My key takeaways from my 2022 books

In 2021, I read just 24 books. Going into 2022, I wanted to read more and managed to read 57 books. Many of these were fiction books I read for fun, often alongside my wife who got back into reading in 2022.

In 2021, my learning focus was Leadership and Personal Efficiencies. I expanded on these learning, in 2022 with books like The Mentor Leader, Personal MBA, and Building a Second Brain.

In 2022, I added two more learning focuses, Mindfulness and Software Development books. This includes books such as The Obstacle is the Way and Team Topologies.

I also read a number of history books and a few other non-fictional books including The Road to Disaster and Can’t Even.

How to get your point across in 30 Seconds or less

Attention spans are shortening, the author Milo O’ Frank wrote in 1986. The World of Tik Tok and X (apparently people didn’t have long enough attention spans for even the name Twitter) would not here surprised the author of this book.

When talking or writing, to make our point, we must make our pitch short. Start with a hook to bring the listener in. Have a single objective for your pitch. Know your audience and tailor your pitch to them. And finally, find the right approach, given all the above, to lead you to your objective.

6 Thinking Hats

The 6 Thinking, Hats introduces a useful tool for conversations for when a decision needs to be made. All too often, we lead to endless debate or a topic, pitting people against eachother. By inviting everyone to approach the problem by looking at it from the 6 different thinking hats together, one at a time, a group can engage in a collaborative effort instead of a combative one.

The 6 thinking hats are:

• White Hat - Based in Fact
• Red - Concerned with Emotions
• Black - What can go wrong?
• Yellow - What can go right?
• Green - Breeding ground for Creativity
• Blue - Concerned with Organization

Talking to Strangers

Talking to people we don’t know is not as simple as we think. We cannot tell what they want, when they are lying, nor if they have good or bad intentions. Our approaches often lead to conflict, and so we need to re-examine our strategies of talking to others.

To me, this book was more focused on highlighting the problem and a bit light on offering solutions or advice.

The Mentor Leader

Part memoir, part leadership book, the Mentor Leader follows Tony Dungy, former head coach of the Indianapolis Colts through the rise and culmination of his career with winning the Super Bowl in 2007. Interspersed with his personal history, this book lays out Tony Dungy’s leadership style, which he dubs the mentor leader. A mentor leader must have strong character, put others above themselves, strive for significance, and keep a lay term perspective.

Road to Disaster

The Road to Disaster is a history that provides an insider look into book the political workings behind the Vietnam war. What is an interesting view is how self-confidence and inaccurate data contributed to the escalations of the conflict.

Success Under Stress

Stress is an emotional reaction to threats in our environment. Evolution has evolved these stress responses to enable us to survive, but they are poorly adapted to modern life. This book provides a few techniques for us to succeed with our stressors.

The key tool I took away from this beak is the story log. If you struggle with taking things personally, capture the stories you are telling yourself in a story log. Jot down the event, and the story you are telling yourself about the event. Then, brainstorm three alternative stories that could be possible. Then, with perspective, consider how you want to respond, or it the event has passed, what a better response would have been.

Team Topologies

In Software engineering, Conway’s Law states that the architecture of our systems takes on the shape of the communication paths of our architecture. If we want to change an architecture then we must change how we are structured.

Team topologies offers an in depth look at how we might organize teams in order to build the architectures we went while trying to limit the cognitive load of our teams - that is the mental effort we must exert to do our job and all of the things we must remember to do it well.

Can’t Even

Many people, myself included, tend to only read books with which we agree with the premise or which build on our world view. Rarely do I seek at books that argue something counter to my view of the world. Can’t Even, which describes how millennials became the burnout generation, falls into the latter category. The author lays down all of the reasons why millennials have it so much worse than previous generations and how society and how our parents raised us are to blame. This book sits in stark contrast to the next book on my reading list…

The Obstacle is the Way

Everyone, millennials included, face challenges. Rockefeller started his career during a recession and saw it as blessing, as he was made stronger. Compare this with the title of the previous book, “Can’t Even”. This book is divided into 3 elements, Perception, or how we perceive a situation, Action, or how we choose to respond to what we perceive, and our Will, or the internal drive that says when we will give up.

