BOOKS  
I highly recommend

The Geek Way The radical mindset that drives Extraordinary Results author Andrew McAfee.  The Geek Way is a set of solutions for thriving in a faster-moving business world. They're cultural solutions, not technological ones. The geek way consists of four norms: behaviours that a groups members expect of each other. The first is speed: a preference for achieving results by iterating rapidly instead of planning extensively. The second norm is ownership. Compared to industrial era organizations, geek companies have higher levels of personal autonomy. empowerment, and responsibility, fewer cross-functional processes and less coordination. Third is the norm of science: conducting experiments, generating data, and debating how to interpret evidence. The fourth and final great geek norm is openness: sharing information and being receptive to arguments, reevaluations, and changes in direction.

Wiring the Winning Organization  How do some organizations break away from the pack while others fall further behind? After researching the successes and failures of organizations from the last 150 years, award-winning authors Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear, DBA, have unlocked the key to success.
In their eagerly awaited book, Kim and Spear bring to light a new theory of high-achieving organizations. They examine how companies solve the most important problems better, faster, and easier than their competitors by quickly and regularly closing the gap between aspirations and real-world success. This book teaches companies that are struggling to perform how to achieve the continual greatness seen in the best of the best.
This groundbreaking theory of organizational advantage details three components: simplification, slowification, and amplification. These create coherence across large, complex organizations, empowering them to architect enviable success in the market.

The High-Velocity Edge (Second Edition)
“[The High-Velocity Edge] contains ideas that form the basis for structured continuous learning and improvement in every aspect of our lives. While this book is tailored to business leaders, it should be read by high school seniors, college students, and those already in the workforce. With the broad societal application of these ideas, we can achieve levels of accomplishment not even imagined by most people.” (The Honorable Paul H. O'Neill, former CEO and chairman, Alcoa, and former secretary of the treasury)
“Some firms outperform competitors in many ways at once - cost, speed, innovation, service. How? Steve Spear opened my eyes to the secret of systemizing innovation: taking it from the occasional, unpredictable ‘stroke of genius' to something you and your people do month-in, month-out to outdistance rivals.” (Scott D. Cook, founder and chairman of the executive committee, Intuit, Inc.)
“Steven Spear connects a deep study of systems with practical management insights and does it better than any organizational scholar I know. [This] is a profoundly important book that will challenge and inspire executives in all industries to think more clearly about the technical and social foundations of organizational excellence.” (Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP, president and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement).
Build a system of “dynamic discovery” designed to reveal operational problems and weaknesses as they arise.
Attack and solve problems when and where they occur, converting weaknesses into strengths.
Disseminate knowledge gained from solving local problems throughout the company as a whole.
Create managers invested in developing everyone's capacity to continually innovate and improve

Unbundling the Enterprise : APIs, Optionality, and the Science of Happy Accidents  Drawing on real-world examples of both innovative “digital pirates” and legacy “digital settlers,” authors Stephen Fishman and Matt McLarty articulate strategies to unbundle business capabilities into reusable digital assets. These building blocks can then be rapidly combined and recombined to capitalize on new opportunities and innovations as they emerge. For business and technology leaders, Unbundling the Enterprise provides an actionable methodology to engineer “happy accidents” and sustainable success in turbulent times.
Underpinning their strategy are techniques tailored for digital business, like using APIs to create widespread optionality, designing digital business models focused on value exchange, and optimizing outcomes through tight feedback loops. More than copying the superficial traits of digital pioneers, this book reveals the deeper mindset shift required to continually capitalize on unanticipated opportunities enabled by rapid technology innovation.

Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action Based on foundations from Value Stream Mapping, cybernetics, and the Toyota Production System, Flow Engineering's lightweight and iterative practices build the value, clarity, and flow required for effective collaboration and collective action. Written by Value Stream Mapping experts Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis, Flow Engineering provides a step-by-step guide for running fast-paced mapping workshops that rapidly build shared understanding.

Using five key maps to facilitate collaborative “flow conversations,” Pereira and Davis show how teams can surface tangled process dependencies, conflicting priorities, and unspoken assumptions that grind progress to a halt. The result? A clear roadmap owned by the people doing the work to accelerate innovation cycles, optimize workflows, and achieve more effective coordination.
Applicable across any industry, Flow Engineering's techniques have helped leading organizations improve critical workflows like customer onboarding, product development, and hiring.
It's time to stop trying one-size-fits-all frameworks to find value, clarity, and flow to improve culture and performance. Flow Engineering meets your organization where it's at and shows you how to move it where it needs to go.

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
Accelerate your organization to win in the marketplace.
How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter - that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance - and what drives it - using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for listeners to apply in their own organizations.
Listeners will discover how to measure the performance of their teams and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance. This book is ideal for management at every level.

