READ THIS FIRST
Congratulations! The fact that you’re looking at this means you’re at least thinking about reading, and there is no better way I’ve found of learning. This is a long list so it can quickly get overwhelming. I’ve broken it into topics, and then in the topic, they are listed out in order of my favorites (so the first book was my favorite on it, and so on through the list).
If you can handle them, audio books are the secret of how I’m able to read as much as I do. If you haven’t sped them up yet, moving to 1.2 will let you read 20% more. Over time, you’ll find yourself moving the speed up faster (after 9 years, I listen around 2.5x which is how I read so many). I take notes on every book by using text to speech on my phone to send myself a text message. My feeling is the 10 min it might take for notes mad the hours I spent on the book far more valuable.
For those who are readers, the habit can get a little pricey. Amazon or Audible will have every book, but Overdrive.com will connect to your local library and let you check out kindle and audio books for free. Everand.com is a service that lets you read either kindle or audio books that aren’t in the library. The claim is that they have unlimited reading, but I’ve noticed I’m capped at 2 audio books a month (though I can still read paper). Either way, at $10 a month, if you read a book a month, the service is still less than audible or kindle.
Like every reader, I have a list I will never get to, and I’m always looking for a good book. If you find one not on this list, would love to hear about it at kevin@business-simplified.com.
Small Business
Mike Michalowicz – This one is actually an author over a book. Mike has dedicated his life to giving other small business owners the tools he’s found along the way. Many people know him from Profit First which tells you how to make sure you get paid as an owner, but The Pumpkin Plan will tell you how to focus on the best customers. Get Different will help you with marketing. Clockwork will help you with process. All In will help you with finding and keeping the people you need.
Business Made Simple: 60 Days to Master Leadership, Sales, Marketing, Execution, Management, Personal Productivity and More – Miller does a great job of breaking up the key principles every small business owner should understand, including leadership, marketing, sales, negotiation, management, and execution.
Traction – Whether you’re in a small business or a large one, a key thing you need to understand is how to structure the business to be successful, and what are the key roles you’ll need. Traction presents the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), which gives you a solid structure for both. Although it’s must have reading for any small business, I’ve seen many large organizations that don’t have the basics in place and would benefit.
Who not How – This is a lighter book from Dan Sullivan but an important one for every small business owner. As a small business, too many times owners are trying to do too much with too few resources, trying to learn how to do everything instead of relying on professional help. In this book, Sullivan highlights the importance of leaning on others. This becomes really important with the new fractional resources which allows companies to have access to Marketing, Finance, HR, or other professionals, but only use what they need.
Shut Up and Listen!: Hard Business Truths that Will Help You Succeed – In this one, Fertita, who grew a small restaurant into a casino empire, focuses on key items every business owner should understand, including focusing on customer needs, understanding your strengths, knowing where to focus, and understanding and taking advantage of business cycles.
Fractional Leadership – Every small business owner fights with trying to balance what they should do on their own, when they ask for help, and who they should ask. In this book Ben Wolfe explores the most common fractional leaders (Marketing, Sales, COO, CIO/CTO), what they do, and when you should use a fractional vs just grabbing a consultant or agency. Whether you use fractionals or not, the book provides a great foundation for what the key success items are in each of the areas.
Leadership
As we look to what to do, all of us are looking for leadership. One of the key themes I see in this area is finding ways to influence through servant leadership, or putting other people’s needs first.
All In: How Great Leaders Build Unstoppable – Michalowicz has dedicated his life to helping small businesses and this is a simple straightforward one on leadership, using his own story as a small business owner as an example. He focuses on the Costco approach (pay more per person, but get the best so you pay less in the long run), training, finding the best in every person, and making sure you have both the right fit and in the right seat.
High Performance Habits – I almost didn’t read this one because I wasn’t looking for another book on habits. But the book is about practices more than habits. Burchard walks you through how great leaders increase their own internal motivation, control their emotions, build influence, and develop personal courage. Must read for any leader.