The author provides examples From many people yet leans heavily on Stoic philosophy including this quote from Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius “Choose not to be harmed - and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed - and you haven’t been.”

LeaderShift

Written by John C Maxwell, Leadershit shares the 11 mental shifts a leader must make in their career, such as when an individual is promoted to a leadership position, they must make the shift froma soloist to a conductor.

Building a Second Brain

In “Getting Things Done”, David Allen stated that “your brain is for thinking of ideas, not remembering them”. This is where a “Second Brain” comes in. How can we save all of the interesting bits of information, knowledge, and artifacts we build in a way that we can easily access it and leverage it when we need it?

At its core, the system consists of a common folder structure for your electronic documents, wherever they are that is called the PARA method:

• Projects
• Areas of Focus
• Resources
• Archive

Strategize

Strategize deals how to define and execute a product strategy. A successful strategy lies at the Center of business goals, market needs, and the key feature differentiators of the product.

Art of Business Value

Art of Business Valve explores what the elusive ‘Business helve’ that many agile frameworks and practices refer to. If the role of development teams is to deliver and maximize business velve, we must understand and articulate what the business values.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

We develop many habits on our way to success and significance. But many of these habits hold us back and prevent us from making the next jump in our career. This book presents many of the most common habits that hold people back and how to overcome them.

Personal MBA

An MBA is expensive in both time and money. The Personal MBA aims to give the reader all of the knowledge of an MBA without the expensive price tag. Even if you do pursue an MBA, the Personal MBA provides Clift notes for most of the topics covered and is a great resource to point to other books tht die deeper on the topic.

My key takeaways from my 2021 books

I am an avid reader. Over the past 5 years, I’ve read at least 2 books a month. I read for both fun and learning, striving to strike an even balance. Often, learning occurs from my fun reading as much as the other books. Take Matthew McConaughey’s memoir, Green lights. In addition to being entertained by his stories and his refined Texas drawl, the premise of the book is that at times the universe will give you “green lights” to proceed.

My reading in 2021 followed 3 key themes, books for fun, books on leadership, and books on personal efficiencies. I’ve left most of the books for fun off this light, like the Silmarillion. Below are my key learnings from my 2021 readings.

Team of Teams

Team of Teams combines three of my favorite types of books history, military, and leadership. The author recounts first-hand how he transformed the military and the leadership of the military organization responsible for rooting out and fighting insurgents in Iraq during the Second Iraq War. As the title of the book suggests, this was accomplished by forming a team of teams that decentralized decision making and the free-flow of information between different agencies, including intelligence agencies usually accustomed to keeping secrets well guarded.

Green lights

I prefer to read my books instead of listening to them. However, if I come across an audio book that is read by the author AND their profession is to speak for a living, then that audio book will get the ‘greenlight’ for me.

This is a fairly entertaining read. What I wasn’t expecting deep insightful ideas. Here are a couple quotes that jumped at to me.

• Great leaders are not always in front, they also know who to follow.
• We cannot fully appreciate the light without the shadows.
• We have to be thrown off balance to find our footing.
• Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.

War of Art

Creative endeavors done by professionals is a war. Professionals will encounter resistance in many forms, yet know that the only way to succeed is to overcome resistance in its many forms.

Boundaries

Many of us fail to establish and enforce strong boundaries between us and other people. This results in inner or external frustration. Poor boundaries at work may result in us being overworked as we find it difficult to say no.

This book dives deep into types of problems with boundaries, the laws the authors feel boundaries follow, and how to establish boundaries. The key point is that boundaries are not selfish but actually lead to mature relationships.

