As I was frantically packing the day before I moved to New York, I remember seeing a bright orange book on my mom’s desk. With the chaos of moving on my mind, I didn’t even think to ask her about it. But, as I was eating breakfast the next morning, my mom handed me that shiny orange book and told me she had bought it for me. Still more pressed about moving, I briefly glanced at the back to see that it was about Dunkin Donuts, and with my dad on my case about getting to the airport, I ended up tossing it into my backpack and forgetting about it. Despite my dad’s stress about me missing my flight, I ended up at my airport gate an hour too early (shocker – I know). Unzipping my backpack to get a phone charger, I decided to pull out that annoyingly bright book one more time. Rereading the back, I thought it was an interesting concept; the CEO of Dunkin Donuts had managed many other companies in the past, and I thought there could be some fascinating takeaways, especially as I was starting a corporate job in just two days.
I started reading Challenge Culture on the flight over, but the majority of it was consumed on my daily commute to work. When I initially read the back of the book, I had pretty high expectations and thought that I could gain some interesting insight from Nigel Travis’ life experiences. However, the more I read the book, the less confident I was that would be the case. It felt like there were so many topics he could’ve talked about but instead cherrypicked disjoint events to fit his narrative. The book is called Challenge Culture to describe the working environment Travis has made throughout his tenures of leadership. The Challenge Culture makes sense on paper: Nigel wanted his employees to be able to challenge their leaders and push back where necessary without fear of consequences. Yet, it felt like he didn’t need an entire book to convey this message. The length of content felt like it could have been summarized better as an article or Ted Talk. Whereas half of the book felt like it was giving meaningful merits of the Challenge Culture, the other half felt like a disorganized grouping of events being forced to fit the narrative.
I almost wish Travis had made this book a regular biography without the challenge culture being the pervasive ideology. He has a lot of experiences that I would have liked to hear more about, and his coming-up story was great to hear since he truly had to work for his accomplishments himself. Although I had some memorable takeaways from this book, they were few and far between compared to what I had set my expectations to. That being said, this was still an interesting read. I never wanted to put it down at any point, and it made my morning commutes significantly more entertaining. This book will also be memorable for me both because my mom gifted it to me and because it’ll serve as a marker of the first book completed on my New York reading journey. Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t love this book as much as you would have hoped, but it was still a fantastic read and I appreciate the thought you put into buying it for me.
Rating: 3/5