The Hard Thing about Hard Things – Business can often be a dog eat dog world, and Horowitz’s story is proof of how brutal business can be. He starts the book with the story of the company from start to his final exit taking a company from $1.2M to $1.6B. He then goes into detail about some of the principles and decisions that helped make him successful in the process. Most often books are about theory, with some instructions, but here Horowitz includes both. Great reading for any leader.
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win – This book has great principles presented in a fun read. Each chapter walks through one of the twelve principles the authors cover, but with examples from their experiences as Navy Seals in Iraq. The book starts with the premise that when top leadership takes responsibility for errors (no matter who made the actual mistake), teams can focus on fixing the system that allowed something to happen instead of wasting time on blame. It then provides a number of other tools to help teams be more effective.
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell – Bill Campbell was an amazing individual who went from a football coach to helping the biggest names in Silicon Valley including top leadership from Google, Apple, Intuit, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook. His style was one of tough love, starting with a rough exterior focused on pushing people to be their best, but also mixed with a deep caring. The book provides simple examples of how Bill ran one on ones, overcame turf wars, created trust in teams and organizations, and advice he gave to help teams overcome whatever obstacles they were facing.
The Infinite Game – Too many companies play in business like it’s a finite game, with a start and finish. They keep score with quarterly or annual profits. In this book, Sinek suggest we play a much bigger game, one that doesn’t end, and the goal is to just keep playing. The idea is to stretch your time horizon, and focus on winning being a cause or purpose rather than just customers or profits. This plays into the purpose driven approach many companies are using to focus on solving deeper problems, leading to both short term wins, and long term strategy.
Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust – Leadership has moved from the early 1900’s when the CEO knew how to do every job, to the complexity of today, where leadership’s job has moved to harnessing the genius in every individual. Servant Leadership focuses on how to do this, and Ken Blanchard is a pioneer in the field.
Strategy
Too many people see strategy as a roadmap. The roadmap is the end result, but strategy is deciding what you will do to win (which tells you where to focus).
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters Rumelt does a great job of talking about what strategy isn’t, with a variety of examples. He then walks through the process of creating a good strategy, which starts with the challenge in the market that needs to be overcome, moves to guiding principles individuals need to use through the process, and then specific actions the company will take (roadmaps are the end result, but strategy is how you get good ones). Strategy is never easy. You’re looking for a different approach, a way of winning based on your specific strengths and overall market need and other competitor’s weaknesses. This book won’t tell you what your strategy should be, but it will get you started on the journey.
Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results – The first step of strategy is deciding how you’re going to win. The next step is turning that plan into a reality. For those who haven’t heard of OKRs (objectives and key results), they are a simple way to turn a strategic goal (objective), into an actionable plan (key results). This book discusses how to integrate OKRs into your process to help focus on the most important items that will help make you successful.
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs – We see quite a bit of focus in the literature of the power of OKRs. Radical Focus has a lighter coverage of them. Measure What Matters is a deep dive. The books provides their history, then discusses using them to focus on priorities, align individuals in the organization, and create accountability, with a variety of examples of how they have been used.
Critical Thinking
Thinking Fast and Slow – This is Kahneman’s classic explaining system 1 which is our unconscious system that drives most of our behavior, and system 2 which is our conscious mind that we think of as ourselves. Not a short book, and it feels like it’s written by a Nobel prize winning behavioral scientist (which it is), but one of the most quoted book I’ve seen on the mind.
Challenge Your Assumptions, Change Your World – We recognize assumptions when we make a prediction that fails, but actually assumptions are the predictions the brain is making that Hawkins discussed in A Thousand Brains. Cohen explores what an assumption is, provides tools to spot them, and ways to think about which assumptions are valid and which need tested.
Systems Thinking
Thinking in Systems – Systems thinking deserves it’s own category just because it’s useful for both innovators and leadership. While all of us need to be looking at the bigger picture, and many of us think we’re already good at it, the book provides insights into the the different elements of any system including the purpose of the system, how inventories are stored, the way items flow in and out, how feedback is used to control both flows and overall inventory.
Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen – Most of the books on innovation focus on solving a problem, this book is a good one on thinking bigger – how to prevent the problem in the first place. Their is some focus on understanding the system, but most of the focus is on how to effectively change it.
