This page contains some resources that I have found useful in my personal and professional life. If you don’t want to scroll through the entire list, you can click on one of the links below and filter the resources by specific category.
I will update this list as I discover new resources. If you have a resource you think I should add, please email me.
In the interest of full disclosure: Some of these may include links to sites where you can purchase books or other services. I may receive a small affiliate commission on these sales. I only recommend things I think may be of value to my readers.
The masters in the art of living make little distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their minds and their bodies, their education and their recreation, their love and their religion. They hardly know which is which. They simply pursue their vision of excellence in whatever they do, leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing. To them they are always doing both.
I put together a couple of “word cloud” graphics for a project, to communicate the characteristics of unaligned vs. aligned organizations. I think they’re pretty useful… and decided to post them here!
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2010)
Zappos’ founder and CEO Tony Hsieh tells the story of his company’s raving fans and rapid growth, won through a maniacal focus on corporate culture and customer satisfaction. This was one of the books we had every employee read at Varrow, a fast-growing IT start-up. It became a cornerstone of our award-winning customer-centric culture.
While I believe Delivering Happiness provides a great blueprint for culture-building in new and young organizations, it doesn’t provide much actionable insight in how to apply these principles to established, unhealthy, or calcified businesses. Readers who have worked in traditional businesses will find opportunities to laugh out loud at the naïveté of some of the stories. Still, it’s an entertaining and inspiring look into what’s possible when you build a truly aligned organizational culture.
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else (Jossey-Bass, 2012)
The Advantage is a quick read that provides a compelling case for building Organizational Health, a deep alignment of priorities and management practices across an organization. In my most recent fast-growth business, we found this book to be quite valuable in developing a common language to address some of our challenges of growth and scale. Most of Lencioni’s observations and insights align with my own view of, and framework for, organizational alignment.
Lencioni himself observes that while the formula for Organizational Health is straightforward, few organizations seem to achieve it and maintain it long-term. Why? I believe it requires a level of consistency and discipline that few management teams and established organizations can attain… at least with their current leadership. Most organizations I’ve encountered, beyond the start-up stage, are fundamentally inconsistent and undisciplined, with a multitude of priorities, processes, practices and performance metrics that perpetuate this. And many leaders I’ve worked with become addicted to these behaviors and the chaos-management adrenaline they produce.
Still, I highly recommend The Advantage as an aspirational model, and a tool for realizing just how unhealthy some of your organization’s behaviors may be… and for ideas on how to make your organization healthier.
Tribal Leadership (HarperBusiness, 2008)
Tribal Leadership was a foundational text for building the culture at Varrow, an IT company we grew at over 70% CAGR for 8 years. Dave Logan and team’s research, insights, and practical guidance on fostering and nurturing tribes was required reading for all our employees for a few years. Tribes form naturally and organically; they’re NOT engineered by management. But there ARE things management can do to support and enable tribal health. There also are bad management practices that can suppress tribes, or worse, create pathological tribal behavior.
Groups of people naturally organize into tribes, around their shared purpose and passion, two of my “P” Principles of Alignment. This is great background reading to better understand the power of those principles, and strategies for leveraging them in your organization.
Toyota Kata (McGraw-Hill Education, 2009)
My friend Michael Sledge turned me onto Toyota Kata. This excellent book explores the underlying culture within Toyota that enables all of their well-known processes and tools to actually yield sustainable advantage (and that enabled them to be developed, in the first place!). Through observation of Toyota’s processes, Rother realized that the magic isn’t really in the processes. Instead, it comes from deeply ingrained cultural behaviors for continuous improvement and coaching that have developed over decades and are practically invisible to those within the system, because it’s just the “Toyota way”.
I recommend this to anyone who wants to make ANY process improvement initiative really stick.
Click the link above to find it on Amazon.
Excellent post on alignment between your Product, and what’s important to your customers.