5-star books of 2022
2022 was a good year for my pace of reading — I finished 47 books, but I’ll admit a lot of it was junk food for the brain (LitRPG, see below) - excluding all of that reading for fun, I finished about 15 books in business, leadership and technology — and only the four below earned a 5-star review from me!
Non-Fiction:
Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility (Ratings: Goodreads — 4.3, Amazon — 4.6)
Soon Safer Happier was a book I chose for the IT-wide bookclub I facilitated last year because it’s an excellent introduction to many of the topics that matter for us to perform better as a team. This book is like a 101 class on modern management — from concepts of lean, and agile, to product ownership and psychological safety. While the author’s don’t go deep into any one topic it’s enough to get folks excited to learn more. That said, the book certainly did introduce me to new ideas that matter, specifically the Cynefin framework is one that sticks with me to help identify when lean or agile technique may be more appropriate for a given project. This book also inspired change in how we’re trying to be more agile with our very large ERP implementation. I had 64 Kindle highlights in this book, here are some favorites:
- “It is important not to focus too heavily on “servant” and forget the “leader” part. Too much servant and not enough leader will result in Brownian motion, with teams behaving like the random motion of particles suspended in fluid. As a leader there is a need to ensure that the outcome hypothesis, the mission, the North Star, the purpose and meaning, is clearly articulated and understood. This provides high alignment. People are aligned toward a common goal. Then, as a servant, get out of the team’s way. Provide high autonomy and support to remove impediments that are preventing the team from optimally achieving the desired outcome.”
- “In a crisis, people generally use their initiative and don’t wait to be given step-by-step orders. The trick is to maintain this without the chaos. To maintain the swarming and working together with autonomy, with a clear mission, and with a minimal viable process within risk appetite all of the time, being directionally led and supported from the front.”
- “In the Age of Digital, for product development, each iteration of the product is new and unique and has never been done in that context with those people before. This also applies to package software, such as ERP or CRM systems, as well as bespoke development. It’s not been used in that context, with those unique people or the same processes, data, culture, organizational history, and memory before. In a context that is emergent and adaptive, predetermined solution-based deadlines and milestones are an antipattern.”
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
(Ratings: Goodreads — 4.1, Amazon — 4.6)
This was recommended by Gartner as one of their top-10 business books to read in 2022 and I agree. I loved Grit by Angela Duckworth and Range is like a companion that seeks to help us understand that success can be found through dedicated pursuit of a single goal, but it can also be found from building a base of diverse knowledge — and that really true innovation generally comes from individuals that can combine insights across multiple domains. I’ve seen this in my own experience moving from financial services to distribution, and between sales and IT. The more perspectives you can bring to bear on a problem, the more likely you are to see a solution that “experts” are unequipped to find. This book gave me a lot to think about in terms of how I think of my own career, how I mentor others, and how we help guide Ethan through school. I had 29 highlights in this book, but they hit hard and I still think about them regularly, here are my top three:
- “The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”
- “Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, she told me, “but you have to understand that they may have blinders on. So what I try to do is take facts from them, not opinions.”
- “On the very first day the instructor asked the class, rhetorically, for the single most important principle in decision making. His answer: to get consensus. “And I said, ‘I don’t think the people who launched the space shuttle Challenger agree with that point,’” Geveden told me. “Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn’t be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions.”
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
(Ratings: Goodreads — 4.1, Amazon 4.6)
This book was recommended to me by Gordie Spater and Mark Hatton of the Katahdin Group. I love understanding new operating systems and frameworks for companies and I hadn’t heard of the Traction system before they introduced me to this book. Traction is one of many packaged systems for processes and behaviors to run a business, I also read The 4 Disciplines of Execution this year (4DX) which proposes a competing framework and comparing the two, I thought Traction had more to offer. I struggle to imagine employing any of these frameworks dogmatically — each business is unique and so the management techniques need to uniquely fit the situation, but Traction has some great insights that many business can apply and benefit from. 45 highlights for me in this one, my top three below:
- “If you’re not happy with the current state of your company, you have three choices. You can live with it, leave it, or change it. If the first two are not an option, it’s time to admit that you don’t want to live this way any longer.”
- “At the end of the day, after multiple people have walked into your office with their problems and left them with you, you end up with 20 monkeys jumping around your office. If someone walks in with a monkey, he or she needs to walk out with it. If he or she can’t or won’t, you’ve hired the wrong person.”
- “Remember, less is always more. Most companies make the mistake of trying to accomplish too many objectives per year. By trying to get everything done all at once, they end up accomplishing very little and feeling frustrated.”
