And other interesting topics.
By reading the following, I gained perspectives that will made me a better leader, spouse/partner, parent, friend, and human. What have you got to lose? Get to it!
- General Leadership
- Understanding People and Yourself, Communicating with Empathy, and Seeing the Unseen
- Adapting to New Roles and Expectations
- Business Processes
- Product Management, Development, and Marketing
- Coaching
- How Others Did It
- General Wellness
- Improving the Way We Do Business
| Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders |  |
L. David Marquet | Lead with intent. Turn followers into leaders. |
| Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say--and What You Don't |  |
L. David Marquet | A study of leadership communication through the last hours of a doomed ship. The concepts in this book are powerful, and worth learning. |
| Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't |  |
Simon Sinek | You are here to serve those in your charge and clear the way for their success. |
| Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win |  |
Jocko Willink, Leif Babin | Tactical leadership at its best. |
| The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win |  |
Jocko Willink, Leif Babin | Tactical leadership with nuances. The world isn’t black and white—it’s all about shades of gray. |
| When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think |  |
Rus Laraway | Direction + Coaching + Career => Engaged Employees => Results! |
| Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action |  |
Simon Sinek | Why => How => What. Are you sweeping the floor, or sending people to the moon? Are you building a wall, or a monument to your beloved god? Define and pursue your Just Cause. |
| Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't |  |
Jim Collins | A study with interesting findings on why companies break out of being “good” into being “great.” |
| Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. |  |
Brené Brown | You can’t lead without courage, and you can’t have courage without vulnerability. |
| Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead |  |
Brené Brown | Lead the same way you live, with empathy and authenticity |
| Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity |  |
Kim Scott | You know it! It’s a classic! Radical Candor is caring personally and challenging direclty. |
| Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter |  |
Liz Wiseman | How to amplify the capabilities of those around you instead of stifling them. |
| Always Endeavor: A Developmental Guide For In Extremis Leaders |  |
Colin Greata | Prepare yourself to join a U.S. Spec. Ops community. A detailed perspective about what it takes to become one of the best. |
| Just Work: How to Root Out Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying to Build a Kick-Ass Culture of Inclusivity |  |
Kim Scott | Learn how you’ve hurt others and how to build a better work place by not doing it again. |
| Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World |  |
Adam Grant | Learn why some people are more innovative than others, ultimately because they don’t accept the status quo for things they care deeply about |
| Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age |  |
Dale Carnegie | Technicques and concepts that will improve your relationships and your level of influences in your circles. I’m not doing it justice! This is a must read if you aren’t a hermit. (–Loïc) |
| Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know |  |
Adam Grant | Allow yourself to consider letting other opinions change yours. |
| Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success |  |
Adam Grant | There are givers, matches, and takers. It’s best to be a giver. |
| What Every Body Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People |  |
Joe Navarro | Understand people’s body language. |
| The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business |  |
Erin Meyer | Understanding how people communicate, across cultures. |
| Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion |  |
George J. Thompson, Jerry B. Jenkins | How to not have that “winning” argument you’ll regret having had your whole life. |
| Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life |  |
Amy E. Herman | Learn to see what you’ve been ignoring. |
| Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It |  |
Chris Voss | Negotiate like when lives are at stake. |
| Becoming Bulletproof: Life Lessons from a Secret Service Agent |  |
Evy Poumpouras | A must-read if you interact with people and their intent is not guaranteed to be to your benefit. |
| Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception |  |
Philip Houston_Michael Floyd, Susan Carnicero | Imagine how different your life would be if you could tell whether someone was lying or telling you the truth. |
| Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All |  |
Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, Susan Carnicero | People are often untruthful out of fear of negative consequences associated with divulging information. But if a person is made to forget the long-term outcomes of lying, they can be influenced to disclose sensitive information that's being withheld. |
| Six-Minute X-Ray: Rapid Behavior Profiling |  |
Chase Hughes | In less than six minutes, you’ll know more about the hidden side of the person you’re speaking to than their own friends and family - no joke. |
| Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Pit of Success: How Leaders Adapt, Succeed, and Repeat |  |
Dave Jennings | Expect to be not as good when you are on your path to doing new things. Information is power. |
| Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong |  |
Eric Barker | Most of the earnest and logical advice you got about how to become successful was wrong. |
| What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful |  |
Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter | America’s most sought-after executive coach shows how to climb the last few rungs of the ladder. |
| Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit |  |
Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck | Learn all about the benefits of Kanban. |
| Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product Management in Practice: A Practical, Tactical Guide for Your First Day and Every Day After |  |
Matt LeMay | A most excellent account of the pressures, expectations, responsibilities, and real-world situations illustrating the difficult, challenging, and ultimately, extremely important role of the Product Manager. As an engineering manager, I found this book eye opening, and I learned a lot that I hope will help me become a better partner to my PMs. For PMs, this book describes very well many tactics and philosophical ways of thinking that could help you become greater at your craft. Please read it and let me know what you’ve learned. |
| Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products |  |
Marty Cagan, Chris Jones | How to think about your product from the perspective of those who will use it and how to build effective teams. |
| Product Management For Dummies |  |
Brian Lawley, Pamela Schure | A wealth of information from the leaders of the 280 Group, a Product Management education organization. It’s highly useful for dummies, like me (Loïc), and I imagine, would have lots of eye opening information for seasoned PMs. |
| The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win |  |
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford | This book is a spiritual successor to The Goal, and is similarly written as a fictional story. Follows a director of engineering who gets a battlefield promotion to VP in the midst of an extremely challenging business and technical environment. Organically describes where agile software development comes from. The Phoenix Project is one of the few “work” books that I’ve read multiple times. |
| The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations |  |
Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Nicole Forsgreen, Ph.D. | This award-winning and bestselling business handbook for digital transformation is now fully updated and expanded with the latest research and new case studies! |
| Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making |  |
Tony Fadell | Reflections from the leader of the teams behind the iPod, iPhone, and Nest thermostat. Incredible insights about how to go from zero to one, and the business of doing things for the first time. |
| Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever |  |
Michael Bungay Stanier | Coach effectively without subject expertise. |
| Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers |  |
Ben Horowitz | A story about being cut throat in the early days of tech in Silicon Valley. |
| No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention |  |
Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer | This was the Netflix Way under Reed Hastings. Sadly, no longer. |
| Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual |  |
Yvon Chouinard | Patagonia. A way of being. |
| Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art |  |
Nestor James | You will learn how you should have been breathing your whole life. |
| The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower--and Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion |  |
Phil Stutz, Barry Michaels | Actual tools to help you get unstuck, control anger, combat anxiety, find discipline, and express yourself. |
| Title | Cover | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World |  |
Yancey Strickler | Yancey Strickler, the former CEO of Kickstarter, lays out a vision of our economic world in which we change course to eliminate the focus on financial maximization, and expand our definition of value beyond money, to include things like purpose, family, community, wellness, sustainability, and many other traits, to lead us to a more fruitful, kind, and generous world. |