Reading List

The current pile of books on my desk

Earlier this year a former colleague asked me to make a list of some of the books I’d recommended him over the prior months. I ended up really enjoying the exercise; it showed that I’d read more than I thought, and that plenty had made a significant impact on how I think and work.

I’ve definitely not completed everything below (and I’ve certainly missed a few books also) but it’s a good starting point. I’d love to hear what others think!

I put books into the following categories

• Stories
• Presentations, arguing etc.
• Personal organisation
• Psychology and Behavioural Economics
• Management
• Engineering Management
• Software Engineering

Stories

• In the Plex (Amazon)
• Lots of interesting stories about Google’s origins. The descriptions of their use of signals for improving search performance, and the launch of display network advertising and adwords were inspirations for inSight’s creation. A fun breezy read.
• Flash Boys (Amazon)
• Enjoyable stories of trading firms discovering High Frequency Traders front-running their trades. Really nicely written, with a little technical jargon but also nice story arcs of firms laying their own fibre stealthily.
• Bad Blood (Amazon)
• Story of Theranos’s rise and ultimate demise. I’d never heard of it before but it was really well told and super enjoyable. I read it in about 5 train journeys it was so gripping.
• How Music Got Free (Amazon)
• I found this super nostalgic: it describes the early days of mp3s, FTP servers and BBS systems (I ran a BBS at one point- loved it). Interestingly almost all pirated mp3 files were stolen from a single CD pressing plant in Virginia. The book covers the development of the technology, as well as the tactics the smugglers and pirate groups used to spread files.

Presentations, arguing etc.

• The Science of Storytelling (Amazon)
• Written by a novelist that was procrastinating on writing a novel. He discovered that many traditions taught to writers had their foundation in psychology. The book covers how these different disciplines share a lot.
• Interesting and relevant to things like presentations etc.
• The Presentation Coach (Amazon)
• Written by a barrister so is a little wordy but provides a nice framework for preparing and giving presentations.
• Ties with Science of Storytelling: avoid presentations that start with agendas, or lengthy descriptions of individuals. Instead, say something that sparks people’s interest, for example.
• Thank You for Arguing (Amazon)
• Lots of detail on arguing, rhetoric etc. Provides lots of foundational information and detail. A shorter book written by the same author on the same topic is How to Argue with a Cat.

Personal Organisation

• The Bullet Journal Method (Amazon)
• One of the most useful tools I’ve adopted to better organise myself. The book’s quite nice in that it takes the practice of bullet journaling and layers on a little psychology and other things to help you adapt to something that works for you. I’m trying to structure something that aids reflection, goal-setting and more.
• The Rhodia Goalbook is my favourite book to do this with.

Psychology / Behavioural Economics

• Predictably Irrational (Amazon)
• Describes many biases and interesting phenomena around decision-making; we like to think of humans as logical and rational but we frequently aren’t.
• It’s really well written and the author has some amazing TED talks also.
• Drive (Amazon)
• Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose are what motivate people. We used it as the basis for structuring and organising teams years ago to enable people to find Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose in their work.

Management

• High Output Management (Amazon)
• Written by former CEO of Intel. Seems to be highly recommended in US VC circles, and covers a nice range of practical subjects: performance reviews, goal-setting, meetings, purpose of management etc.
• Has been really helpful in helping me frame what I should do, and how I should do it. Totally changed (and increased) my opinion of the purpose and activity of management.
• Everyone should read it.
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Amazon)
• Written by Ben Horowitz of a16z. Each chapter starts with a Hip-Hop quote but covers some interesting topics around the issues an organisation faces. I’ve not read all of it, and it seems a little glib at times, but looks like a reasonable read for some things.
• Principles: Life and Work (Amazon)
• Ray ran a hedge fund and apparently went bankrupt a couple of times. His insight was that all things he experienced have happened before, and that bad investment decisions flowed from not appreciating history and its repetition of patterns; that the investor hadn’t experienced something before didn’t mean that kind of event hadn’t occurred before.
• He ascribes a methodology that any decision he makes is based on principle, and records both the situation, decision and the principles that led him there.
• His emphasis on principles created algorithmic trading pre-computation.
• Very interesting.
• The Goal: A Graphic Novel (Amazon)
• Referenced a lot in other books like The Phoenix Project. The original novel is hard to work through (you can tell its written by an academic researcher trying to write a story) but I found the graphic novel much easier. I reference this all the time when talking through what problem to fix. Focus on the constraint!
• Opened my eyes to the world of business fiction (I read The Phoneix Project soon after which I found a far more enjoyable story).
• Managing Up (Amazon)
• Interesting to help me deal with having a new boss. Helps to frame understanding how to present yourself differently.
• Early days but has been helpful.
• Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (Amazon)
• One of the few books on strategy I enjoyed reading, and nicely explains why most strategy things are poorly considered. Has a nice overlap to An Elegant Puzzle and Principles.
• Will be re-reading (along with Systems of Engineering Management) to help guide efforts in early 2020 on better establishing and communicating strategy.
• Wardley Maps (Blog series on Medium)
• Much like Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, argues that existing tools typically used for strategy are poor (SWOT, for example). Instead, relates to Military Strategy and practices like Situational Awareness and presents Maps as a method to help understand landscape and compete more effectively.
• The Art of Strategy (Amazon)
• Only just started but it covers strategy as viewed through game theory, and so provides some tools for trying to make better decisions.
• Measure What Matters (Amazon)
• I think OKRs are great. They’re simple in theory but hard to do well. Perhaps they’re approximately equivalent to any goal setting system but I think they’re a nice model.
• It’s a breezy read with a few chapters on aspects of OKRs and then stories from companies that adopted them to illustrate. Some stories are better than others.
• It was useful to reset examples of writing good OKRs and get some inspiration from YouTube, for example.
• Team of Teams (Amazon)
• Describes how the US military adapted command structures during the Iraq war to adapt to the enemy.
• Pushes decision-making to be decentralised and encourage teams to work to objectives, rather than activity.