Leader Who Had no Title

Told as a story, the leader who had no title explains how anyone can stand up and be a leader, regardless of your position in the organization. By taking responsibility, taking actions, and developing the right behaviors, anyone can inspire and lead others.

Leadership is Language

Written by David Marquet, the author of Turn the Ship Around, Leadership is Language talks about how the language leaders use is important. Equally important is to not follow the old patterns of leadership but instead follow the new plays of modern leadership, which are:

• CONTROL THE CLOCK, not obey the clock
• COLLABORATE, not coerce
• COMMIT, not comply
• COMPLETE, not continue
• IMPROVE, not prove
• CONNECT, not conform

Getting things done when you’re not in Charge

This book is written around a model of change influence in which you, as the change agent connects people, wants, and reality. Influencing change requires understanding how the reality interacts with the people in the agenication and their wants and desires to change.

Smarter, Faster, Better

In the author’s studies around productivity, he landed on 8 key areas. When harnessed well, these lead to smarter, faster, better results. The 8 key areas are Motivation, Teams, Focus, Goal Setting, Managing others, Decision Making, Innovation, Absorbing Data.

A Minute to Think

We all find ourselves very busy, in need of a minute to think. This book is about creating white space through application of smart strategies to optimize your time. One interesting insight from this book is that making many small improvements can be more effective than making one big improvement. The smaller improvements are easier to implement then large ones, meaning we can gain greater successive improvements.

Making Work Work

Positivity in organizations is key to making work “work”, or functional. There are many ways to achieve this, but one way is to act like your “hire” self, that is the version of yourself that shows up to job interviews.

Rebel Talent

Rebels here a knack for making things better. Rebels, as leaders, can drive innovation and creativity throughout the organization. Rebel Talent speaks to the value rebellious, creative people bring to an organization.

Keep the reader at the center of your writing.

Just as we develop user-centered designs, our communication should place the reader at the center of what we do. Three key ways to apply this is to:

• Lead with the summary and key point you aim to convey
• If you provide context that is not absolutely necessary, place it towards the end
• Provide jumping off points for your reader to save them time

These ideas come from the book Smart Brevity, which covers the mechanics of the concept in great detail, from the structure of a message, the use of axioms to highlight the important details, and how to apply it to various mediums, including presentations. Check out the book to learn more.

My three key lessons from Smart Brevity

I’m striving to apply these three key ways to improve how I write. The overarching aim of each is to put the reader at the center of the message. This makes the writing less about what I want to say and more about what the reader needs to hear and understand on the topic.

First, when I’m writing for others, I pause to make certain I know what it is that they truly need to know about what I’m sharing. I try to boil down the message to the one take-away they need from the message. As shared in Smart Brevity, if you can’t identify the key take-away, how can you expect the reader or listener to? As the writer of the message, I am the expert on what I need to convey; if I can’t convey it succinctly, then have I not done my job. In these cases, I need to put in more work.

Second, I aim to put the key take-away at the top, explain why it matters clearly and providing clear exit points for the reader. With shortening attention spans, it’s important to lead with the important message up front. Additional context can be shared, but it should be at the end, so those who do not need or care about the context can skip it.

Finally, my blog posts now contain a tag line along with the title. While the titles aim to be catchy, the tag line summarizes the key point of the post. This ensures that each post has a tight focus and gives the reader the option to decide if they want to continue or not. For those who skim messages, the headings give them an indication on which areas of the messages they should read and which they can ignore.

Are you writing for you or are you writing for the reader?

In software, we say that software is written once and read many times. As such, we strive and reiterate that software should first be functional and second be readable by the humans who have to maintain the code. Many of a developer have come across poorly written code, cursed at the complexity of it, struggled to identify what it is doing, and then only discover that they wrote the code.

Concurrently, we strive to build and deliver user-centric solutions. These solutions aim to put the user at the forefront of our design, so that we produce solutions people actually want to use, not what we think they would like.