Process Improvement
The Power of Business Process Improvement – Most of us our working to find better ways to get more done. In this book, Susan Page walks through documenting processes and then finding ways to improve them step by step. Great text for anyone looking to find a better way of getting work done.
Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work – There is so much opportunity for automation, yet so few executives understand the high level process of breaking work down and then automating the process. This book does a great job of going through the process of understanding the individual tasks, their strategic importance to the organization, options for automation, and finding the right balance between humans and automation.
Analytics
Competing on Analytics – Too many businesses are still trying to make decisions based on intuition and observation, instead of just asking the question and gathering data. This HBR book walks through a five stage maturity model showing how companies go from not using data at all to having it as a key competitive advantage. Lots of great information if you want to understand the high level concepts without diving into statistics or Python.
Storytelling with Data – This one could go into communication as well. The first part of analytics is finding the insight, but the second part is telling the story. The book does a great job of getting tactical on specific examples and approaches you can use. If you need to communicate numbers at all, this is a great read.
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking – If you’re working with analytics, it helps to understand the concepts of math. This books gives you a simple explanation of high level ideas anyone in math should understand. The book covers concepts like linearity, calculus, regression, probability, optimization, and a number of others, but it language anyone with a basic understanding of math will be able to understand.
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy – This one is interesting. The author looks at the harm analytics has done in a variety of fields, and how they tend to disproportionally impact the poor. I read it as a warning of where there could be weaknesses in models, and how to spot them. An example was a car insurance company that used credit scores more than driving records, and charged more the less likely you were to change, leaving competitors an opportunity. Good book for a thinking about unintended consequences of models.
AI/Digital
A Thousand Brains – When we look at how artificial intelligence works, it helps to start with the human brain and how it works (since it is still far more powerful than any computer). This book breaks that down, understanding the models we create, how we make predictions, and discussing where emotions come from (something we’re not even close to with AI).
Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence – AI is becoming an important change to how we work. In this book, Agrawal compares the introduction to AI to that of electricity. The first 20 years after electricity was created, only 3% of homes had it. 20 years later 97% did. We are currently in that in between time as the technology gets implemented (though it will be a lot shorter than 20 years). Great book on thinking about where the applications should be.
The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI – The whole digital world can be overwhelming for the rest of us. If you’re not a computer science major but still want to understand the tools and how to use them, this is a great introduction to what things are and how to learn them. A key point the author makes is that you only have to understand 30% of a tool to be able to start understanding where it can be used.
Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World – This one is interesting because I’ll mention it, but because you should be aware of it, not read it. If you’ve heard someone talk about how AI will take over the world in the next 10 years and kill all the humans, this is likely where they got it from. Gawdat associates computers with emotions and consciousness without understanding enough about either. If you read it, read A Thousand Brains first for a much better understanding of what Gawdat misses.
Project Management
Agile
At their heart, Agile concepts are simple. But a key part of making them successful, for a team or an organization, is understand the core principles and how to use them.
Individual Teams
Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition – This is the bible if you are in a leadership role in Agile or interested in leveraging the principles in your company. Adkins, does a great job of focusing how to understand where teams are at, what you need to change before you start coaching, and then how to coach individuals to get the long term success Agile promises.
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time – This one is a little controversial in the Scrum community, since the real power in Scrum is doing the right thing, not increasing efficiency (and the title gets managers all excited about efficiency). Either way, the book does a great job of walking through the different elements of Scrum and why they exist. Too many times we see teams implementing scrum by doing what they do today, but changing what they call it. This book does a great job of making sure you know why the principles exist, helping to change how we work to get the benefits.
Turn the Ship Around – Marquette never mentions Agile, but excellent book of how he used the principles to turn one of the worst performing ships in the fleet into the best. Simple principles, easy to follow, and a fun read.
Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love – Fun, easy book to read about how Sheridan applied Agile principles at Menlo. Book is a good overview of how to apply the principles to the company environment, hiring, safety, communication, learning, and leadership.
