April K. Mills' "Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials" is a distillation of several change management approaches into clear and enjoyable approach to change.
All in book review
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss was recommended by a couple colleagues. This is a great book on negotiation (and a bunch of related topics). Voss and Raz start each topic with a life-and-death hostage negotiation and then delve into the ideas behind the topic and where these apply in the less dire scenarios people face every day. The authors use Voss' own experiences in the FBI as the lead international kidnapping negotiator, his research and studies into what makes negotiations work (or not), and his teaching and consulting work. These elements are combined in a fairly engaging style: starting each chapter with a hostage situation made me want to keep reading to find out what happened, ... and learn a lot along the way.
Unlocking Innovation Productivity
Unlocking Innovation Productivity (Proven Strategies that Have Transformed Organizations for Profitable and Predictable New Product Growth Worldwide) by Mike Dalton is a guide to the challenges of product innovation and how to overcome them. He provides seven cumulative strategies to improve innovation, all based on Critical Chain Project Management and the underlying Theory of Constraints.
Quality, Involvement, Flow: The Systemic Organization by Domenico Lepore, Angela Montgomery and Giovanni Siepe. It's a good read for people interested in management and creating ever-flourishing organizations.
Breakthrough Project Management from Ian Heptinstall and Robert Bolton is a brief guide to getting significantly improved project performance through combining two management approaches: One is Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) and the other is collaborative contracting. For me the material on CCPM is a confirmation of what I have been doing for many years. And the material on Project Alliancing is new, and yet it rings bells for ensuring successful projects of any type.
Advertising is not a topic I normally worry about, but somehow the topic of "Seducing Strangers: How to Get People to Buy What You're Selling" by Josh Weltman goes beyond just about advertising. I like to think that this topic can be thought of beyond purely advertising into other areas where one might need to get people to "buy."
Two useful, easy to consume versions of The Goal are available... One a book and the other a one-page comic.
The larger Theory of Constraints community has been a great source of business novels over the past year. My latest find is The Human Constraint by Angela Montgomery. The story was compelling, and I thought the approach to talking about the formal process was very light-handed with just enough to make me curious to find more.
It's a short book, meant to be a quick read and guide to start thinking about thinking. Or maybe, more accurately, to get people doing something differently about thinking. The tone is light, but insistent - change the way you think to create fantastic new solutions.
Clarke Ching's "Rolling Rocks Downhill" is a great business novel, primarily about TOC and Agile. I like how it combines a number of perspectives and shows how real value can be obtained in surprisingly short time horizons. That said, it helps when there is outside pressure.
Kevin Fox's book, Aligned & Engaged, talks about creating effective teamwork in an organization. He provides 29 practices that will help any leader create more and more alignment and engagement in order to improve the bottom line.
Gary Klein's decision-making research is centered around the idea of intuition - what he calls "recognition primed decisions." Intuition is a key element of decision-making. It's not that analysis is wrong, but analysis alone is often insufficient to make good decisions. And how to develop intuition? Develop expertise through experience and guided learning situation.
Stephen Bungay's "The Art of Action" brings together ideas around how people and organizations should be led, based on the study of Carl von Clausewitz and other military thinkers around how they deal with the fact of life: we can't know everything before we must act.
"The CIO's Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance: Applying the Best of Critical Chain, Agile, and Lean" by Michael Hannan, Wolfram Muller, and Hilbert Robinson is a good, short description of how to take ideas from several disciplines and apply them to an overall portfolio management approach.
"Pride and Joy" by Alex Knight is a Theory of Constraints business novel about a hospital in chaos and a way of thinking that can help move beyond the chaos to a truly patient-centric, high quality environment.
Freek Vermeulen's "Business Exposed" is a great read that debunk a lot of common practice and common beliefs within business. He brings in a variety of business research to back up his sometimes surprising observations.
Yishai Ashlag's new book, TOC Thinking: Removing Constraints for Business Growth, is a good overview of the Theory of Constraints approach to thinking about running organizations.
Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business has a lot of familiar material in it. Duhigg puts it together in a compelling story that talks about why we get stuck in ruts - in personal life and in business life - and the paths to breaking out of the rut.
Jason Jennings' book Less is More: The main idea: focus. Focus on one thing - one thing for the long term, not one thing this quarter. And that one thing is the big idea of the organization - why is the organization on the planet? That big idea sets the direction and the yardstick by which everything is measured.
"With everything you do you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors." Is one version of the summary of this book.