Both of these concepts seem simple; ensure that what we write and build is done for others benefit and needs above our own. Yet the emergence of user-centric design in the last decade and popularization of models, tools, and training programs to teach this style of design show that while the concept is simple simple, it doesn’t mean it’s obvious nor easy to do.

In the book Smart Brevity, the authors identify a similar pattern with communication. When writing a message for others, how often do we consider the needs of the reader when we draft a message? How much time do they have available? What is the bare minimum they need to know about this topic? Why is this message important?

As with any skill, writing reader-centric messages takes time. This post itself went through MANY edits to land at its current state and I’m still questioning the length and brevity of the message. But I believe just as iteration is the key to user-centered design, iteration is a key part of crafting and learning to craft reader-centric messages.

What doesn’t kill you truly makes you stronger

Imagine a stormy evening for a moment. Rain is comind down in sheets, hitting the pavement in waves. Trees are being whipped by the wind, testing the strength of the branches as they flail around. Lightning is momentarily brightening the evening sky as the bassline of thunder plays against the percussion of rain striking roof, windows, wall, and ground. The wind howls through the air, playing a melody against the back drop of rain and thunder.

Both trees and houses are subjected to the same stresses of a storm, namely powerful wind, but each has a different relationship with those stresses. A house is built to withstand certain wind speeds. Exceed those speeds, and shingles and other parts of the home will suffer damage. A house can either withstand wind or be harmed by it.

Trees have a different relationship with wind and other environmental stressors. Trees aren’t built, but are living, growining, adapting plants. As they grow, they are exposed to external forces like the wind. Far from making trees weaker, these stresses make the trees stronger and help them reach maturity. In the Biosphere 2 study done in the 90s and popularized by the Pauly Shore movie “Bio-Dome”, trees grown in the controlled environment would eventually collapse if they were not exposed to wind.

Our leadership grows the same way. While we grow personally in good times and bad, our skills as leaders are put to the test when things go sideways on us. Anyone can sail a ship underway in a calm breeze, but it takes a skilled sailor to navigate in a storm. Likewise, a crisis requires leaders to leverage their full arsenal of leadership skills to navigate and resolve, often under time pressure.

The stresses of the bad times are what grow us. When things are going well, when we have the luxury of time, how much easier is it to consider the optimal approach to take an action? Yet here in the good times, we’re comfortable. As former CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty once stated, “Growth and comfort do not coexist.”

We all will face good and bad times in our careers. Seek discomfort in the good times to force yourself to grow so that you are ready for the bad times. And when you are in the middle of the bad times, think of yourself as a tree blowing in a storm. You may feel whipped around, uncomfortable, and stressed, but remember to bend, not break and that you will grow stronger from this experience.

As a leader, ensure what you say and what is heard aligns with what you intend

“Lean in”. This phrase has permeated my organization in the past few years. Originating from Sheryl Sandberg’s book of the same name, it was intended as a rallying cry for women in the workplace to be bold and lead. In the original context, this is a powerful message, encouraging women to stand up in the organization and lean into the opportunities in front of them.

This powerful message is diluted, even twisted when used in different contexts. The key context I hear it is a call for people to be engaged, work harder, and not check out, as if just telling people to ‘lean in’ is an antidote to disengagement in the work place. To those already over-taxed with daily demands and tasked with doing more with less, this can sound like a motivational message from the manager in Office Space.

As leaders, its our duty to communicate clearly to our team, often in the form of motivation. But with any communication, it’s crucial that we verify that what we say and what is heard aligns with what we intended to communicate. Communication is hard.

For leaders, it is the most important thing that we do. And yet, communication is more than some pithy phrases repeated over and over. We must continually hone our skills and as with any skill, seek feedback. Otherwise we risk coming off as an out-of-touch leader.

