“So many books, so little time.”.. so said Frank Zappa.
A colleague recently requested a list of the books that have influenced me. So, here goes with a list of the top five reads that have had the biggest impact on me personally and professionally; plus some lunchtime teasers.
Personal development
- Reclaiming Your Life by Jean Jenson – an excellent DIY guide to regression techniques with powerful tools for healing and emotional growth.
- Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child by John Bradshaw – a great introduction to regression techniques and some useful practical exercises.
- Life Before Birth by Arthur Janov, the granddaddy of regression-based therapy, who may one day be seen as the Freud of our times. I had a difficult birth and I’ve benefited massively from Janov, one of the few writers and clinicians boldly exploring the links between birth and our adult lives.
- A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lanno – an accessible tour of the neuroscience of our basic human needs.
- The Bomb in the Brain YouTube series by philosopher Stefan Molyneux – for those who need the data, an excellent summary of how early experience impacts adult life.
Business books
- Maverick! by Ricardo Semler, an extraordinary success story of humanist principles put to work in an industrial conglomerate.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman a remarkable feat of accessible scholarship packed with insights – worth it for my introduction to the Validity Illusion alone.
- The Modern Firm by John Roberts, brilliantly fuses thinking on economics, culture and organisational design to provide coherent models of the organisation.
- #Workout by Jurgen Appelo, one of the world’s foremost gamifiers of management practice.
- One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization by Dee Hock – a superb treatise on how to successfully embrace complexity, with lessons on how creating self-organising systems can sometimes require some tough negotiating.
Lunchtime teasers
- The Cynefin Framework by Dave Snowden on understanding our place.
- Foundation 20 // Elon Musk by Kevin Rose – superb interview with the X-Man himself.
- Kanban and Evolutionary Management – Lessons … from Bruce Lee by David Anderson – martial arts meets management.
- Spotify Engineering Culture – part 1 Agile culture par excellence.
- The legendary Valve Handbook for New Employees.