Agile Organizations
Team of Teams – McChrystal walks through how he turned the forces in Iraq who were getting badly beat by quick Iraqi insurgents into an Agile organization that could react quickly and take the upper hand. Even though the book never mentions Agile, it’s a great outline of how to build teams that adjust quickly and work together which is the heart of the concept.
Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them – Although the author isn’t a big fan of Agile – this is actually the best book I’ve seen at building an Agile organization. Hamel discusses how much administrative work costs society, and then shows how to leverage principles of markets, ownership, meritocracy, community, and openness to push administrative tasks down to the front line and create a company where everyone is thinking like the CEO.
Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos – As people realize the value of Agile, we’re seeing more books on implementing it outside of IT. This book looks at how business leaders can implement the concepts throughout the organization, looking at Agile leadership, budget cycles, organizational structure, scaling teams, and mistakes to avoid.
The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done – Another book on scaling Agile, this one is built on creating an Agile organization by focusing on the key mindsets of focusing on customers, small teams, and networks. The first part of the book has great examples of how to apply the principles. The second half gets into examples of how society has gotten these principles wrong, and results we see because of these mistakes.
Product Management
One of the complaints about Agile is the short term focus. Product management is the strategic side of Agile, thinking long term of what we can deliver to customers to be successful.
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love – Marty Cagan wrote the product management bible with this one. He covers the full role of product manager from working with teams (and key roles on the team), creating a product vision, discovery techniques, experimentation, prototyping, testing, role of leadership, alternatives to roadmaps, OKRs, and how to keep innovation in large organizations, with examples of great product leadership in the field.
The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field – In this book Michalowicz focuses on presenting the concepts of niche marketing to small business owners rather than product managers, and does so in a hilarious down to earth way. The focus is on finding the most profitable customers and ignoring everyone else to create the best product that fits those customer needs.
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value – If you’re new to product management, Melissa Perri is a great introduction to the concepts. She goes to the basics of product management, talking to the why. She speaks to the role of the product manager, different examples of bad ones, walks through a product kata (a simple tool to help teams focus on creating the right solution), and building a product led organization. She has good examples, and one of the easiest discussions on strategy I’ve seen.
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days – This is a great book for product managers to see how quickly a problem can be solved. It discusses the process of identifying a customer problem, defining a solution, building a prototype, and testing it with users in five days. Agilists have an issue with the book since they argue it’s not a sprint in the Scrum sense of the word, but great book about rethinking how you are conducting experiments (and why it’s important to get the whole team involved).
Innovation
Project management often talks about the iron triangle – good, fast, cheap, pick two. But innovation lets you pick three. It finds way to step away from either or options to look at ways we can have our cake and eat it to.
Both/and Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems – This lines up with designers who focus on constraints knowing it sparks creativity. In this book the authors challenge readers to stop thinking of either/or when there’s a problem and work on thinking creatively to find ways to get both sides benefits.
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration – Catmull is more than the CEO of Pixar, he was a pioneer in computer animation. Book is an excellent example of creating a culture of creativity in organizations. He speaks to the process in Pixar of taking every movie, which sucks to start with, to the blockbusters the studio is known for creating.
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – In this text, Clayton Christiansen introduces the theory of jobs to be done, the idea that consumers don’t just buy products, they really hire them to complete a job in their lives. Great book on segmenting customers and then working with each of them to understand what they are really looking for from a product.
Insight Out – Stanford Professor Tina Selig breaks down the process of developing ideas and then turning them into reality into four steps: Imagination, Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. She walks through each to actually provide a roadmap into a process that often isn’t well explained.
Change by Design, Revised and Updated: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation – If you are in product management (or a product owner), and haven’t heard of design thinking, it’s well worth your time. In this book, Tim Brown, the chair of IDEO, provides an in depth walk through of each step of the design thinking process, which includes understanding the people who will be using the product and their problems, brainstorming, creating prototypes, and then testing.
Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change – Another book on design, but this one sits on the fence between innovation and change management. It explains the intervention design process (IDP) which focuses on where you want to end up and then creating the design to get there. The book looks at sources of customer insights, needed behavioral change, and thinking about different sources of pressure in creating change. It also discusses piloting and testing to make sure early on you’re on the right.
