10 Books That Will Change Your Understanding of Community
There are a lot of books written about how to build community.
And there are a lot of posts listing the top community books.
Here’s a good one with a lot of the usual suspects.
They’re great, and I’ve learned a lot from them. I even wrote one. But I’ve always learned more about community from books that aren’t directly about community.
Here are 10 books that aren’t directly about community, but shaped much of my philosophy around how to build communities.
Have a book you think I should read? Drop a comment and let me know. I have a book-buying addiction that NEEDS TO BE FED.
The first “online” community existed long before the invention of computers and the internet. The telegraph transformed how humans communicated. It allowed us to talk across oceans and continents. It changed the speed of information. This book is about the history of how the telegraph came to exist and the fascinating culture and rituals that formed among telegraph operators. It’s incredible how similar it was to the culture of online communities today.
Junger (who also wrote The Perfect Storm) provides a powerful perspective on community through the perspective of combat veterans. The strongest communities are formed amongst groups of people experiencing intense adversity. The book references a study where rates of depression surprisingly went down during the London Bombings because citizens felt more connected to each other. Combat veterans feel an intense sense of community while at war, and then come home to a society that lacks that same tribal connection we all yearn for. The lack of community may explain the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder we see today.
Alinksy’s manual for starting movements and creating change is a must-read for anyone working in community, even if not in politics. His out-of-the-box approach shaped community organizing for years to come and inspired many modern-day campaigns, including Obama’s. His model for how people in society break down into “haves, have nots, and have-a-little-want-mores” is a fascinating corollary for any community.
How we connect with each other today is rooted in how we evolved as a species. Homo sapiens’ ability to form larger groups may be the primary reason we outlived other human species that were stronger and smarter. Our ability to believe in something that doesn’t exist in nature (myths, gods… mission statements?) gave us a reason to connect to each other beyond basic needs for survival. Our ability to gossip helped us feel like we could know and trust larger groups of people.
This book framed how I think about “distributing control”. L. David Marquet was tasked with commanding the lowest-performing submarine crew in the fleet and turned it around into the highest-performing fleet by flipping the military model of top-down leadership on its head. Instead of orders coming from above, members of the fleet would send orders up the chain of command. It was highly risky and, it turned out, highly effective. Community building is all about empowering people to contribute as leaders. This book shows you how.
We use the word “community” to describe a lot of different social groups. One type of group community is often conflated with is a “crowd”. Surowiecki presents a data-backed case that crowds, when given independence of decision-making, will tend to make better judgments than any one person, even if that person is considered smarter or more experienced. But it also makes it clear that communities in the way we know them can be very inefficient at making decisions or judgments due to groupthink and other social dynamics. Our temptation is often to let our community make decisions together, but this book makes the case that this won’t work. You can however put certain criteria in place to tap into the collective wisdom of large groups of people.
People either love or hate this book. I credit it with unlocking awareness of a lot of my personal biases and privilege. If you’re building community, you’re influencing who belongs, who feels included, and who feels safe. If you’re white, this book will help you see your privilege and give you more confidence to engage in conversations around race. If you aren’t white, this book will give you a perspective into why white people struggle to have meaningful conversations around race. Ultimately, this book will lead you down a path to building more inclusive communities and help you better navigate conversations around race and privilege with your members.
This book shaped how I think about contributor models in communities. Based on deep research in the open-source space, Nadia Asparouhova shows how our dream state of communities, filled with lots of contributors all playing a meaningful role, is just that: a dream. Most communities are built and maintained by a very small core group, and sometimes a single individual. Open source is one of the purest forms of “community-based business” we have. This book will clear up some common misconceptions about how the community sausage is made.
This might be the most important book community builders can read. Our work deals deeply with human emotion. We have to manage our own emotions, and work with the range of emotions that show up in our communities. This book is an invaluable guide on how to communicate thoughtfully in difficult conversations, especially when experiencing anger and frustration. It provides a path to communicating empathetically without sacrificing honesty.
I’m a people pleaser. Always have been. A lot of community builders are. It’s what makes us good at understanding and connecting with people, but it’s also the root of much of our suffering. Often great communities are built by doing things differently, and that can cause people to throw some shade your way. You’ll also have to make decisions for your community that aren’t popular. You’ll have to enforce rules. You will have members who don’t like you. This book, written as a conversation between a philospher and a youth, offers a great primer on “Adlerian psychology”. It will help you separate your self-esteem from the perspectives of others.
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Here’s a message I got last week:
“Hi, David - because of your job board, I'm wrapping up my first week as Head of Community at a wonderful organization. I'm so excited: I feel well-suited for, and mission-aligned with, my new role. Thank you, thank you, thank you."
1. Late Checkout: Community Manager (Remote) - the opportunity to work on the incredible Late Checkout team with Greg Isenberg and April Maclean. This team understand community product design better than anyone I know.
2. Bitly: Senior Director, Community (Remote) - Everyone’s favorite URL shortener is hiring for a legit senior community role, reporting directly to the CMO.
3. Notion: Head of Community (NY) - Building community at Notion is kind of like cheating because everyone already loves the product so much. They’re looking for someone with 10+ years experience, b2c/b2b background who has grown large teams.
That’s all for this week!
I tested out publishing twice last week. I liked it. I’m going to try to keep a Tuesday and Thursday cadence going.
So I’ll see you back here on Thursday.
-David
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