We’d love to share our 2019 reading list, curated by our network of transformation experts.
Business and leadership
- Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle.
- Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Hardcover) by Simon Sinek
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Air Eyal
- Inside the Nudge Unit: How small changes can make a big difference by David Halpern – explains how to consider behavioural science to nudge and encourage positive behaviours from inside the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team unit.
- Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t 30 Jan 2014 by Simon Sinek – a good read, with case studies, especially as we lead new generations entering the workforce with different needs from the workplace, at the same time as we have 5 generations working side by side.
Understanding ourselves and our workforce
- Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World by Leonard Mlodinow – how the human mind deals with change, very timely for the world we live and work in.
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Daniel H. Pink – covering high performance and satisfaction in today’s world.
- Flow: Living at the Peak of Your Abilities Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi PhD – a 30-year-old seminal work on a state of being that involves working at your full potential.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow Paperback by Daniel Kahneman – “A tour de force is a must-read for anyone interested in either human behaviour or investing.” ―Larry Swedroe, CBS News.
The Future of work
- The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton – this reframes how we associate age and work-life stage, and how we must reframe the 3 stage life model of education, work, retirement – future of work, named business book of the year 2016.
- Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux – this book shows that every time humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness in the past, it has invented a whole new way to structure and run organisations, each time bringing extraordinary breakthroughs in collaboration.
Food for thought – the world, the future, ourselves
- Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life Nassim Nicholas Taleb – this has practical elements and plenty of examples of the concept as Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”
- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Nassim Nicholas Taleb – the impact of unpredictable events, with examples, such as 9/11.
- Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – ideally read after The Black Swan, this explains how we need to be in a complex and VUCA.
- Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari – the history of humankind.
- Bullshit Jobs: A Theory – 15 May 2018 by David Graeber – based on the essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” which went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.
Transformation and the impact technology
- Technology vs. Humanity: The coming clash between man and machine (FutureScapes) Leonhard, Gerd – about the exponentially growing and pervasive impact of technology on humanity.
- A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future – 17 Apr 2008 by Daniel H. Pink – The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.
Practical
- Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp , John Zeratsky , Brad Kowitz – process, practical, new ways of working, reframing risk, this is a step by step guide for running a sprint to solve big challenges- trust us, this method REALLY works.
Comments are closed.