Think Again – This book by Adam Grant is focused on rewriting our mental models. The book is focused on helping see where models aren’t working, understanding and rethinking assumptions, and then has some great tools on thinking about how you help other people do the same.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail – This book is focused on consumer facing products, but the concepts help anyone trying to balance focusing on small vs large changes in innovation. It provides examples of how established companies focus on small improvements to existing products, while newcomers are able to focus on new innovations in niche markets that start out expensive, but then take over the market as the price drops (ultimately replacing market leaders).
That Will Never Work – In this book, Mark Randolph gives a behind scenes look at the creation of Netflix. The corporate version of Reed renting a movie is true, but the actual creation of the idea is much more nuanced, with years of looking for something that would work, and the team stumbling over the idea for a subscription and no late fees. Great case study on innovation.
Comedy
The Serious Guide to Joke Writing – Holloway has worked on comedy shows where it’s the writers job to find something funny everyday. She’s had to create jokes about financial crisis, insurance, and all kinds of topics that aren’t by nature funny and she takes you step by step through the process. Her joke web exercises show how to connect ideas which are a powerful way of finding creative solutions to any problem.
Do You Talk Funny: 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker – Besides helping us find creative ideas, humor can be a powerful way of improving the way we communicate with others. The book walks through ways to use humor in how we communicate.
Emotional Intelligence
We spend a lot of time at work thinking about what we do and how we can do it better from an intellectual perspective. However, emotional intelligence helps us understand a key part of being human.
Emotional Intelligence Habits – This is the newest work by Bradberry and is literally an encyclopedia of EQ. The first chapter introduces the importance, second offers a free assessment to see where you are at, and the remaining chapters are all focused on improving your EQ on a specific topic such as gaining confidence, working with negative people, being more happy, etc. It’s meant to be more of a workbook you can leverage when you need help, but great work packed with powerful ideas.
Daring Greatly – When I mention Brene Brown, most guys will mention their wives love her. It’s worth finding out why. Brown had dedicated her life to understanding shame, fear, vulnerability, and how they impact innovation, leadership, productivity, and companies in general. Great work on improving your EQ when it comes to leadership.
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts – As discussed, we are seeing a lot of focus on the advantages of servant leadership. This book provides an aspect of that, discussing the importance for leaders to be vulnerable. The focus is having the courage to be human, and to give permission to others to do the same. The book discusses the negative aspects of trying to be perfect as leader, and how these can be replaced with empathy, curiosity, and confidence.
Mental Health: Stressed: It Changed Everything – This one is actually specific to EMS providers but it talks through the ordeal one faced, getting PTSD so badly he imagined stabbing his infant while holding her. It’s an eye opening account of both the stress EMS and other front line providers face, how he got the help he needed, and how others can as well.
Culture
One of the core jobs of leadership is creating the right environment that will allow employees to thrive. Here are my favorites on creating that culture.
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups – This is a great summary of some of the newest research on culture, culminating at the end with how to create the two most common cultures – one in which employees know to do the right thing every time, or ones where finding the right solution is the goal (cultures of innovation). If you can only read one book on culture, this would be my recommendation.
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention Reed, the CEO of Netflix, talks about his journey to create a culture high in talent and candor. The journey is a combination of lessons learned from failures from his previous company, and noticing how changes at Netflix impacted culture, and then taking advantages of those changes to create a great one. My favorite book on culture, even if you only read the first two chapters.
Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others – This one sits between leadership and culture as Sinek provides my favorite example of servant leadership, analyzing the role from the earliest history of humanity, where leaders were the ones we counted on to protect us (which is why we are willing to give them a special place in society). The first half of the book is a great review of the leadership role, the second half looks at how the misuse of that role has impacted society and why we don’t trust leaders who give up their role of putting others first to focusing on themselves.
Marketing
General Marketing
Marketing has changed significantly in the last 20 years as we move from simply advertising a product, to educating people and focusing on solving problems.
The Ultimate Marketing Engine – Great book on not just marketing, but finding the right clients and then serving them through the full customer journey. Jantsch focuses on how to make every customer into one that refers. It’s good for your business, but also makes sure you’re providing the right value to the right customers.
