Jason Knight
I had some learning budget to spend so I bought some books! I normally read on Kindle but thought I'd get a selection of classics I'd already read as well as some inspiring books I hadn't. Looking forward to diving back in, learning & relearning 🧵 https://t.co/HQ1l2OkrVf
Book mentions in this thread
Escaping the Build Trap
by Melissa Perri
"To stay competitive in today's market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small"--Page 4 of cover.Votes: 5
Radical Candor
by Kim Scott
Featuring a new preface, afterword and Radically Candid Performance Review Bonus Chapter, the fully revised & updated edition of Radical Candor is packed with even more guidance to help you improve your relationships at work. 'Reading Radical Candor will help you build, lead, and inspire teams to do the best work of their lives.' Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In. If you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all . . . right? While this advice may work for home life, as Kim Scott has seen first hand, it is a disaster when adopted by managers in the work place. Scott earned her stripes as a highly successful manager at Google before moving to Apple where she developed a class on optimal management. Radical Candor draws directly on her experiences at these cutting edge companies to reveal a new approach to effective management that delivers huge success by inspiring teams to work better together by embracing fierce conversations. Radical Candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on the one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It is about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism – delivered to produce better results and help your employees develop their skills and increase success. Great bosses have a strong relationship with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get stuff done, and understand why it matters. Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Drawing on years of first-hand experience, and distilled clearly to give practical advice to the reader, Radical Candor shows you how to be successful while retaining your integrity and humanity. Radical Candor is the perfect handbook for those who are looking to find meaning in their job and create an environment where people love both their work and their colleagues, and are motivated to strive to ever greater success.Empowered
by Marty Cagan
Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech productshow to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the books message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams.No Rules Rules
by Reed Hastings
Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies There's never before been a company like Netflix. Not only because it has led a revolution in the entertainment industries; or because it generates billions of dollars in annual revenue; or even because it is watched by hundreds of millions of people in nearly 200 countries. When Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix, he developed a set of counterintuitive and radical management principles, defying all tradition and expectation, which would allow the company to reinvent itself over and over on the way to becoming one of the most loved brands in the world. Rejecting the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate, Reed set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, and giving employees context, not controls. At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance and hard work is irrelevant. At Netflix, you don't try to please your boss, you give candid feedback instead. At Netflix, employees never need approval, and the company always pays top of market. When Hastings and his team first devised these principles, the implications were unknown and untested, but over just a short period of time they have led to unprecedented flexibility, speed, and boldness. The culture of freedom and responsibility has allowed the company to constantly grow and change as the world, and its members' needs, have also transformed. Here for the first time, Hastings and Erin Meyer, bestselling author of The Culture Map and one of the world's most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial philosophies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from his own career, No Rules Rules is the full, fascinating, and untold story of a unique company making its mark on the world.The First Minute
by Chris Fenning
Are you starting conversations the right way? Communication should be clear, concise, and should get to the point quickly. The problem is we don't always know how to do this. What does it mean to be concise? How can a complex topic be summarized in just a few lines? This short book is a step-by-step guide for clear, concise communication in everyday work conversations. Being concise is not about trying to condense all the information into sixty seconds. It is about having clear intent, talking about one topic at a time, and focusing on solutions instead of dwelling on problems. Throughout this book you'll discover how to: Have shorter, better work conversations and meetings Get to the point faster without rambling or going off on tangents Lead your audience toward the solution you need Apply one technique to almost every discussion, email, presentation and interview with great results This book is a result of more than 20,000 conversations in both business and technical jobs. Chris Fenning has trained individuals and teams around the world in these techniques. He has worked with organizations from start-ups to Fortune 50 and FTSE 100 companies. These methods work for them all. Having clearer communication is easier than you might expect, and it all starts with the first minute.The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
by Jim Dethmer
