I curated a reading list of what I have read and considered essential books on Business Agility, leadership, design thinking, and like topics. The list in is no particular order. If you need a starting point, look for the asterisk (*). This is an evergreen post I update often.

Leadership, Change Management, & Organizational Culture

• Leading Change by John Kotter (amz link) *

• Switch by Chip Heath & Dan Heath (amz link) *

• Accelerate by John P. Kotter (amz link)

• Start with Why by Simon Sinek (amz link)

• Drive by Daniel H. Pink (amz link)

• Radical Candor by Kim Scott (amz link)

• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown (amz link) *

• Daring Greatly by Brené Brown (amz link)

• Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek (amz link)

• Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet (amz link)

• Mindset by Carol S. Dweck (amz link)

• Implementing Lean Software Development by Mary & Tom Poppendieck (amz link)

• Leadership Is Language by David Marquet (amz link)

• Tribal Unity by Em Campbell-Pretty (amz link)

• Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (amz link) *

• Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan (amz link)

• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence (with article "What Makes a Leader?" by Daniel Goleman) by Harvard Business Review, et al. (amz link)

• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture (with article "How to Build a Culture of Originality" by Adam Grant) by Harvard Business Review, et al. (amz link)
  

Coaching, Facilitating, Teaching, & Mentoring

• Training From the Back of the Room! by Sharon L. Bowman (amz link) *

• Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins (amz link) *

• Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais (amz link) *

• The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (amz link)

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni (amz link)

• Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal (Retired General) (amz link)

• Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby (amz link)

• The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier (amz link)

• Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni (amz link)
  

Lean Systems Thinking, Value Streams, & Measurements

• Project to Product by Mik Kersten (amz link) *

• The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald G. Reinertsen (amz link) *

• Value Stream Mapping by Karen Martin & Mike Osterling (amz link) *

• Learning to See by Mike Rother & John Shook (amz link)

• Managing to Learn by John Shook (amz link)

• Lean Thinking by James P. Womack & Daniel T. Jones (amz link)

• Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming (amz link) *

• Measure What Matters by John Doerr (amz link) *

• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (amz link)

• The High-Velocity Edge by Steven J. Spear (amz link)

• Creating Great Teams by Sandy Mamoli and David Mole (amz link)
  

Innovation & Startup Mindsets

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (amz link) *

• The Startup Way by Eric Ries (amz link)

• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker) by Harvard Business Review, et al. (amz link) *

• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen (amz link)

DevSecOps, Technical Agility, Architecture, & Scaling Lean-Agile

• SAFe Distilled by Richard Knaster & Dean Leffingwell (amz link) *

• The DecOps Handbook, by Gene Kim, et al. (amz link) *

• Agile Software Requirements by Dean Leffingwell (amz link)

• User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton & Peter Economy (amz link)

• Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J. Anderson (amz link)
  

Agile Product Delivery, Design Thinking & Customer Centricity

• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, & George Spafford (amz link) *

• The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim (amz link)

• Value Proposition Design by Alexander Osterwalder, et al. (amz link)

• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Design Thinking (with article "Design Thinking" By Tim Brown) by Harvard Business Review, et al. (amz link) *

• The Lean Machine by Dantar Oosterwal (amz link) *

• Lean Product and Process Development by Allen Ward & Sobek Durward (amz link) *

• Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur (amz link)

• About Face by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, et al. (amz link)

• Paper Prototyping by Carolyn Snyder (amz link)

• Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden (amz link)

• The Design Thinking Playbook by Michael Lerwick (amz link)

Digital Transformation

• Competing in the Age of AI (amz link) *

Strategy & General Business

• Built to Last by Jim Collins (amz link) *

• Good to Great by Jim Collins (amx link)

• HBR's 10 Must Reads On Strategy by Harvard Business Review, et al. (amz link)

• Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim (amz link) *

• Made to Stick by Chip Heath (amz link)

• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Communication (with article "The Necessary Art of Persuasion," by Jay A. Conger) by Harvard Business Review, et al. (amz link)

Note: the amazon links are affiliate links

From the folks over at InfoQ:

— Whilst remote working presents challenges to innovation and collaboration, there are effective techniques to address them

— Staff-Plus engineers bring value through far more than their technical skills

— Developer Experience can be measured and there are metrics that can be used to find small improvements that make a huge difference

— It is possible and practical to include climate impact as a quality attribute of a software product

— The use of AI tools, such as large language models, can enhance the work of good programmers but do not replace the need for human expertise and creativity

https://www.infoq.com/articles/culture-trends-2024/

Interesting to see Value mindset cast as Innovators— I’m surprise that was not considered the foundation of Business Agility.