$100M Leads and $100M Offers – Hormozi was a gym owner that figured out how to fill his gym full of people, fill other people’s gyms, and then help all businesses get the customers they need. More than just a book, this is a free system. You can go to Acquisition.com where he will walk you step by step through the process he explains in the books.
Revenue Growth Engine: How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth – Most people don’t want more leads, they want more customers, and they want more revenue. Rev Ops is the move away from siloed marketing, sales, and customer service to thinking about how to connect with more customers and add more value to them. Every marketing company should be reading this book.
Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen – People love stories, and Miller walks you through how to use story telling in your marketing to help your message jump out.
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer – One of the biggest issues with marketing is not knowing what is out there. In this book, the authors provide 19 different channels you can use and explain how to test each with less than $1k and in less than 30 days to find which channels will work best for you at the moment.
If you’re doing B2B marketing – you should be leveraging LinkedIn. You need to be using automation (I like thecodexmedia.com though there are lots of options out there). You don’t have to be awesome to be successful with LinkedIn, there’s enough people that you can be clumsy and still have success. Here are the books on helping you with the details.
LinkedIn Riches: How to use LinkedIn for Business, Sales, and Marketing – If you connect with John Nemo, he’ll often send you the book for free. Simple and to the point, getting LI right is about getting the right profile, connecting with the right people, and sending the right messages. This book will walk you through all three steps.
LinkedIn Unlocked – Nemo will get right to the point, but if you want to go deeper, this one by Dodaro is a great lead. Her chapter on targeting is a great walk through on building a buyer persona. More depth than Nemo, and a great lead to take your connecting to the next level.
Sales
Influence / Change Management
At it’s heart, leadership is about influence, getting people passionate enough to change what they’re doing. These books look at how to harness that passion and the process of change.
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek does a great job in this book of getting to the bottom of motivation, which starts with purpose. The book looks at not only how to get employees excited about what they do by linking it to something more, but also how to help customers understand that your product is more than just a bottom line.
Breaking Through: Communicating to Open Minds, Move Hearts, and Change the World – This book by Susman goes through a number of difficult communication challenges she’s had to overcome in her life and the principles that helped her get her message through. The most important of these was convincing a doubting public about the safety of vaccines as she worked with Pfizer through the pandemic. She walks through how to leverage courage, creativity, humility, empathy, and humor to effectively communicate some of our most difficult messages.
The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism – I always thought of charisma as how much people like you. While not incorrect, more importantly it has an impact on how well you are able to influence others. This book explores the three different aspects of charisma (power, warmth, and presence), and provides a variety of techniques to discover and improve on the one that works best for you.
Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman’s work is so influential in the field, that it’s worth mentioning. It does a great job of analyzing the conscious and unconscious parts of the brain and how they influence our behavior. However, this book isn’t for everyone. While full of great information, it’s longer and can be dry at times.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard – I would recommend this one if you’re interested in how our unconscious minds influence behavior, but looking for a lighter read than Thinking, Fast and Slow. It builds off of Kahneman’s work, providing straightforward explanations of the concepts and then good examples of how to use them to change both our own and other’s behavior.
Personal Productivity
We’re all looking for ways to get more out of the effort we invest. Key themes we see in this area are deliberate practice, deep work, and the importance of habits.
Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things – This is a great book by Adam Grant combining a number of the best research ideas on productivity. Many of us have heard of the 10k hour rule to world class excellence (you need 10k hours of deliberate practice). Grant discusses how we create the motivation to make those 10k hours fun to help get them in. He discusses the role of character, how we become sponges to absorb all the knowledge we need, and how to leverage these tools in a number of different scenarios.
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance – Psychologists are now questioning the importance of talent in peak performance, since talented or not, top performers all have around 10K hours of deliberate practice (deliberate practice is not just going through the motions, but breaking performance into smaller skills and then focusing on improvements). The authors discuss how to implement deliberate practice into any field, and finding the passion that will carry you through the needed effort.
Chop Wood, Carry Water – This is the lighter version of Grit. At the end of the day, success is built on hard work. This book is about falling in love with the work needed to be successful.