You'll never see leadership the same way again after reading this book. These fifteen commitments are a distillation of decades of work with CEOs and other leaders. They are radical or provocative for many. They have been game changers for us and for our clients. We trust that they will be for you too. Our experience is that unconscious leadership is not sustainable. It won't work for you, your team or your organization in the long term. Unconscious leadership can deliver short term results, but the costs of living and leading unconsciously are great. Fear drives most leaders to make choices that are at odds with healthy relationships, vitality and balance. This fear leaves a toxic residue that won't be as easily tolerated in an increasingly complex business environment. Conscious leadership offers the antidote to fear. These pages contain a comprehensive road map to guide you to shift from fear-based to trust-based leadership. Once you learn and start practicing conscious leadership you'll get results in the form of more energy, clarity, focus and healthier relationships. You'll do more and more of what you are passionate about, and less of what you do out of obligation. You'll have more fun, be happier, experience less drama and be more on purpose. Your team will get results as well. They'll be more collaborative, creative, energized and engaged. They'll solve issues faster, and once resolved the issues won't resurface. Drama and gossip will all but disappear, and the energy and resources that fueled them will be redirected towards innovation and creativity. Any one of these commitments will change your life. All of them together are revolutionary. Leaders who practice the 15 commitments: - End blame and criticism - Speak candidly, openly and honestly, in a way that invites others to do the same - Find their unique genius - Let go of taking everything-especially themselves and their problems-so seriously - Create win for all solutions - Experience a new relationship to time and money where there is always enough What do you need to bring to the table? Be curious. Sounds so simple, and yet in our experience it's a skill few have mastered. Most of us are far more interested in being right and proving it, than we are in learning, growing and shifting out of our old patterns. By default we gravitate towards the familiar. We're asking you to take a chance and explore the unfamiliar. You'll get scared and reactive. We all do. So what? Just stay curious and let us introduce you to a whole new world of leadership.Eat Their Lunch
by Anthony Iannarino
The first ever playbook for B2B salespeople on how to win clients and customers who are already being serviced by your competition, from the author of The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need and The Lost Art of Closing. Like it or not, sales is often a zero-sum game: Your win is someone else's loss. Most salespeople work in mature, overcrowded industries, your offerings perceived (often unfairly) as commodities. Growth requires taking market share from your competitors, while they try to do the same to you. How else can you grow 12 percent a year in an industry that's only growing by 3 percent? It's not easy for any salesperson to execute a competitive displacement--or, in other words, "eat their lunch." You might think this requires a bloodthirsty "whatever it takes" attitude, but that's the opposite of what works. If you act like a Mafia don, you only make yourself difficult to trust and impossible to see as a long-term partner. Instead, this book shows you how to find and maintain a long-term competitive advantage by taking steps like: • ranking prospective new clients not by their size or convenience to you, but by who stands to gain the most from your solution. • understanding the different priorities for everyone in your prospect's organization, from the CEO to the accountants, and addressing their various concerns. • developing a systematic contact plan for all those different stakeholders so you can win over the right people at the organization in the optimal sequence. Your competitors may be tough, but with the strategies you'll discover in this book, you'll soon be eating their lunch.Votes: 1
How I Built This
by Guy Raz
Based on the highly acclaimed NPR podcast, How I Built This with Guy Raz, this book offers priceless insights and inspiration from the world’s top entrepreneurs on how to start, launch, and build a successful venture. Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy’s Pita Chips). Award-winning journalist and NPR host Guy Raz has interviewed more than 200 highly successful entrepreneurs to uncover amazing true stories like these. In How I Built This, he shares tips for every entrepreneur’s journey: from the early days of formulating your idea, to raising money and recruiting employees, to fending off competitors, to finally paying yourself a real salary. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of starting their own business or wondered how trailblazing entrepreneurs made their own dreams a reality.Obviously Awesome
by April Dunford
You know your product is awesome-but does anybody else? Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn't a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition or trying to attract the widest customer base. So what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech exec, is here to enlighten you.The Language of Leaders
by Kevin Murray
Inspiring communication can make the difference between poor performance and exceptional results. This is why CEOs and HR professionals now believe that the ability to understand, motivate and inspire others is the characteristic that is most important when recruiting senior leaders. Many leaders wrongly perceive they have to become inspired orators if they are to inspire others. Wrong. Language is a system of communication, so the issue is: what system should leaders use to inspire brilliant results? This is the question Kevin Murray answers in The Language of Leaders. Based on original interviews with an extraordinary list of more than 70 top leaders from a wide range of business and public sector organizations, this book provides a unique insight into how these leaders have responded to the demands of a transparent world. It reports on what they have learned and creates a lexicon for successful communication. The message from these leaders is resoundingly clear - communication is now one of the most crucial skills of leadership. Filled with actionable lessons and insights from leaders of high-profile organizations, The Language of Leaders is an invaluable book for anybody in a leadership position, or who aspires to lead.The Lean Startup
