Told from the perspective of President of Thedacare, Kim Barnas, this book covers the history and tactics of the Thedacare Lean Health Systems Transformation during the early 2000’s. Now considered lore on second only to Toyota’s own cultural transformation as it developed and improved the Toyota Production System, this journey for Thedacare is a great introduction to lean basics, cultural transformation, and some simple tactical tools that are lynchpins in a culture change to a people (patient/customer/provider) centric healthcare model in which problem solving is the centerpiece of the business and continuous improvement mindsets and results are pervasive across the organization (horizontally and vertically). Having come from aerospace and manufacturing, I found this easy read a refreshing reminder of lean tactics and principles but also a very useful exploration of continuous improvement, culture transformation, and lean in a VERY different industrial sector. I recommend this book for any healthcare professional but also for anyone in continuous improvement, no matter the industry.
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk!
This book is a classic of marketing and is recommend often among entrepreneurs and successful CEO’s alike. This book is compact and easily distilled to your particular situation. I found it VERY helpful to understand marketing in general but also as a lesson in organizational change as well. While it might not seem useful internally to an organization, this book is fundamentally about individual and group psychology, choice theory, influence, and customer satisfaction. When viewed from those angles these 22 Laws become VERY useful to a much broader audience. I recommend this book for leaders and managers, marketers, industry and market analysts, entrepreneurs, and startups.
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
Author Sebastian Junger (of A Perfect Storm) lays out his personal experiences with PTSD and his efforts to overcome it but while in so doing learning a great deal about war, psychology, belonging to a group and society, and political viewpoints in our country. This book was an eye opening example of the usefulness of evolutionary psychology, transitions theory, and applied journalism to a VERY important challenge our country faces with 2 lengthy and on-going wars and many of our war fighters returning home with inadequate supports and systems to get them transitioned back into society in a healthy way. This book was informative for me and some of my own personal experiences and I have shared it as a resource for fire fighters, police officers, as well as leaders in organizations seeking to understand how individuals operate and don’t operate in a larger organization, especially during and after largescale disruptions and adversity like wars and natural disasters. I recommend this book for leaders and managers, change agents, and people interested in evolutionary psychology and how to cultivate and maintain a strong, tightly knit group or organization for an improved sense of belonging.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Steven Pinker is one of the greatest philosophical thinkers of our time. He’s written extensively in the field of ethics, environment ethics, and animal rights. This book was started before the presidential election of 2016 but accelerated to address the fomenting and destabilizing effects of nationalism, identity politics, and anti-science and anti-reason currents popping up in the US and abroad. Pinker explores an extensive lists of macro measures of “quality and quantity” of life since the Enlightenment with his central thesis being that humanity has made considerable progress across almost all measure DESPITE the “sense” that we aren’t and that we’re perpetually headed for decline. He explores these facts with extensive empirical evidence and also describe the varying hypotheses (not all his own) as to why we “feel” the sense of dread and decline. He speaks to political rhetoric coupled with increasingly massive volumes of sensationalist and offense seeking media, mixed in with our natural cognitive biases like negativity biases (many brought about as useful evolutionary adaptions but which have been coopted in our modern age through marketing and political messaging). I did a podcast with graduate student Dustyn Addington and co-host Whitney Johnson (find the podcast here) on the subject which is pretty entertaining. I recommend the book for anyone interested in history and the philosophy of science, as well as those interested in long range planning, macro economics and economic development, empirical evidence based analyses at a micro and macro level, and philosophy of history as well. This book I believe is a helpful North Start when you’re feeling adrift or overly negative/cynical/frustrated with where you “feel” things are headed. This book will lay out the empirical evidence that supports that while short term events and narratives may sway you emotions, reason will prevail with supported empirical evidence.
Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
Many of us learn ABOUT Nelson Mandela and he and his compatriots efforts to overcoming apartheid in South Africa but reading this autobiography brought a depth of clarity and understanding to me that I didn’t expect. Given these are his words, most of which were written secretly during this prison years, it speaks volumes to his leadership style, his priorities, his sense of purpose, and his visionary view of the future of he and his countrymen (including whites and other ethnicities). I read this book as a historical view for Southern Africa in preparation for my trip to Malawi to do business training and development. I figured it would provide me a general region wide view of the past 50 years from his eyes and timeline of events. It did help bring a lot of context for me but was also a lesson in overcoming adversity, extreme perseverance, collaboration among friends as well as adversaries, and personal discipline through many trials and challenge. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to expand on their first person accounts of leadership and change management, as well as those seeking to add to their understanding of African and world history.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel is more famously known for his part as a founder at PayPal as well as his work as a Venture Capitalist at Thiel Capital but this book is a great resource and insight into his thinking not only about business but history, political science, and his thoughts on the trajectory of history. This book is a collection lectures he gave at Standford on Startups, compiled by a student of his and then collaboratively edited into the final book. This book is probably in many of the Top 10 books for startups and entrepreneurs out there and for good reason. It’s choc full of macro, strategic thinking models as well as integration of fundamental aspects of nature like Power Laws and Network theory. Additionally, he brings into play societal level patterns and paradigms to help the reader understand what true change and earth shattering products, services, and business models really are. He has a straight forward style backed up with a thorough understanding of business, systems theory, economics, political science, and much more. I recommend this book for startups, entrepreneurs, innovators, strategists and more.
Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
Crossing the Chasm is a fundamental business and technology classic. Timeless in its analysis and understanding of human and societal change and adoption, this book will layout out the core elements of product marketing but also change management in general. This book has proven and well researched strategies to create massive adoption curves for new products, services, and organizational change. I recommend this book for technologists, product developers, marketers, and change agents.
Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
Competitive Advantage is another classic from the great Michael Porter. This book is more internal and organizational focused than Competitive Strategy and provides the reader a rigorous and well thought out method for understanding the core of your advantage as an organization. He gets down to the simple truths of competitive advantage in this work. In the age of endless business school, executive, and consulting jargon on whatever dressed up version of technology, methods or tools are claimed to be competitive advantage, Porter will dispel all the myths for you and provide you a clear and cogent understand of the structure of your organization and how it delivers value in a sustainable and effective way. I recommend this book for leaders, strategy analysts, organizational effectiveness consultants, and also continuous improvement professionals. It is actually a great accompaniment to the “Value Stream Mapping” approach that will expand on that method and tool set to an organization wide and financial model point of view.
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
This book is truly a tome of Strategic Analysis and Strategy in general but it is also an incredible guide and reference for ongoing work. Michael Porter is considered the Grandfather of Strategy and Strategic Analysis in the 21st century. His various works are considered, in some form or another, as required reading in any MBA course on Strategy and leadership. I was first exposed in my Master’s of Science program at Purdue, through their partnership with Thunderbird School of Global Management. His article, included in Harvard Business Reviews “Top 10 Must Reads” On Strategy, titled “What is Strategy?” merely glosses the surface. Porter my brother as an Industrial & Systems Engineer by another Mother as this book is a thorough “systems thinking” analysis and framework of industry’s, markets, business structures, and ultimately understanding their evolution as well as where the profit (and power) currently resides in a market and where it is likely to reside in the future. I recommend this book for anyone seriously interested in the foundations of Strategic Thinking but also Industrial & Systems Engineers, Innovation Leaders and Leaders in General, as well as entrepreneurs looking to have a framework from which to understand the current and long term structure of their industries.
The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
I’m a huge fan, believer, and engineer focused on systems design and analysis approaches. The Startup Owner’s Manual has been a go to resource for a systems thinking view of building an organization but I also believe improving one as well. The central tool of this method is the “Business Model Canvas” but it can just as easily be translated to “Organization Model Canvas” or even “Teaming Model Canvas” with a few tweaks in verbiage and format. I’ve coupled this tool with strategic analysis tools like SWOT and Market Analysis frameworks. It’s an incredibly rigorous, practical, and proven approach to design, prototype, implement, and improve your business model as you startup, scale, and mature your organization. I believe the canvas can be a central tool for organizational effectiveness consultants, consultants in general, General Managers, and Innovation focused leaders. The processes are clear but also the tools are visual, easily understand by wide audiences, and create a systems (broad and interconnected) view of how your organization meets it’s purpose and value proposition for it’s customers. This is a Top book of mine that I recommend probably the most often.
Who: The A Method for Hiring
Who: The A Method for hiring is a well thought out, practical, validated approach to developing a robust people process focused on hiring top talent in a systematic, focused, and ultimately, long term success focused way. Smart and Street take the lessons learned from the largest research study of it’s kind at the time to help solve one of the never ending challenges of owning, operating, and managing an organization and that is finding, retaining, and developing top talent. I’ve shared this book with entrepreneur peers, managers I know, business owners I’ve consulted for, and many others I interact with that have faced the challenge of finding and retaining top talent. Sadly, I find many small to medium sized business have ad hoc and non-standard ways they approach searching for, interviewing, selecting, hiring, onboarding, and training new talent in their organizations. This costs a huge amount of time, productivity, and ultimately money, but results in dissatisfied managers, new hires, and existing employees. This book is highly readable and is practical in its methods. I recommend this book for leaders, managers, project managers, and HR professionals looking for a thorough and well researched method for hiring great people.
