Books

These are books that I’ve recently read and why and how they have influenced my thinking. The most recent are at the top, and Ive included amazon affliate links to each.

• Never Split the Difference I stumbled into this via a training course I took in work around difficult conversations. It’s about negotiation and touches on the fact most negoitiation is not about hard facts, but about “feelings”. This is related to thinking fast and slow, how our animal mind makes decisions quickly and that in a sense is its own form of thinking, that in turn guides our slower rational processor. Much of it is actually really about building emotional rapport with the person you are conversing with so that you collaborate effectively on getting to a solution. I’ve been trying to practice it on our 3-year-old with a certain degree of success (between tantrums!).
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy Probably one of the more formative books in my thinking. One of the principles I like in my work is a concept of “The red thread” which means every item of work ultimately connects up (via the red thread) to the companies current strategy. The formation of that strategy is not a loose vision but the core components outlined in this book. he “kernel” of a strategy, as articulated by Richard Rumelt in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, comprises three essential components: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent actions. This framework serves as the foundation for effective strategic planning and execution.
• The subtle art of not giving a F It might feel like this is a click-bait name but it’s good. I’ve recently bought it for the older kids as I know they will read things with swear words in the title!. Three things that resonated with me. 1/ Embrace the struggle: Its all about the struggle, we learn from our challenges. Entitlement is avoidance of problems and it is the getting over problems that is the growth and the learning. 2/ Action ➡ Result ➡ Motivation. Many of us wait for “motivation” to get started, but motivation, to action and results is a recurrent loop. Invert the loop. When we confront the challenges we face and take action, we (eventually) get results and that breeds motivation. Results are only due to action. We must overcome intertia to drive action to gain motivation. 3/ I realised I hadn’t crystallized in myu own head the difference between principles and values. My take now is, values are waht we hold true, they must always be “continually re-engaged” (or challenged if we realise we have shitty values that we want to change) and principles are akin to policies that we use to help use make decisions or structure how we do things.
• The power of habit This is a really nice book that provides some insights into how our brain works and how we “internalise habits”, moving repeated actions from cognisant thought to “automatic thought”. Fascinating observations on how these then go on to manifest themselves at an organisational level and at a societal level.

Blogs

These are blogs that I currently actively read or find useful

• John Cutlers Blog John who was behind Amplitudes North Star framework provides a continuous stream of thought that help shape my view points around mental models for delivery in organisations.
• Simon Wardleys Blog The author of Wardley Maps who has shared interesting thoughts on the different roles that appear in teams over time (Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners)
• David Heinemeier Hansson Creator of Ruby on Rails, interesting thoughts around remote work & leadership.
• Ryan Singer Talks about shaping and scoping work, that enable parallel mission driven delivery. In particular, I find the ShapeUp process a strong candidate to balance discovery and shipping inventive and machine learning products because the blocks that are big enough to enable meaningful inventive discovery & deliver, but small enough to enable us to change course.