On a cold, winter day, my family moved in to our newly constructed house in the suburbs of the Midwest. Despite the brisk weather we were enjoying, the front yard had recently been coverred with sod - grass expertly grown on a farm. The side and back yard was mud and rocks, and remained that way until late spring, when the builder finished the yard by smoothing the dirt, laying grass seed, and covering it with straw.

While both the front and back of the house appear as one yard, seven years later they still retain different charecteristics that reveal their origins. The front yard requires a regimen of weed and feed fertilizer, to prevent weeds from growing and to strengthen the lawn. The back yard still requires grass seed, fertilizer, and a healthy dose of water while I struggle to fill in stubburn bare sponts in the back yard. The front yard gets mowed weekly, while the back yard can go 2 weeks in between mowings. The front yard is green and almost completely devoid of weeds, while the back yard contains clover, dandelions, and other weeds alongside the fescue grass common to the midwest.

As coaches or leaders, at some point, we will find ourselves nurturing two or more teams at once. It’s common to assign a Scrum Master two teams, expecting them to form, facilitate, and coach for them both. These teams are like my two yards. Their needs, while based on the same science, are ultimately different. As much as I want to treat the yards consistently, they will need different levels of care, different levels of attention, and different methods and solutions to address their unique problems. And the same applies for your teams.

Coaching teams is like caring for a yard. You must observe what is missing, diagnose the problem, and apply a fix. Then you must wait patiently as the fix takes effect, changes the situation, and re-observe so you can decide what further changes are needed. Every yard, and every team, is different. But with experience, we can learn to be effective gardeners of our yards and our teams.

A Servant leadership, a term added to the lexicon of Leadership by Robert Greenleaf in the 20th Century and popularized in Software Engineering through the rise of agile movement, flips the organizational chart on its head. A Servant leader is someone who serves those that they lead. Instead of blindly ordering people to complete a task, we serve them and aid them in the removal of impediments to the completion of their work. This means putting the people you lead first. While most people understand that this means putting those you lead ahead of yourself, this also means that you should put them ahead of everything else, including your boss.

Servant leaders, in my experience, are people pleasers. They want to be helpful and do all that they can do to help other people out. And that includes when they are given orders from leadership. But when you have many competing priorities, from your team, your boss and the organization, which do you prioritize first?

Let’s imagine a scenario where we have 4 tasks, one to serve those we lead, one task from our leader, one tasks from the broader organization, and a task that we’ve identified on our own. For this question let’s assume that all tasks take equal time and are of equal value. Which of these tasks should we complete first?

A traditionalist will prioritize their boss’s request first. The boss is the one who “signs the cheeks”, so to speak. Pleasing them will be high on their list. They’ll likely prioritize their organization’s ask next, seeking to respect ‘the chain of command’.

A TRUE servant leader, I will argue, will prioritize the task from their team first, as serving them comes first in their mind, then serving the wider organization. If Servant leadership flips the organization chart, empowering their team is more important than following the ‘chain of command’.

A people pleaser, on the other hand, will try to get it all done, aiming to please everyone. As the old cliche goes, “when you try to please everyone, you please no one.”

True Servant Leadership will require ruthless prioritization. It will require you to prioritize items. I am a firm believer that your priorities should match your values. Everything you do, including prioritization of your tasks, should be rooted in your values if you are being true to yourself. If you are unconsciously prioritizing tasks, consider what choices you are making. This may reveal something about what you value or show that you are not being true to yourself.

And the answer may not be what you expect.

What happens once the quest is done?

(Spoiler alert: The below contains spoilers of the Mandalorian and Boba Fett series to date.)

Somewhere along the way, you had a goal, a quest, you were pursuing. Maybe it was as simple as complete a class. Finish High School. Graduate College. And once you accomplished the quest and met your goal, then what? You may have had a clear path forward, maybe not. What happens once the quest is done, the dragon slain, the towns people saved, peace restored? For the Star Wars fans in the audience, this is exactly the situation season 3 explores and why it may feel painful to watch for some.