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
(Ratings: Goodreads— 4.0, Amazon — 4.5)
Have you ever had a day (or a few) at work where you thought, “this is crazy?” I’m sure I must have been having the kind of day when the title of this book grabbed my attention. This book is written by the co-founders of Signal37, the creators of Basecamp.com. We use Basecamp at Benco so I was familiar with the company before reading the book. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson have done a remarkable job of building their firm around happiness and respect for their team members. 29 highlights in this one, all focused around providing a workplace based around respect for people and building an environment that enables and empowers people to do their best work. Are we going to blow up our shared calendars at my work? Probably not. Do I wish we could? Yep. This book was probably the most challenging for me to pick only three highlights to share, there is some really good wisdom in here!
- “The shared work calendar is one of the most destructive inventions of modern times. So much orbits around it, so much hinges on it, and so much is wrong because of it. Getting on someone’s schedule at Basecamp is a tedious, direct negotiation, not an easy, automated convenience. You have to make your case. You can’t just reach into someone’s calendar, find an open slot, and plant your flag. That’s because no one can see anyone else’s calendar at Basecamp. This flies in the face of nearly every other company we’ve studied. In most places, everyone can see everyone else’s day. People’s calendars are not only completely transparent, they are optimized to be filled in by anyone who simply feels like it. Effectively, people are encouraged to slice other people’s days into little 30-minute chunks of red, green, and blue appointment blocks.”
- “Ever been in a relationship where you’re endlessly annoyed by every little thing the other person does? In isolation, the irritating things aren’t objectively annoying. But in those cases it’s never really about the little things. There’s something else going on. The same thing can happen at work. Someone says something, or acts in a certain way, and someone else blows up about it. From afar it looks like an overreaction. You can’t figure out what the big deal is. There’s something else going on. Here’s what’s going on: The trust battery is dead.”
- “The problem, as we’ve learned over time, is that the further away you are from the fruit, the lower it looks. Once you get up close, you see it’s quite a bit higher than you thought. We assume that picking it will be easy only because we’ve never tried to do it before. Declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you’re setting out to do. And any estimate of how much work it’ll take to do something you’ve never tried before is likely to be off by degrees of magnitude.”
Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup (Ratings: Goodreads — 4.0, Amazon — 4.4)
I learned about this book from Rob’s podcast, Startups for the rest of us — which is based around building sustainable SaaS businesses without big-time VC funding. The podcast is great, and Rob’s book didn’t dissappoint as well. I gained a lot of insight from this book — valuble as we incubate internal startups in a large enterprise, but also for mentoring, coaching small businesses through my involvement in local entrepreneurship and TecBridge.org. One of the most common refrains I hear in entrepreneurship is that first time entrepreneurs worry most about product, second time entrepreneur ship worry msot about marketing and distribution. I’ve found that to be true myself that when we fail to launch a new offering to the market it’s generally because of a distribution issue and not a technical or product issue. This book focuses in large part on the marketing and distribution side of business — not how to build a technical product. The author has a bias towards self funded startups, how to find the right idea, and a framework to get started. 27 highlights for me in this book:
- “When looking at your marketing plan you should actually be thinking: “If I could get only on the front page of [small-but-very-focused-niche-website].com.” Find the website(s) where your real market hangs out. These are the people who will actually buy your product. The competition will be less and your conversion rates will be orders of magnitude higher. Unfortunately, great products are often built and launched without a thought given to how the target audience will find out about it. You must have an inexpensive, ongoing source of new customers.”
- “When searching for a niche, there’s a loose rule of thumb that says to stick to markets where you can take out a full-page ad in a magazine targeted at your market for less than $5,000. The idea is that if a market has a magazine devoted to it, it’s large enough to provide enough customers and if a full-page ad is less than $5,000, the market is small enough that you’ll be able to effectively market to it. As an aside, I don’t recommend magazine advertising due to the difficulty of tracking prospects, the inability to tweak content mid-stream, and the challenge of getting people to “switch media” from print to the web. But understanding how magazine publishers segment the market will provide you with insight into viable niches.”
- “To find your hook you can take one of three approaches: 1. Explain what your product does and for whom. Such as “Simple proposal software made for designers.” 2. Make a promise to the customer espousing a benefit of your product, such as “Save Time. Get Paid Faster.” 3. Describe the single most remarkable feature of your product, such as “One Thousand Songs in Your Pocket.”
Fiction:
Ember (Awaken Online: Tarot #1) (Goodreads — 4.5, Amazon 4.7)
My son got into the LitRPG genre this year and I was introduced to it through a teammate (thanks Jay!). LitRPG is an interesting genre, largely defined by the fact that characters level up and gain skills as if they were in a video game. I heard a good advice this year that one of the best ways to have a solid relationship with your kids is to become a raving fan of whatever they are into (vs expecting them to adopt our own interests)— I’ve tried to embrace that this year and it’s been great! Our shared enjoyment of these books gives us a lot to talk about and we’re excited about each new addition to the series together. Tarot is my favorite arc of the Awakened Online universe — if you are into fantasy / video games — specifically traditional computer RPGs like I grew up with in the 90s, I think you’ll enjoy this series.