Development As Freedom
Nobel Prize winning Economist Amartrya Sen produced a timeless work on Economic Development with lessons that can be applied to raising children, developing and leading organizations, and tackling some of the most challenging development issues of our time. Sen creates a framework from which to view freedom and development as a focus on developing capabilities for individuals, communities, entire nations, and ultimately the human race. Drawing on ancient wisdom, political history and theory, economics, and practical experience, he paints a broad yet deep picture to both understand the theory but also practice development as freedom. I recommend this book for those interested and practicing economic development in the world but also for those volunteering in their local communities and schools who want to expand their understanding of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
What Got You Here Won't Get You There
Marshall Goldsmith has done a great job in discussing the nature of success, professional development, and organizational dynamics of leadership development. In this classic, he describes 20 personality characteristics that become increasingly critical to overcome as one “climbs the ladder” of success in an organization beyond clear results and demonstrated skill sets in a particular subject matter or technical expertise. We all have heard about the “Peter Principle” where a common organizational dynamic is to promote people to the level of their incompetence and thus, negative impact on the organization and ultimately professional decline. This book will help you reflect on your own traits that may be in your way to better relationships and improved professional success but also help you view other professionals you work with through a systematic, researched, and easily understand model. I recommend this book for any professional but in particular any position requiring management and development of others, where relationships and interactions are keys to success, and for those interested in continuous self-improvement for a better personal and professional life.
The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter
The First 90 Days is a classic to me at this point. It’s rigorous, deep, and planned approach to transitions and getting up to speed is applicable in any new role or assignment you may get. It’s not just for Leadership, as is often thought, but rather for anyone that takes on new projects or roles regularly. It’s for those who want a systematic and proven approach to analyzing an organization, identifying key relationships to develop, what position the organization is in and how to identify early wins as well as long term strategic focus areas to both deliver quick, position results to an organization but also secure your position as essential to success. The central notion is that the “value extracting” period of a new position should be 90 days or less, with the following 90 days of “value adding” to be large in scale to achieve “break even” for the organization within 180 days. That’s 1/4 the average time for “ramping up” in an organization of 2 years. Talk about a serious way to achieve professional and organizational success if all personnel (leadership, managers, individual contributors) planned for and executed rapid transition and integration plans like Watkins showcases here. If it isn’t clear enough yet, The First 90 Days is for any reader excited, interested, and committed to quick development and transitions for adding immense value to their organization and themselves as well.
Trives: We Need You To Lead Us
In true Seth Godin style, he captures an angle and an underlying substructure into leadership, marketing, content creation, and followership, and makes it an understanding and tactical philosophy and method. He takes Networked Leadership and helps the reader understand that if one is truly a leader, with an idea, message, or motto, that their is likely a Tribe of other interested people out there waiting for a leader. However, this book is also a rich insight into organizations, team work, leadership, and management as well. It can provide many institutional roles a way to understand how people work and think together in pursuits of interests, passions, and common goals. This is in my Top 10 for marketing and content/product creation for sure.
Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change
In “Managing Transitions” author William Bridges explores his conception of Organizational Transitions. This stems from his research, consulting experience, and design work from another book, “Transitions”. He lays out practical questions that need to be addressed at each stage of an organizations lifecycle, how to prevent complete demise, and leadership tactics and characteristics required to manage the evolution of their organizations. I recommend this book for HR professionals, Organizational Effectiveness experts, continuous improvement experts, and Leaders and Managers in general.
On Change Management from Harvard Business Review's "10 Must Reads"
As with Harvard Business Reviews “On Strategy”, “On Change Management” is a rich resource and primer in the area of organizational change management. The variety of authors bring a broad yet deep background in the field to provide the reader with articles that have prescriptive as well as descriptive components. This book provides a pragmatic understanding of the subject matter but also provides the readers with systematic, tests and proven methods for successful change management. As with “On Strategy” many of these authors have since published books built from the core principles laid out in these articles. A must read for human resources professionals, continuous improvement experts, change agents, leaders, and anyone seeking to understand human and organizational psychology and how to get from current state to a brighter future.