The Mandalorian Series started off immersing us in the world of Star Wars. After one or two episodes in season 1, we teased out that the story takes place after the fall of the Empire. A few episodes in, the main charecter, Mando is given an explicit quest to return baby Yoda to his kind. Along the way he had a number of different adventures, but each episode, each encounter was always pursuing the end goal of helping baby Yoda (or Grogu as we learn his proper name further in the story). Season 2 ends with this goal accomplished. The Boba Fett series sees Grogo return to Mando’s side. Season 3 picks up with the two of them reunited.

And then what? The quest has been achieved, so where do we go from here? It’s not clear where the season leads to and each episode is its own self-contained story. We see bits and pieces of where the story is going, and in the 5th episode we see something of a quest finally form: re-establish Mandalore. And yet, that may just be a side quest or a way to advance the plot.

It’s a different way to tell a story and let the plot emerge. We were used to a giant quest in front of us for this show. Most of the episodes take place in the ‘return Grogu to his people’ quest. What do we do once the objective has been complete?

Sometimes in life we have a clear path. Much of the time, the path is only clear after the fact. Life transitions from a clear
quest to moving forward to some unforeseen future… and back again.

Season 3 of the Mandalarian is uncomfortable because we don’t know where we’re going. For anyone who has accomplished a big life goal, you’ve likely sat afterwards and pondered “now what?” The first half of Season 3 mimics the wandering that can follow the accomplishment of a goat. In our life, we may find ourselves having one encounter after another, marching towards an ultimate quest. Yet much of the path will be murky and hidden from us.

When you find yourself lost, take stock of where you are, keep moving forward, and do what you can where you are to help other people. Stay true to yourself. You may not know what quest you are on now, but that goal may emerge in time as you look back and realize the way you were going the entire time.

We learned to read as children, starting with simple books, simple words, and silly situations to spark the imagination and capture the attention.

As we got older, we read longer and longer books, with more complex words, realistic situations, and demanded we monitor our own attention. First we started with simple chapter books and by the end classics of literature -Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlet Letter, Crime and Punishment. All of these books require finishing the book to fully understand and grasp the meaning, the themes, and lesson the author is teaching.

As an adult, and as a working professional, you may find yourself reading non-fiction books - a book my schools prepared me little for reading, consuming, and understanding. These books are a different beast from the fiction we were taught to read.

The good thing is, we’re adults and we get to decide how much we’ll read, what we are going to read, how much we’ll read and most importantly, why.

Because you decide why you read and what you want out of it, you get to dictate the approach you will use. I see too many adults, including many working professionals, choose not to read at all, which is a shame, because a lot can be learned from a book.

Most of us approach a book like we were taught as kids - to read it cover to cover. There are alternatives to this approach.

Using Priming, we start by understanding what the book we’ve chosen is about, consider why we are reading this book, and what we hope to learn.

Armed with this pre-work, we can proceed along one of three paths, skimming the book and looking for key points and the information we want, start at the beginning and read the key chapters, or, start at the beginning and read until we’ve extracted what we wanted to learn.

After reading, capturing notes, and analyzing nearly 100 ‘books, I’ve noticed a pattern. Most books will begin with the problem the author is exploring, then provide the author’s solution. Once the solution has been shared, the author then explores various dimensions of their solution and corollaries from it. If all you were seeking is to understand the solution, then skipping the corollaries and details might be fine.

Reading a book as an adult does not need to be the same as when we were students. You get to decide why you are reading the book, what you want from it. how you will read the book, and when you are done with it. Most non-fiction books can be understood in just a few chapters. The Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule applies to non-fiction books - 80% of the value of the book comes from 20% of its chapters. Don’t feel bad if you seek those chapters at and more on to the next book - there’s a lot of great ideas to explore out there.

Last year, 2020 was many things. Historians, authors, and journalists will have lots to explore within the depths of 2020. Yet, with no where to go, it was easy to find time to read in 2020.