by Eric Ries
Outlines a revisionist approach to management while arguing against common perceptions about the inevitability of startup failures, explaining the importance of providing genuinely needed products and services as well as organizing a business that can adapt to continuous customer feedback.Votes: 1
The Personal MBA
by Josh Kaufman
'A business classic. You're pretty much guaranteed to get your money's worth - if not much, much more' Jason Hesse, Real Business This revised and expanded edition of the bestselling book, The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman, gives you everything you need to transform your business, your career or your working life forever. An MBA at a top school is an enormous investment in time, effort and cold, hard cash. And if you don't want to work for a consulting firm or an investment bank, the chances are it simply isn't worth it. Josh Kaufman is the rogue professor of modern business education. Feted by everyone from the business media to Seth Godin and David Allen, he's torn up the rulebook and given thousands of people worldwide the tools to teach themselves everything they need to know. The Personal MBA teaches simple mental models for every subject that's key to commercial success. From the basics of products, sales & marketing and finance to the nuances of human psychology, teamwork and creating systems, this book distils everything you need to know to take on the MBA graduates and win. 'File this book under: NO EXCUSES' Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and Linchpin 'Josh Kaufman has synthesized the most important topics in business into a book that truly lives up to its title. It's rare to find complicated concepts explained with such clarity. Highly recommended' Ben Casnocha, author of My Start-Up LifeThe Presentation Coach
by Graham G. Davies
You probably hate giving presentations. You probably hate listening to them too. Why? Because most business presentations are too long, too detailed, too boring...and submerged under a blizzard of PowerPoint. But the single most important presentational tool known to man isn't a slideshow. It's you. Whether you're speaking to one person across a table, 20 people in a boardroom or 1,000 people in a ballroom, it's all about the words you say and how you say them. The Presentation Coach shows you how to use what you've already got to give you clarity, confidence and impact in every speaking challenge you will ever face. You'll learn the unique Bare Knuckle 5-step process to effective presenting, and how to apply it to all business speaking, from large-scale presentations to one-to-one client meetings. Graham Davies has been coaching high-profile individuals from the worlds of business, politics and entertainment in exactly these techniques for the past 25 years. Now it's your turn. Praise for The Presentation Coach "Graham Davies is a brilliantly funny speaker who knows how to inspire and enthuse anyone who sees presenting as a bore, a burden or a source of terror." Nick Robinson, Political Editor, BBC "This book really captures Graham's intense and robust sense of coaching. Just like the author, it is amusing, punchy and really comforting to have access to in all presentation situations." Michel Combes, CEO,Vodafone Europe "Required reading for anyone who wants their presentations to enthuse rather than euthanize their audience." Tim Curtis, MD, Northern Europe, Land's End "Graham is a highly effective presentation coach. He is always honest and gets straight to the point. His book is just as direct and entertaining as he is in person." Nick Jeffery, CEO, Vodafone Global Enterprise "I don't know anyone who could wear the label 'the presentation coach' more confidently than Graham." Daniel Finkelstein, Executive Editor, The Times "I use Graham's system strictly and religiously in every speech. In fact on almost every important occasion when I need to get a message across.... You will never regret buying and using this book." George Clarke, MD, Heidelberg UK "Graham helped me develop my very own presentation style, true to myself, with high impact and focused very much on the audience." Phil Clarke, CEO Designate, Tesco "Graham's approach is ruthlessly robust and utterly practical. This book is the next best thing to seeing him in person, and much less of a strain on your budget." Matthew Wilson, CEO Brit Global Markets "...Davies's compelling book illuminates all the pitfalls and provides a simple guide to allowing personality into presentations - radical stuff indeed!" Andy Street, MD, John Lewis "Whether you are a Prime Minister, chief executive or anyone else who needs make an impact, then you must read this challenging and innovative book by Graham Davies." Neil Sherlock, Partner, Public Affairs, KPMG "...I wish Graham had written it 20 years ago..." Richard Klein, MD, Bank of America Merrill Lynch "Never again will you commit the crime of Death by Bullet-Point." Penny Philpot, Group Vice President, Worldwide Partner Services, Oracle "Graham Davis is a talented gagmeister who shows that the best way of exposing a bad argument is with a good joke." Boris Johnson, Mayor of London "Reading his book will spur you on to win your own presentational race." Richard Dunwoody, twice winner of the Grand National "Graham completely reframed my approach to presenting. His approach works!" Otto Thoresen, CEO, Aegon UK "A process that you can use no matter what the situation. I heart