Engineering Management

• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Amazon)
• Written by a former VP of Engineering at Stripe. Covers lots of similar things to High Output Management, but with more focus on engineering. For example, covers sizing teams, modeling problems with systems thinking etc.
• Everyone should read it.
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean and DevOps (Amazon)
• Amazing book that connects both practice and research. Based on research from the State of DevOps surveys, is able to demonstrate how practices like frequent small releases are predictive of high performance organisations.
• Earlier books like Lean Software Development would describe how to view Engineering through a Lean lens. This book provides direct evidence of how that transforms your organisation.
• Everyone should read it.
• The Phoenix Project (Amazon)
• More business fiction. Written by one of the authors of Accelerate. It covers a protagonist that’s promoted and given one fire after another to put out. Much like The Goal, a board member comes along and helps the lead understand how limiting work in progress, and focusing on constraints, can help increase throughput.
• I was expecting it to be a hard read given I tried reading The Goal but it was surprisingly fun. Highly recommended and lots of food for thought for how to improve things.
• I read 95% of the book on one UK-US flight (I knew I wasn’t going to sleep in economy). Felt quite emotional by the end (combination of story-telling and tiredness I guess).
• Everyone should read it.
• Principles of Product Development Flow (Amazon)
• Covers a ton of principles around lean development. Argues that having an economic model of value is important to make good decisions. In particular, says that Cost of Delay should be the dominant factor: the cost of being 1 week late can be small at the beginning and thus misleading, instead, it should be based on value at the end of development.
• Quite mathematical and, because it’s a long sequence of principles, hard to form into a story or methodology but plenty of incredibly useful things to apply. Well worth working through the theory to adjust decision-making today.
• The Manager’s Path (Amazon)
• Changed my opinion on 1:1s and helped provide a solid framework to help me appreciate what I should probably spend my time doing.
• Very practical and covers typical growth of an employee as they become more and more senior within an organisation.
• Project to Product (Amazon)
• Tells the story of moving through BMW’s factory and office, and how the flow of value is immediately visible. The author wanted to achieve the same with software, and understand why it was different.
• Like Accelerate, suggests a few metrics to visualise the flow of work (Load, Efficiency, Distribution for example). I’m keen to experiment with using these to help teams optimise/explicitly manage their flow of features/risk work a bit like SLOs control reliability work.
• War and Peace and IT (Amazon)
• A really enjoyable read. I’m only about half way through but I’m optimistic it will help understand my place on an executive team, and how to close any Business/Tech gap.
• Team Topologies (Amazon)
• Only just recently started reading it and haven’t finished yet. I like that it provides a mental framework on aspects of teams: type of team (Value stream, Platform, Difficult Subsystem) and collaboration model (Collaboration, as-a-service, Facilitation).
• I’ve been recommending it to other technical and non-technical leaders to understand how they could adopt patterns our cross-functional engineering teams demonstrate and explicitly manage collaboration styles to achieve the results they want.
• I also like the pragmatism on recommendations, suggesting that there isn’t one true way but rather lots of trade-offs and you have to respond to the environment.
• Works quite well alongside Systems of Eng. Management and Flow to understand impediments to flow stemming from org/team structures.

Software Engineering

• Release It (Amazon)
• The best book I read on production-hardened software. Was the origin of the circuit breaker, bulkhead etc. patterns implemented by Netflix in Hystrix.
• Should be read by all engineers
• A Philosophy of Software Design (Amazon)
• Written by a lecturer in software engineering at Stanford. Frames engineering in tactical vs strategic design (rather than technical debt). Describes a model of software that has different cost of complexity according to how often it changes: if a module’s implementation changes infrequently it’s less important if the code is complex.
• I like it as it’s really short and provides a few examples of things that he found helped students write better software by the end of the course.
• I think it could provide a nice basis of a general software engineering training we could provide.
• Site Reliability Engineering (Amazon)
• A collection of essays from within Google around all aspects of their engineering teams. Lots of really interesting tidbits but especially helpful for concepts that are applied to systematically control BAU type work and reliability problems (with SLOs and Toil).