Tag: Books

I succeeded in maintaining my reading habit in 2018 and ended up reading 25 books. I keep a log of all the books I’ve finished on my website, but wanted to highlight a few of my favourites from 2018.

Brief Answers to the Big Questions

Stephen Hawking

Professor Stephen Hawking has greatly inspired me over the years. In his final book—posthumously published—Hawking discusses his outlook on some of the biggest issues facing our existence.

Measure What Matters

John Doerr

If you’ve ever been interested in how OKRs can drive growth and ambition within an organisation, Measure What Mattersshould be at the top of your reading list. Written by the man that introduced OKRs to Google. John Doerr draws upon his wealth of experience working at Intel and other high-powered tech companies to demonstrate the power of OKRs in driving results where they matter.

Unbelievable

Jessica Ennis-Hill

Unbelievableis the story of how a young girl from Sheffield became an Olympic champion. I found this book as I was training for my first competitive races earlier this year and it provided buckets of inspiration to keep me going. It’s easy to overlook the amount of hard work required to rise to the top of your sport. Unbelievable gives you an inside look into the work and sacrifice that Jessica Ennis-Hill went through to get there.

To Pixar and Beyond

Lawrence Levy

I’ve long been fascinated with Pixar’s success and have read many books on the studio. Most of which have focussed on the creative/storytelling side of things but To Pixar and Beyondgives an insight into the business behind the hit movies. Lawrence Levy tells the story of his time as Pixar’s CFO, what it was like to work with Steve Jobs, and how he found meaning after leaving Pixar.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried

DHH and Jason Fried once again prompt us to slow down, take a step back, and reconsider how we are working. If you read Signal v. Noiseyou may have already encountered some of the ideas in this book, but it’s always good to have a refresher.

We live in a world where you can go online and watch a talk from pretty much any prominent individual from the past two decades. That’s pretty amazing, but I still find magic in the written word.

In this post I wanted to share some of the books I’ve read over the years that have helped me develop in business. I’m not including biographies here, that’s a whole other post.

In no particular order, here goes.

Onward

Onward by Howard Schultz, ceo of Starbucks Coffee Company, is one of the few books I’ve read more than once. It’s about how Starbucks navigated the stormy waters of the economic downturn in 2008 by recognising that their problems could not be blamed on what was happening in the markets. Instead, they were the result of many years of complacency and a focus on increasing shareholder value.

This is the best book on leadership, focus, and corporate strategy I’ve ever read.

The Innovator’s Dilemma

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen is a modern day classic. The book explores the theory behind sustaining vs disruptive innovation. How small companies can outmanoeuvre their larger competitors, and how large corporations are often unable to achieve true innovation.

Delivering Happiness

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh is a great story of how Zappos”“and the legendary Zappos culture”“came to be. This book is a manifesto for how to bring happiness into the lives of your customers and employees. Business is only boring if you let it be.

Rework

Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson talks about an alternative strategy for running a business. The founders of the popular project management tool Basecamp, challenge many of the accepted business norms like working long hours and growing as fast as possible. This refreshing outlook is sure to give comfort to many entrepreneurs who just want to run a small, sustainable business.

If you’re going to read any of the books on this list, make it this one.

A Book About Innocent

I stumbled across A Book About Innocent when I was researching the Innocent brand for a project I was working on. The book explores the story of how Innocent drinks came to exist and what the company does to make it’s employees and customers happy. This is the second best non-BS business book I’ve ever read (second only to Rework).

Pick up the physical copy of this one if you can. The illustrations really come to life on the beautifully thick paper stock.

I finished reading this earlier this week and thought that I would just write a few words about the book.

This book is a very detailed account of Starbucks’ journey back to greatness. Howard Schultz takes you through the challenges that the company and he faced when trying to turn the company around and restore the culture.

Overall I thought this book was pretty good and it made some thoroughly enjoyable reading. My favourite thing about the book was the fact that Howard had included the memos and emails sent out to Starbucks staff during the companies transformation. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone that is interested in business or Starbucks.

I’ve recently completed my stereotypical geek persona by rediscovering my love for books. I used to read quite a lot when I was younger but I was always a really slow reader (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire took me two years – seriously) and this kind of put me off reading.

The other day I decided to start reading a copy of ‘Wake up and change your life’ by Duncan Bannatyne (the business guy) which my dad had given me as a birthday present a few years back. It turns out it’s actually a pretty good book. Anyway for some reason I can now read at a decent speed so now reading is a lot more fun. I’ve managed to power my way through three books in the last week or so and I thought it would be a good idea to share with the readers of my blog (if there are any) some books that I think are really awesome. So in no particular order here goes.

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

This is a great book about how Tony built up Zappos.com around focusing on the company’s culture and the service that it provides it’s customers. While these may sound like obvious things for a business to focus on Tony’s “lets WOW our customers” approach is a step above anything that I have ever heard about before.

Personally this has to be the best book that I have ever read. It has truly changed the way that I think about things and how I will run my company in the future.

ReWork by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

This book looks at taking a totally different approach to the way that you work. Jason and David talk of how regularly working late nights and ‘workaholism’ are poison that will do more harm to your company (and you) in the long-run than the short-term benefits that these activities bring.

This book questions so much of ‘traditional’ business ideals that I found a part of me reacting defensively to some of the claims that are made. However by making me question why I had that initial reaction I have come to see the benefits of this alternative way of running your business. If you’re in business or a self-confessed ‘workaholic’ then this is definitely worth a read.

Googled: The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta

This book is all about how Google got to where they are today and offer’s a really interesting insight to the some of the goings on inside of Google. Ken takes you through the journey that Larry Page and Sergey Brin embarked upon when they decided to build a more useful search engine and the global business that subsequently followed.

As a fan of all things Google I found this book a really interesting read. There is a lot of focus in the last few chapters on the “Google vs Traditional Media” battle which does have a few dry spots but overall it’s a great book. If you’re interested in Google then this book will provide you with some really good knowledge about how they got to were they are today.

These are just a few of my favourite books. I’m reading Onwards by Howard Schultz (Starbucks) at the moment so I will post a mini review once I’ve finished it. Also ‘Delivering Happiness’ has changed the way I think about business (and business) so much that I plan to writing a post dedicated to some of the topics discussed in the book so keep an eye out for that one appearing on here soon.

Thanks for reading!