Compared with 2019, I read fewer books in 2020, 52 vs. 36. Yet this was my target from the start of the year. In years past, I would rush through books, getting a sense of accomplishment siimply from completing the book. This year’s focus more than ever was to focus on grasping the concepts in the book and considering how I was going to improve from them.

My goal was to read a balance of books. I aimed for four areas of reading: Fun, Technical, Leadership, and Self-Help books. My target was for Fun to take up half of the total, with Technical being a quarter, and Leadership and Self-Help rounding out the rest. In the end, Leadership accounted for 7 of the 36 (instead of 4) and Technical was only 5 of 36. In hindsight, this makes sense as leadership and influence have been my target growth areas for some time.

The following is a summary of a selection of the books I read last year. Instead of listing all books, this list is targeted at the most impactful books or series of books I read.

2018 Book List
2019 Part 1
2019 Part 2

The Expanse Series (Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, Abaddon’s Gate, Cibola Burn, Nemesis Game, and The Churn)

I’m a huge fan of the TV show “The Expanse. In need of some escape from a pandemic, I decided to read a book about… a pandemic (it made more sense at the time). These books cover the first 5 seasons of the show. Starting out, the series splits the narrative between two viewpoints in Leviathan Wakes (James Holden and Detective Miller), then expands to four or more throughout the rest of the series. This can be a bit jarring as a reader, but keeps the suspense going for a TV show.

The Churn is a novella, set before any of the books, but with a large tie-in with Nemesis Game.

The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking

Dale Carnegie has timeless knowledge to share. After reading his acclaimed book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, I knew this book would have great, practical advice. If you have to present to audiences often and want to improve, this is a great book to study. I suggest adding this to your library as a referece book, because you’ll find yourself returning to it time and again.

Attention Management

Time management skills are critical to success, but recent trends are pointing that what we really need i the modern workd is to better manage our attention. Using our natural rhythms to do work at optimal and staying focused, we can get more done than simply ‘managing our time’. This book provides a good introduction to the concept and some practical advice.

A Year of Living Mindfully

Designed with one section/activity for each week of the year, I started this in 2019 and finished in 2020. There was no better year to focus on mindfulness than 2020! This book contained numerous practices and guidance on being mindful. With 2020 behind us, mindfulness is still an important skilset. If you want to learn more and are willing to put about 15 to 30 minutes towards it a week, this would be a great resource for you.

Atomic Habits

We’va all heard stories of ‘overnight’ successes, people who seemingly in one day achieved success. What we don’t see is all the hard work that went in, the tiny habits that led to the success. This book undercovers the science around habits and gives a framework for establishing new habits: make it visible, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. If you want to establish better habits for yourself, this book can help you get there.

The Compound Effect

I read this shortly after Atomic Habits, and the two books overlap in content quite considerably. While Atomic Habits focuses on the science, The Compound Effect focusses more on being successful and the compounding impact good habits can have over a long period of time. If you want to really learn about habits, read both of these books. If you want to know more about success, check this book out.

Maxwell Daily Reader

John Macwell is a prolific author in the leadership space. This boook contains a page for each day of the year that teaches a different leadership lesson eac day, pulling excerpts from his many books, like the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. This was such a good read that I decided to read through it again this year.

Humble Inquiry

How often do we ask questions from a place of humility, a place where re recognize we are dependent upon the other person to provide the answer? The author outlines what it means to engage in humble inquiry, why it is important for team work and psychological safety for leaders to ask questions in this way, and also whiy it is so difficult in Western culture to adobt this mindset.

Speed of Trust

Trust is crucial to teamwork and to leadership. With trust, we can get many things done quickly. Without trust, things take much longer to accomplish.

Written by the son of the author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective Poeple, Speed of Trust provides a framework for building trust, starting with our personal charecter and our track record of results and then expands into our behavior with others. Much like 7 Habits, this book is foundational to leadership and has been included in many leadership classes.

