Recommended Books by Subject

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

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)


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