The Obstacle Is the Way – Focused on applying stoic philosophies to the modern world, Holiday discusses how you need to change your perception to see the opportunity in obstacles, using them as advantages to help you grow.
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – This book discusses how our society has trained us to move quickly back and forth between tasks, but related to the importance of deliberate practice, the importance of being able to have time to focus. For all of us feeling like we could do more, this book talks about how to get more out of the time you invest in any important task.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – While practice makes perfect, and deep work makes time for that practice, habits create the discipline to get started. The author focuses on atomic habits with the idea that a small step gets us started in the right direction. The book provides steps for creating these small habits and how to link good habits to what you’re already doing today.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success – This is an older book, but worth looking at if you’re not familiar with the work. Too many kids peg themselves as smart or dumb when they walk into kindergarten and then live their lives with that idea. Dweck’s research shows that it’s not about smart or dumb, but that all of us can learn if we’re willing to work for it. Pairs well with Grit.
Communication
Communication is such a big part of what we do today, that it’s worth breaking up into into coaching, facilitating, public speaking, and story telling.
Coaching
Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity – A key element we’re seeing is the importance of transparency. In this book, Scott focuses a variety of ways to communicate the right message, and the dangers of not doing so.
Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smart – This isn’t a coaching book at all, but it still focuses on the best of coaching – how to help other people improve their performance. The key is changing your focus from looking good to helping others grow. Great book on coaching, and excellent book for managers who want to do better at applying coaching principles.
Co-Active Coaching: The proven framework for transformative conversations at work and in life – For connecting with individuals, coaching becomes a great tool. It can be a difficult transition for leaders, however, since instead of giving great advice, you need to ask the right questions and then listen. Co-Active coaching provides a straightforward walk through of the process, skills and principles.
The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever – This book provides an explanation of why coaching is important, and how each of us can create a coaching habit (reaching for questions instead of advice when someone has a problem). It then provides seven questions you can use as a coach. The questions felt a little simplistic (for example – what’s on your mind, what else, what’s the real challenge here for you). However, they help think about the overall approach to getting people thinking.
The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships – Listening fits into a number of places, but is a key skill in coaching. I had my questions on how much value a book on listening could add (just keep your mouth shut, right?). But the book explores why listening is so important, from helping us find our identity as children to feeling validated as an adult. Understanding listening was one of the biggest gifts I could give someone else helped me put more emphasis on it. The book also has an empathetic approach to helping you understand reasons it’s hard, so you can see how to improve.
Facilitating
Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High – Strategic leadership is about getting everyone focused on the most important task, but that is always controversial (everyone has a different opinion on what’s most important). This book provides great tools to creating a safe environment and getting everyone’s opinion out into the open so we can have honest conversations. As a leader, it also helps you think about your assumptions, and how to be persuasive without being abrasive. There’s a lot of focus in the research of creating more inclusive workspaces, this book provides great tools on how to make that a reality.
Facilitating with Ease!: Core Skills for Facilitators, Team Leaders and Members, Managers, Consultants, and Trainers –I didn’t have a very clear understanding of facilitation does before I read this one. In a nutshell, a facilitator is the secret to a good meeting, keeping topics on track, making sure everyone is participating and getting heard, moving groups to a decision, and then making sure action items are recorded and followed up on. No company is able to hire a facilitator for every meeting, but understanding the skills will make your meetings far more effective.
Public Speaking – TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking – From the title, I originally thought this would be a collection of TED Talks – but it’s actually a step by step process of how to create one. It walks through key elements of a good presentation, including storytelling, connecting with the audience, tying the presentation together, preparation, and even what to wear.
Story Telling – Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business – Story telling is key way to connecting people whether one on one, small group, or a big crowd. This books walks through the importance of stories, key elements, and different kinds of stories to use in business (including value, founder’s story, purpose, and customer stories). It also talks about where to find stories, since most of us feel we really don’t have one.
