The Alumni Career Services team shares the books that challenged and inspired their thinking this year.
Ultimate Questions: A Stakeholder Guide to the Business of Your Life by Andrew C. Wicks
Reviewed by Jen Coleman
Since 2020, Darden’s Alumni Career Services has offered a life design workshop based on Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’s Designing Your Life. One of the foundational exercises in their book asks participants to reflect on why we are here and why we work. Andrew Wicks’s Ultimate Questions focuses entirely on this reflection. Wicks references Designing Your Life in his discussion of the good life, underscoring the intellectual alignment between the two approaches. Ultimate Questions invites readers to wrestle with enduring questions about identity, purpose, the good life and how we should live and work with others.
This is not a casual read. That is unsurprising given that the book emerged from a course Wicks taught for many years, one in which students spent an entire semester working through these challenging questions. To gain full value from the book, readers must be willing to slow down, complete the exercises and reflect honestly. Ultimate Questions rewards depth and engagement rather than quick consumption.
The material on leadership was particularly compelling. Wicks challenges a common but often unexamined assumption that those we lead share our answers to life’s most important questions. Leaders inevitably project their own views of purpose, success and the good life onto others. The book asks us to consider the consequences of that projection. Are we making it easier or harder for others to live well? Are we grounded in helping others, serving something larger than ourselves and fostering environments where people feel connected to one another and to the mission of the organization?
It is difficult to imagine a more important set of questions for business leaders today.
The Thinking Machine, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt
Reviewed by Stacey Milne
Witt’s biography not only tells the story of Huang and NVIDIA since its 1993 founding in a Denny’s restaurant. It also reveals a broader technological transformation tracing the unlikely paths of scientists and engineers that ushered in the era of AI.
Witt tells the story of a hard-driving, super intelligent and ultra-competitive CEO who had the vision to bet his entire company on a weekend pivot from being a computer graphics company for gamers to the supercomputer engine for the AI industry.
Huang thinks like an engineer, not a businessperson. As a Darden grad schooled in the social sciences and humanities, with no deep understanding of microchips, machine learning, parallel computing or neural networks, I found it fascinating to learn about NVIDIA’s technical innovation. Equally compelling was the business and personal journey of a CEO who believes his work is ushering in the next industrial revolution—and that it will be unquestionably good for humanity.
Build the Life You Want by Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey
Reviewed by Marty Speight
Arthur Brooks’ happiness course at Harvard Business School is famously oversubscribed, and his Atlantic column, “How to Build a Life,” has now run well over 100 installments. Clearly, something he is saying is landing — especially with high-achieving professionals.
I recently read Brooks’ 2023 book, Build the Life You Want, which distills his research, teaching and practical wisdom into a concise guide to becoming happier. It’s a short book, dense with ideas, and it’s not the usual pop psychology of the self-help genre — there are no hacks here, no shortcuts. Brooks is rigorous. He starts by clarifying what we actually mean by “happiness,” then grounds his recommendations in behavioral science, philosophy and decades of empirical research.
The framework at the heart of the book is Brooks’ four pillars of happiness: family, friendship, work, and faith. For Darden alumni, the chapter on work is particularly resonant. Brooks reminds us that happy careers take many forms and that lasting satisfaction comes less from status or compensation and more from intrinsic rewards: a sense of progress, competence and service to others.
As his co-author Oprah Winfrey puts it, success in life is about asking the right questions and being willing to answer them honestly. If you are at a moment of reflection — mid-career, post-promotion, pre-transition — Build the Life You Want is a genuinely useful read.
Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Reviewed by Sheila McQuade
To ooch or not to ooch—how to decide? In Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, Chip Heath and Dan Heath offer a clear, practical framework for making better decisions in both business and life. Using real-world examples and a dose of humor, the authors show how even seasoned professionals can improve their judgment by slowing down and applying a disciplined process.
Heath and Heath identify “four villains of decision making” — narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion and overconfidence — that often derail good choices. Recognizing which of these villains show up most often in my own decision-making has been a useful exercise in self-awareness. Since reading the book, I’ve found myself slowing down and questioning my initial assumptions, a small shift that has already led to better decisions.
To counter the four villains, the authors introduce the “WRAP” method: widen your options, reality-test your assumptions, attain distance before deciding and prepare to be wrong. Through business cases, everyday scenarios and research, Heath and Heath suggest that following a process enhances rather than restricts our ability to create successful solutions. Each chapter’s one-page summary makes the framework easy to revisit and apply.
Decisive is a quick, engaging read for anyone facing complex choices. Should you ooch and test an idea before fully committing? Use the 10/10/10 rule to manage emotion? Examine base rates before pitching a new strategy? Whether the stakes are high or you simply find yourself stuck, Decisive provides a thoughtful guide for choosing more wisely.
If you’d like to learn more about our offerings and career coaching, please contact us at AlumniCareerServices@darden.virginia.edu.
