Most of my books tend to be more management and leadership oriented than specifically technical in nature. I often find myself referring to these books and articles in conversations with anybody who shows an interest in affecting change.
I’ll update this list as I keep reading more!
Books
- Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter - Provides many examples and analyses of effective leaders (IC and managers) who make people around them more effective. Also provides examples of the opposite, diminishers and how to avoid those characteristics.
- The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Distributed Everything - What does it take to have leadership qualities in a rapidly changing and evolving space?
- The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth - Psychological safety is often overlooked for the magnitude of effect it has on employees. Learn how to create a safe space and manage risk to avoid disaster. This is one of the most well-researched books I have read in a long time.
- Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations - This is a must read for anyone in the DevOps space, and I highly encourage people to participate in the DORA Survey. What characteristics does a high performing organization show, why, and how do we get there?
- Measure What Matters - The definitive book on Objectives and Key Results. Anyone struggling with goal setting, traction and momentum on their teams should read this book to create engaging, high quality objectives.
- Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems - Much more technical than most books I read, but provides a good look into why Google does what they do at scale. All technical roles should read this book.
- Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud - Brendan Gregg has been my inspiration for many performance analytics projects and this book captures some of his methods.
- The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business - This is more of a leadership specific book than technical. How do we change and adapt traditional strategies while the playing field is making those strategies obsolete?
- The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution - C.P. Snow suggests there is a strong tendency for intellectuals to separate into two gropus: science and humanities. What methods are available to us to take advantage of both in modern society?
- Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages - Language affects culture. Guy Deutscher suggests that we can change our culture by changing the way we speak and think about terms.
Papers
- TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1 - United States Military Training and Doctrine 525-3-1: Multi-Domain Operations and Cross-Domain Capabilities. How does the military change its organization and command structure to adapt to rapidly changing scenarios and a highly siloed system?
- The Ultimate Guide to Effective Data Collection - Learn how to ask the right questions to get better answers.
Podcasts/Videos
- 13 Minutes to the Moon - BBC Podcast capturing the events that happened in the 13 minutes from the command module to the surface of the moon. Breaks down the history behind each communication sent between the astronauts and space command.
- How Language Shapes the Way We Speak - Lera Boroditsky’s TED Talk. Understand how others speak and the way they think.