Summer Reads 2022

Need something new on your nightstand? Looking for a summer escape? Or need your next book club selection? We've got you covered. It's all the pleasures of a reading list, without the book report.

We asked some of Duke's most admired faculty members to contribute to our popular Lifelong Learning summer reading list. Each book includes five questions to consider while reading, direct purchase links, and an introduction video from the author.

The Launch Book: Motivational Stories to Launch Your Ideas, Business or Next Career

Nonfiction Business

5 Questions to Consider While Reading

  1. What is the origin story of your career change or business idea - the story that reveals to the world who you are and why your launch matters?
  2. If you are launching in pursuit of becoming your best self - what is the risk?
  3. What is a failure in your life - failure defined as an outcome different than what you had hoped for and what lesson did you learn from it?  Can you reframe that failure as a transformative life lesson?
  4. Who are the members of your tribe that you can invite to invest in your success and give you the courage, the truth, and the key data to evolve your launch idea?
  5. Imagine it's a year after you've launched - what would you want to tell your current self about this moment in time?

Biography

Sanyin’s mission in life is to enable greatness in others. She is the founding executive director of Duke University’s Fuqua/Coach K Leadership & Ethics Center, a professor with Pratt School of Engineering and a Faculty Fellow with its Divinity School. She was recognized by Thinkers50 (the premier global ranking of management thinkers) in 2019 as the World’s #1 Executive Coach & Mentor. In 2021, Thinkers50 named her as one of the 50 most influential thought-leaders in the world.

An Influencer with more than 1 million LinkedIn followers, she was recognized on LinkedIn’s Top Global Influencer Voices (2017, 2018) Her insights have been featured in New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, HBR, Economic Times of India, Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper, and The Wall Street Journal. Sanyin pens The Last Word Column in Dialogue Review, and the Ask Sanyin column for MIT Sloan Management Review. She authored The Launch Book: Motivational Stories for Launching Your Idea, Business, or Next Career which inspires readers through stories of different leaders and gives them an action plan for leveraging change using behavioral science principles Her biweekly substack newsletter - Leadership Playbook: Unleashing Your Superpowers, helps readers discover their innate and instinctive strengths and build super teams.

She helps CEOs, friends, students, mentees and teams discover and use their superpowers to make the biggest difference. She is also a mom of 3 and married to the love of her life, Chad Miller (Duke Medicine ’99).