Reading, Listening & Learning

Leadership & Culture

• The Speed of Trust – How trust becomes a measurable asset in leadership, not a soft side-note.
• Turn the Ship Around – A practical model for turning top-down control into distributed ownership.
• Amp It Up – Raising standards and urgency without burning people out.
• Team of Teams – Operating as a network of empowered teams instead of rigid silos.
• Leading Change – The classic playbook for making organizational change stick.
• Collective Intelligence – How groups can make better decisions than individuals when structured well.
• High Output Management – A very concrete look at what effective management looks like day to day.
• The Coaching Habit – Asking better questions so people grow instead of becoming dependent.
• The AI-Driven Leader – What it means to lead when AI is part of everyday decision-making.

Product, Startups & Innovation

• Zero to One – Focusing on truly differentiated value instead of incremental copies.
• The Four-Hour Workweek – Questioning default assumptions about work, focus, and leverage.
• The Lean Startup – Learning loops, MVPs, and validated learning for building new products.
• Escaping the Build Trap – Shifting from shipping features to delivering business outcomes.
• Product Roadmaps Relaunched – Treating roadmaps as communication and learning tools, not contracts.
• Continuous Discovery Habits – Making discovery a weekly habit instead of a once-a-year event.
• Outcomes Over Outputs – Keeping teams aligned to customer and business impact, not ticket counts.

Data, Analytics & Governance

• Disrupting Data Governance – Moving from gatekeeping to enabling safe, scalable data use.
• Infonomics – Treating information as an actual asset with measurable value.
• Data Science for Executives – How to reason about data science without getting lost in the math.
• Measure What Matters – Using OKRs to align data, work, and strategy around a few critical bets.
• Data-Driven (Podcast) – Conversations about making real decisions with data in the loop.

Systems, Projects & Delivery

• Critical Chain – Applying constraints thinking to project delivery and resource management.
• The Goal – A story-based introduction to bottlenecks, flow, and continuous improvement.
• Thinking and Systems – Seeing organizations as systems with feedback loops and unintended consequences.
• Continuous Discovery Habits – (Also a product book) but foundational for building learning into delivery.

Strategy, Decisions & Economics

• Thinking Strategically – Game-theory style thinking about incentives and moves in complex environments.
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things – What it really feels like to lead through messy realities, not theory.
• Invent and Wander – Jeff Bezos’s writings on long-term thinking, customer focus, and experimentation.
• Predictably Irrational – How people’s decisions systematically deviate from “rational” models.
• Freeconomics – Exploring incentives, behavior, and unexpected economic patterns in everyday life.
• Picking Winners – Thinking about risk, signals, and selection when making bets.
• Outliers – How context, systems, and opportunity shape exceptional performance.
• Never Split the Difference – Practical negotiation tactics for high-stakes conversations.

Personal Effectiveness & Boundaries

• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – A timeless framework for aligning actions with principles.
• Boundaries – How to say yes and no in a way that protects what matters most.
• The Power of Habit – Building and breaking habits by understanding cues, routines, and rewards.
• The Four-Hour Workweek – Re-evaluating where your time goes and what actually creates leverage.

Podcasts I Recommend

• Product Thinking Podcast – Deep dives into product strategy, discovery, and real-world product challenges.
• CDO Matters – Conversations with data and analytics leaders about building data-driven organizations.
• WorkLife with Adam Grant – Organizational psychology and how to make work more meaningful and effective.
• Hidden Layers (AI) – Exploring how AI is built and how it’s changing products, teams, and decision-making.
• Data-Driven – Stories and lessons from teams using data to shape products, operations, and strategy.

Conferences & Communities

• Gartner Data & Analytics Summit – Useful for seeing where enterprise data and analytics strategy is heading.
• DGIQ (Data Governance & Information Quality) – Deep, practical sessions on governance, lineage, and quality.

I tend to look for events and communities that blend strategy, hands-on practice, and candid discussion about what actually works in complex organizations.