counted, self-reported accomplishments, student grades—and wrestle with how these output measures often undermine the very impact they're meant to create.

The conversation surfaces a profound tension: the things that matter most often can't be measured, and the things we measure often don't matter. "How much do you love your kids? Give me a number." Impact is frequently anecdotal, long-term, and invisible to annual review cycles. Yet participants share stories of transformation—the weight that lifts when you stop carrying inwardness, the ripple effects through families, the moment when someone says "this felt like a therapy session" after a simple conversation about thinking differently.

The session closes with participants sharing their outward game plans: instilling these ideas into management "in small bites," implementing unit-by-unit culture change at the VA, working through the philosophical layers beneath mindset (beliefs, past experiences, conscious and subconscious patterns), and simply choosing to "live it out" against the tide.