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs?
Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.
In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help listeners choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams.
Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

The Whole Brain Business Book, Second Edition Unlocking the Power of Whole Brain Thinking in Organizations, Teams, and Individuals

IDENTIFY how you and others prefer to think
IMPROVE your communication skills
INSPIRE creative thinking in yourself and others
INNOVATE faster and work more efficiently
IMPLEMENT changes throughout your organization
INCREASE productivity and beat the competition

Whole Brain Business Management uses the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument® (HBDI®) to understand that individuals and teams have different cognitive preferences for thinking, problem-solving, and communication across four brain quadrants (Analytical, Practical, Relational, and Experimental). By recognizing and leveraging these diverse thinking styles, organizations can foster innovation, enhance productivity, eliminate blind spots, and improve overall team performance and decision-making in a complex, fast-changing business environment.  .

Project Zero Trust: A Story About a Strategy for Aligning Security and the Business
George Finney, chief security officer at Southern Methodist University, delivers an insightful and practical discussion of Zero Trust implementation. Presented in the form of a fictional narrative involving a breach at a company, the book tracks the actions of the company's new IT security director.
Listeners will learn John Kindervag's 5-Step methodology for implementing Zero Trust, the four Zero Trust design principles, and how to limit the impact of a breach. They'll also find:
Concrete strategies for aligning your security practices with the business
Common myths and pitfalls when implementing Zero Trust and how to implement it in a cloud environment
Strategies for preventing breaches that encourage efficiency and cost reduction in your company's security practices. Project Zero Trust is an ideal resource for aspiring technology professionals, as well as experienced IT leaders, network engineers, system admins, and project managers who are interested in or expected to implement zero trust initiatives.

A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility, In A Seat at the Table, CIO Mark Schwartz explores the role of IT leadership as it is now and opens the door to reveal IT leadership as it should be - an integral part of the value creation engine. With wit and easy style, Schwartz reveals that the only way to become an Agile IT leader is to be courageous - to throw off the attitude and assumptions that have kept CIOs from taking their rightful seat at the table.  

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition: One of the primary books that drove Gene Kim's thinking about "The Phoenix Project" and other later works.


Learning Agile: Understanding Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban
The DevOps Handbook, Second Edition
The Unicorn Project  The Coalition of the Willing
The Phoenix Project The book that started the movement

Yuval Noah Harari
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI  2024
21 Lessons for the 21st Century  2018
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow  2017
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind  2015

While Yuval Noah Harari does not explicitly use the French term "folie à millions" in his new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, the core concept of mass delusion is a central and recurring theme throughout his work, including this latest release. "Folie à millions," which translates to "madness of millions," refers to an extreme event of collective delusion affecting a vast number of people.
Harari's central thesis, consistently woven throughout his books Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and now Nexus, is that the unique ability of Homo sapiens to cooperate in large numbers is founded upon shared fictions, myths, and imagined realities. These are, in essence, forms of collective belief that, while not objectively true, are essential for building and maintaining social order, from religions and nations to money and corporations.
The synopsis for Nexus directly states, "Humanity gains power by building large networks of cooperation, but the easiest way to build and maintain these networks is by spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions." This indicates that the idea of "folie à millions" is not only present but is a fundamental pillar of the book's argument.
In his previous works, Harari has extensively explored how these shared beliefs can lead to both remarkable achievements and horrific atrocities. For instance, in Sapiens, he argues that the cognitive revolution allowed humans to create and believe in "imagined orders," which enabled the formation of cities, kingdoms, and empires. However, these same shared beliefs have also fueled wars, persecution, and inequality.
Therefore, while Harari may not use the specific psychiatric term, his analysis of human history and society is deeply engaged with the phenomenon of millions of people collectively adhering to beliefs that could be described as a form of mass delusion. He posits that this very "madness" is the bedrock of human civilization.

Future
Quantum Supremacy: The Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything
The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Age of Invisible Machines: A Practical Guide to a Hyper Automated Ecosystem

Psychology and Management
Thinking, Fast and Slow Two systems drive the way we think and make choices, Kahneman explains: System One is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System Two is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Examining how both systems function within the mind, Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities as well as the biases of fast thinking and the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and our choices. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, he shows where we can trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking, contrasting the two-system view of the mind with the standard model of the rational economic agent.

Kahneman's singularly influential work has transformed cognitive psychology and launched the new fields of behavioral economics and happiness studies. In this path-breaking book, Kahneman shows how the mind works, and offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and personal lives - and how we can guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble.

 
Highlights from Thinking Fast and Slow
On Character: Choices That Define a Life
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

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