The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell

Leaders often find themselves as story tellers, inspiring and influencing their team. This book outlines ten different types of stories that leaders will find themselves telling to inspire their teams. The book gives an example of each type of story and breaks down the elements of each type so that you can craft your own story for the ten situations provided.

More Effective Agile

As an agilist, I spend a fair amount of time reading articles in my field. In the tech industry, books become stale quickly. Published in 2019 by software engineer and thought leader Steve McConnell, this book takes a hard look at agile in organizations and offers advice at how to structure an agile organization to be more effective. Steve McConnell is also the author of Code Complete, one of my favorite books on software craftsmanship.

More Effective Agile is not meant as an introduction into agile softare deveopment. In this book you will find tips for a practical, analytical approach to agile software development. Check this out if you want practical advice on advancing an agile organization.

Succeeding with Agile

Another book on Agile, I started this lengthy tome many years ago (more than I’d like to admit). The first part of the book gives an introductory overview of Scrum, but like with More Effective Agile, I would consider this an intermediate book on the subject. Succeeding with Agile covers a large gamut of agile topics like how to lead a team, build a backog, do estimation, and work with a large number of teams.

Measure What Matters

Not an agile book per se, Measure What Matters introduces the topic of Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs. Used by Intel, Google, and many other companies, OKRs are an alternative to the cascading goal cycle that many companies have fallen into. Paired with an agile transformation, I see OKRs as a way for an organzation to set goals (both business and improvement goals) in an agile fashion.

The Unicorn Project

Years ago, I read the Phoenix Project, which in the form of a fable, outlines the case for DevOps in modern Software Development. Set in a fictionaly company, the Phoenix Project follows a leader in the production engineering organization. The Unicorn Project, written a few years later, is set in the same fictional company at the same time, but this time we follow a software developer as she joins a new team, witnesses the struggles the run into while trying to get things done and work together to build a cross-functional team that delivers results for the company.

Thinking in Bets

Written by a professional poker player, Thinking in Bets explores the idea of betting and the idea if we treated our thoughts as if we were to place a bet on it. If we did, we’d likely do more research if our confidence was low. Further, we might consider our confidence to our thoughts to aid in quick decision making, both for ourself as well as others.

Influencer

Written by the authors behind Crucial Conversations (plus one newcomer), Influencer breaks down the nature of influence into discrete areas, using a matrix of motivation and ability on one axis and personal, social, and structural areas on the other. Thus, to achieve influence on a change, we must ensure that individuals, groups, and the environment all provide the proper motivation to make a change and that each enable the ability to do so.

When we look at habits, we encounter similar challenges implementing a change. Are we personally able and motivated to make a change? Does our environment setup to make the new habit easy to do and help us be motivated to make the change? When thinking of influence, the science of habits plays a crucial part, as when we try to change others, we are asking that we change other people’s habits.

Why Buddhism is True

As a recent student of mediation, a number of mediation resources are inspired by Buddhism. In learning more about meditation and mindfulness, I’ve also learned more about Buddhism. This book, written by a professor, is not a religous book, but instead takes a scientific lens to the core, secular tenants of Buddhism. In the course of the book, the author argues that there is scientific research to support these ideas.

I find it fascinating when we find that ‘ancient wisdom’ has some grounding in reality. It reminds me that humans hundreds and thousands of years ago had minds just as capable as ours, they just had less access to knowledge of others before them. As we continue to build upon the knowledge of each other, just think what we can achieve.

Radical Candor

Written by a software executive, Radical Candor offers guidance on how to give feedback to others. Radical Candor occurs at the junction of caring personally about someone and challenging them directly. If we lack one element or the other, we are not radically candid.

While the book makes some good points, in practice it can easily be used by naturally aggressive people to encourage them to continue to be aggressive. The back half of the book is aimed more at managers, making the book less useful as a general leadership book.