💡📚 Big Idea Book Club Round-Up with Outspoken Speakers
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Big Ideas💡 and the Best Books! 📚
Looking for some great conversation starters? We can help! So many of Outspoken's speakers are best-selling authors with award-winning books that inspire new approaches to some of our biggest questions. If you're looking for a common read, a community read, or something impactful for your employee resource group, don't miss these titles below, all featured by the Next Big Idea Club!
Rina Bliss | Science, Tech, and Policy Analyst
Rina Bliss is a professor of Sociology at Rutgers University and award-winning author of Rethinking Intelligence (Harper Wave), Race Decoded (Stanford University Press) and Social by Nature (Stanford University Press). Rina’s latest book Rethinking Intelligence: A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential tells us what we should know about the new science of intelligence, and how best to use that knowledge.
Key Insights from the Next Big Idea Club:
💡 Test scores don’t tell us how smart we are.
💡 Intelligence is a process.
💡 Our environments can empower or inhibit us.
💡 We have infinite potential.
💡 Seize the learning moment.
In Rethinking Intelligence, Rina offers successful strategies we can use as individuals and a society, including embracing a growth mindset, prioritizing connection, becoming more mindful, and reforming systemic issues—poverty, racism, the lack of quality early childhood education—that have a negative and lasting neurobiological impact.
Ruha Benjamin | Education & Tech Equity Advocate
Ruha Benjamin is a Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), 2023 winner of the Stowe Prize, among many other publications. Ruha’s work unpacks the relationships between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, and health and justice.
Key Insights from the Next Big Idea Club:
💡 We need to learn how weathering affects our well-being.
💡 Systems of education are microcosms of inequity.
💡 Our workplace can serve as a sphere for change.
💡 Health, education and justice are interdependent.
💡 In addition to pushing for a stronger public safety net, we need to cultivate collective wellbeing.
Part-memoir, part-manifesto, Viral Justice recounts Ruha’s personal experiences and struggles while offering a passionate, inspiring, and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world.
Ximena Vengoechea | Interpersonal Communications Expert
Ximena Vengoechea has led some of Silicon Valley’s top tech companies as a user researcher and advisor. She is the author of Listen Like You Mean It: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection, which builds on her experience facilitating conversations at companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest, unpacking strategies for effective listening and practical concepts for not only the workplace, but also everyday life.
Key Insights from the Next Big Idea Club:
💡 Most of us are not really listening.
💡 Conversations contain hidden needs.
💡 Each of us has a particular filter we tend to listen through. Sometimes it’s the perfect fit, but sometimes it’s not.
💡 Asking the right questions can deepen a conversation.
💡 Empathetic listening requires self-awareness.
In Listen Like You Mean It, Ximena offers an essential listening guide for our times, using scripts, key questions, and more that will teach you how to earn rapport with strangers, ask questions that deepen conversations, pause at the right time to encourage vulnerability, and navigate tough conversations that don’t go as planned.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela | Political and Cultural Historian
Natalia Petrzela is a scholar, writer, teacher, and activist. As an Associate Professor of History at The New School, she studies the politics and culture of the modern United States. She is the author of Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture and her latest book, FIT NATION: The Gains and Pains Of America’s Exercise Obsession, which imagines how we might create a more inclusive, stronger future through exercise.
Key Insights from the Next Big Idea Club:
💡 Mind and body are inseparable, and cultivating both is integral to our wellbeing.
💡 ‘Third places’ are crucial to human thriving.
💡 Expertise isn’t everything.
💡 Fitness is a social justice issue.
💡 No opportunity is too small to make progress.
Only 20 percent of Americans work out consistently, over half of gym members don’t even use the facilities they pay for, and fewer than 30 percent of high school students get an hour of exercise a day. So how did fitness become both inescapable and inaccessible? Spanning more than a century of American history, Fit Nation answers these questions and more through original interviews, archival research, and a rich cultural narrative. Ultimately, Natalia argues that the fight for a more equitable exercise culture will be won only by revolutionizing fitness culture at its core.
Outspoken Agency is a women-owned speaking agency representing leaders, founders, public intellectuals, authors and entertainers for paid keynotes, workshops and panels at in-person and virtual events. Learn more about our female founders here.