Negotiation – Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It – Whether we like it or not, negotiation is part of all of our lives. This book helps to change the way you think about the concept. Interestingly, it uses many of the same techniques in Crucial Conversations and from coaching, understanding the other person’s needs, listening, and then using questions to find a solution. One of my favorite techniques from the book is using questions to get the other person to solve your problem.
Finding Joy at Work
We spend a large part of our lives at work, we should enjoy the time there.
Flow – If you’ve read about productivity, chances are you’ve heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book flow. If not, he describes that moment where we are in the zone, focused on a job we love, learning, growing, as time disappears in the process. The book explains what flow is, how we can achieve it in nearly any situation, and the keys to doing so.
Mindset – This is another heavily cited book. Carol Dweck grew up with a fixed mindset, thinking that being smart, or creative, or innovative was a gift and you either had it or you didn’t. Her research shows the opposite. Most of these attributes are skills. They come more naturally to some people, but can definitely be learned. Realizing that you can grow, changes the way you think about life and has a host of benefits she describes in the book.
Super Better – Jane McGonigal is a game theorist who had to use game theory to save her life. After a concussion, she couldn’t think, have a conversation, read a book, or do much else without excruciating migraines. As a game theorist, she created a game to survive the ordeal. In this book, she explains how to turn your own life into a video game, using quests, powerups, and adventures to both increase motivation and have fun along the way. It sounds a little goofy, but powerful concepts to change the way you think, and full of advice of how to find more joy. I’ve put it here, but also the best book I’ve read on productivity.
The Book of Joy – As we look for joy anywhere, this book by the Dali Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu is a great work to just feel better and understand how to find more happiness in life. The Dali Lama talks about how controlling our thoughts and expectations can help us find joy, and both of them speak of the importance of giving.
Learning
While we’re all working to integrate learning into what we do, these books help to be more effective in the process.
Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career – This is an interesting one. The book gives of examples of people learning skills very quickly, such as learning a new language in three months or covering the material from a four-year degree in a year. The book walks through the process, which starts by analyzing what information is needed, building a plan, and then gaining the needed knowledge, primarily by doing tasks whenever possible. Most of us can’t dedicate all of our time to learning a new skill (as many of the examples are able to do), but the book provides a shortcut to picking up additional skills that shortens the process.
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning – This one is primarily for teachers or students, though that includes anyone getting ready for professional exams. The book looks at the most effective way of learning and teaching a variety of information types including memorization, understanding new concepts, and improving physical skills.
Writing
For many of us that read, we start to feel like there might be a book inside us as well. Here are some books that have helped on my own writing journey.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – While most of us know Steven King for the wide number of novels he’s written, it was interesting to find he was a starving teacher when he published Carry, his first novel. While primarily focused on fiction writing, this down to earth book provides great advice to anyone interested in improving their writing skills. He discusses how to get the first ugly draft out their, the importance of having a disciplined writing schedule, technical aspects, refining texts, and the publishing process.
Published: The Proven Path From Blank Page To 10,000 Copies Sold – There is a whole business out there making money off of coaches or consultants who would like to build authority with a book. This book will save you thousands on people who want to show you how to write a quick book and self publish. The writing ideas will help you get started with the first draft, but more importantly, the book lays out how to self-publish and self-market when you get done, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing versus using a publishing house. Great book for any author, and lets you know how important marketing is.
Write a Must-Read: Craft a Book That Changes Lives—Including Your Own – Published will show you how to get started and publish your book, in this text A.J. Harper shows you how to write a book you’ll be proud of. She will help you find your voice, get through the first draft, and discuss different ways to edit the book to get it to where you want it. Harper loves writing and you can tell. Great book for any non-fiction writer.
Bird by Bird – There is a beauty in writing books about writing, and in this book Lamont doesn’t just cover the art of writing, but does so in way that showcases what beautiful language can look like.
On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts – I have no idea how long it took to write a book on revision (talk about needing to be perfect!), but every writer knows that the real work starts once you finish the crappy first draft. Germano does an artful way of walking you through the process.
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century – Many of us start our writing with a colloquial voice, use far more words than needed, and meandering through the topic. Pinker gives us the tools to tighten that up, making sure our writing is much easier to read, and every word counts to word communicating our message.