This video is a fantastic example of how Industrial Light & Magic has “shifted-left” film editing activities usually only completed in post-production. The results are near real-time edits during the production of Lucasfilm’s hit Disney+ series, The Mandalorian. This has reduced costs, improved quality, and enabled faster release. Continues Integration remains a key way to reduce risk.

For the second season of Lucasfilm’s hit Disney+ series, The Mandalorian, Industrial Light & Magic reengineered their StageCraft virtual production platform rolling out version 2.0 in which ILM introduced among other things, Helios, Industrial Light & Magic’s first cinematic render engine designed for real-time visual effects. Engineered from the ground up with film and television production in mind, Helios offers incredible performance, high fidelity real-time ray tracing, the ability to rip through scenes of unparalleled complexity, all while leveraging ILM’s unrivaled color science, and was designed from the start to work seamlessly with ILM StageCraft. The purpose-built, production-hardened platform allows filmmakers to explore new ideas, communicate concepts, and execute shots in a collaborative and flexible production environment.

https://youtu.be/-gX4N5rDYeQ

Last week I was interviewed by Forbes on the criticality of Lean, Agile, and DevOps within the Auto Industry. Link below.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2021/03/08/experts-say-auto-industrys-software-strategy-needs-to-get-agile-to-compete/

While contributing to the development of a new Leadership Development class today— there was much discussion around Emotional Intelligence. Can the new leadership behaviors required to compete the Digital Age be summed up as emerging Emotional Intelligence? This brought me back to a 2004 February Harvard Business Review article by Daniel Goleman “What Makes a Leader?”

In the course of the past year, my colleagues and I have focused on how emotional intelligence operates at work. We have examined the relationship between emotional intelligence and effective performance, especially in leaders. And we have observed how emotional intelligence shows itself on the job. How can you tell if someone has high emotional intelligence, for example, and how can you recognize it in yourself? In the following pages, we’ll explore these questions, taking each of the components of emotional intelligence—self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill—in turn.

It is fortunate, then, that emotional intelligence can be learned. The process is not easy. It takes time and, most of all, commitment. But the benefits that come from having a well-developed emotional intelligence, both for the individual and for the organization, make it worth the effort.

If you have not read the article (or if it’s been a while) — I suggest giving it a read.

Julia Sklar, writing for the Science section of National Geographic explains why I’m feeling so exhausted teaching remotely over video conferencing compared to when I teaching in-person classes. ‘Zoom gloom’ — an unexpected and real side effect of working remote with video.

However, a typical video call impairs these ingrained abilities, and requires sustained and intense attention to words instead. If a person is framed only from the shoulders up, the possibility of viewing hand gestures or other body language is eliminated. If the video quality is poor, any hope of gleaning something from minute facial expressions is dashed.

Multi-person screens magnify this exhausting problem. Gallery view—where all meeting participants appear Brady Bunch-style—challenges the brain’s central vision, forcing it to decode so many people at once that no one comes through meaningfully, not even the speaker.

It’s even possible Zoom fatigue will abate once people learn to navigate the mental tangle video chatting can cause.

From the folks over at InfoQ:

Key Takeaways

— Remote work is suddenly the new normal due to the impact of COVID-19, and many teams are not fully ready for the change

— The spread of agile ideas into other areas of organizations continues—business agility is becoming much more than just a buzzword

— At the practices level, Wardley Mapping is one of the few truly new ideas that have come into this space recently. Invented by Simon Wardley in 2005, they are gaining traction because they are truly a powerful tool for making sense of complexity.

—The depth of impact that computing technology has on society has heightened the focus on ethical behavior and the move towards creating an ethical framework for software development, as well as growing concern in the environmental impact the industry has.

— Diversity and inclusion efforts are moving forward, with a long way still to go

— Practices and approaches that result in more humanistic workplaces, where people can express their whole selves, are recognized as important for attracting and retaining the best people and result in more sustainably profitable organizations

https://www.infoq.com/articles/teams-teamwork-trends-2020/

Interesting they listed “Scaling Frameworks” in the Late Majority bucket. Much of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) 5.0 is also within the Innovators and Early Adopters buckets (such as: #NoProjects, Business Agility, and Enterprise Startups, and some in the Early Majority: Coaching/Mentoring, DevSecOps, etc.

My wish list (#RelentlessImprovement) for SAFe 6:

• Product Managment over Product Ownership

• Deliberate Culture Design

• Liberating Structure (avoiding Zombie Scrum and doubling down on SAFe Principle 10: Organize around value).

For those interested in Team self-selection in SAFe— I recommend Tribal Unity by Em Campbell-Pretty. (1)

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1. This link is an affiliate