A couple of days into the second quarter of 2021 and I'm on my 22nd book of the year! I wanted to share the titles I've been reading with a couple of likes and dislikes about them :)
1) The Servant - Fictional allegory about servant leadership, super engaging and well written! The whole book is in a story format teaching leadership principles. Highly recommend, super short but makes for a very good book on the weekend :)
2) Scrum - Project management for product development, using real-time feedback to design the product. Super well written and easy to understand, lots of small tricks you can use in your own personal life management.
3) The Scrum Feildbook - Stories of how Scrum was implemented successfully. Good book, though it was a bit overboard on how great scrum was. I wished they added a couple of failures of how it doesn't work in certain scenarios.
4) The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership - Amazing book! It's written kind of like a student-sensei relationship and gives excellent problem-solving formulas to overcome difficult situations in people management as well as manufacturing.
5) The Five Love Lanuguages - Probably one of my all-time favorite relationship-building book, it's written specifically for couples, but I've had amazing success applying the teachings to everyone I meet. Highly recommend!
6) Good to Great - One of my all-time favorites, really helped me see what truly great companies looked like and how to build them. Changed a lot of my mindset and opened me up to a whole new world of effective leadership with the level 5 leader.
7) Built to Last - Also really good, though it felt sort of rushed, I wouldn't say it's a memorable book, but all the content was really good, just not presented in an engaging and meaningful way.
8) Ego Is the enemy - Fantastic book, another one of my all-time favorites. It basically talks about how your ego is the enemy of your own success, and learning to be silent is one of the fastest ways to build a reputation. Highly highly recommend it to anyone, opened my eyes to a lot of things I was doing that just fueled my ego and nothing else.
9) The Pumpkin Plan - You can't go wrong with Mr. Mike motorbike, the pumpkin plan was very well written and made finding your ideal customer/client (giant pumpkin) very clear and straightforward, so much so that I've been unconsciously using those tricks in my everyday conversations with the people I speak to.
10) Ego, Authority, Failure - Very similar to "Never Split the Difference" and is close friends with Chris Voss. It's very well written and gives really good tips and tricks to reading people, but I don't like the way it's written. Feels very manipulative and "us vs them" mentality.
11) Read the Face - Another all-time favorite, not a Christian author by any means and does mention some weird religious stuff here and there, but overall fantastic book. He tells you how you can read people's faces in finding out who they are, even more, so they might know about themselves. He talks about how different faces are built and how certain ones incline people to have different passions in work. I was shocked how well it works, and only reading it once over I'm starting to pick up on a lot of subtle things about the people I talk to. Highly recommend it, though many may find it too "woo woo" magical, though it really isn't.
12) Start from Zero - Really interesting book about building SAAS (software as a service) businesses. The basic idea is finding a problem people are having, getting them to pay for it, and you build the app that you then sell out on a subscription basis. Really well written though he doesn't touch too much on the marketing of the product after it's built.
13) To Kill a Mockingbird - I can't believe I haven't read this classic before, a fantastic change of pace from the non-fiction books, and really enjoyed how it was written from the perspective of Scout in her understanding of what went on. I really wasn't expecting the ending.
14) Delivering Happiness - Excellent book starts out as an autobiography of Tony's life leading up to his building out Zappos and how he was able to do that by focusing on service over making a profit. I don't especially like how sporadic he is and how far he goes to seek happiness in different extremes, but overall very well written with a lot of outside-the-box thinking.
15) Autobiography of Henry Ford - All I can say is wow, another one of my all-time favorites. Henry Ford's story was nothing short of amazing, he really is one of the greats. His biography is very similar to R.G. LeTourneau in how he built his first car, and later his management style of Ford Motor Company was very insightful into how different people have different desires.
16) Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Eloquently written with a lot of the inside looks of Benjamin's life and struggles. I hadn't realized that he wasn't, nor even in his later years a Christian, though he leads a very Christ-like life. I loved how he talked about his different clubs, reminds me a lot of our modern-day masterminds!
17) What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World - Fun change of pace, fiction book recommended to me by a friend online. Super imaginative and had a lot of subtle life lessons/observations packed into it. The plot was decent, though the speed was a bit off, was very slow for the first 90% of the book, then suddenly sped up very fast and answered too many questions too quickly.
18) The New One Minute Manager - Can't believe I haven't read this management book before! Very similar to The Servant in how it's written as an allegory sort of style with the story being very engaging while providing a lot of thought-provoking ideas.
19) Scaling up - Good, not great. Pretty much a compilation of a lot of the great books already written, felt very much like it was a calling card more than a book written to teach. All the content was well presented, just didn't have that element that makes a great business book.
20) The 12 Week Year - Though I've read it before, I read it again this year, it's good, but in my opinion, not very well put together and doesn't resonate on my mind very much afterward. The outline of mapping out your year in a series of 12 weeks could have been further developed and given more real-life examples.
21) Autobiography of Nikola Tesla - Stopped halfway, it was interesting but felt very depressing and egotistical. It was an interesting book, to say the least, but I felt kind of sick halfway through and had to put it down. I probably won't be finishing it.
21) Principles - Great book on principles, though I didn't especially like the erratic nature of the author's story he used to share the principles. Very insightful though and did open my eyes to many subtle things that I hadn't looked very closely at previously
23) The Common Path to Uncommon Success - I'm a couple of chapters in so far, a good book, but so far I feel like it's written more as a calling card to take the space of an expert in his niche and not to just add value with no expectations of return. I can't complain about the content though, really good stuff and engaging stories.