What books to YOU recommend I should read in 2020?

You’ve probably heard it more times than you can count. “You’re the average of the five people spend the most time with,” a quote attributed most often to motivational speaker Jim Rohn. There’s also the “show me your friends and I’ll show you your future” derivative.

They say you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but can you judge people by their books. They’re practically taking a piece of their soul and waving it in front of you like a gigantic, colorful flag. It would be rude not to read something into what they’re reading. However, if you judge a person based on what they read, you have determined who and what they are based on your own prejudices about what people would read a certain type of book.

What do you think? Below is what I have read over the last 18 months. (The * means paper-book, the rest are audiobooks) On the basis of this list what do YOU recommend I should read in 2020?

BOOKS ABOUT PEOPLE AND PERSONALITY

1. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Techniques for Retraining Your Brain
2. Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion
3. The Good Psychopath's Guide to Success
4. Winners: And How They Succeed
5. Flipnosis
6. The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure
7. *The Idiot Brain
8. *Thinking fast and slow
9. *How the mind works
10. *Humble enquiry
11. *Sapiens

BOOKS ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE AND HISTORY

1. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis
2. WTF?: What have we done? Why did it happen? How do we take back control?
3. Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit
4. The Secret Barrister
5. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
6. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
7. The Cold War: A World History
8. The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
9. Bad Blood
10. Hitch-22: A Memoir
11. A History of Russia: From Peter the Great to Gorbachev
12. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
13. Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator
14. *1984
15. *Animal Farm
16. *History of world war 2
17. *The undoing project
18. *Life 3.0
19. *How to fix the future
20. *Utopia for realists
21. *The great economists
22. *Karl Marx and unreason
23. *This is going to hurt (Adam Kay)

BUSINESS BOOKS

1. War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age
2. A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility
3. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
4. Product Mastery: From Good to Great Product Ownership
5. Scrum Mastery: From Good to Great Servant-Leadership
6. Scrum: The art of doing twice the work in half the time
7. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
8. Principles: Life and Work
9. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
10. Key Person of Influence: The Five-Step Method to Become One of the Most Highly Valued and Highly Paid People in Your Industry
11. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
12. The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence Through Leadership Development
13. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
14. Thinking in Systems: A Primer
15. Critical Chain: Project Management and the Theory of Constraints
16. Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue
17. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win 5th Anniversary Edition
18. Summary of Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
19. Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel
20. Lean Mastery Collection: 8 Manuscripts: Lean Six Sigma, Lean Startup, Lean Enterprise, Lean Analytics, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum, Kaizen
21. *Liars poker
22. *Bad pharma
23. *Insecurity
24. Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street
25. The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months
26. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition

THE TOP 10 TIPS FOR PROJECT SUCCESS

The list of success factors for Projects, in rank order are….

1. Clearly defined objectives
2. Good planning and control methods
3. Good quality of project managers
4. Good management support
5. Enough time and resources
6. Commitment by all
7. High user involvement
8. Good communication
9. Good project organisation and structure
10. Being able to stop a project

Source: Sam Elbeik and Mark Thomas https://www.kobo.com/at/de/ebook/project-skills

If you want help with managing projects, programmes or change, get in touch.

Adapt Consulting Company - Consult, CoCreate, Deliver

Mob 447797762051  Skype timhjrogers Twitter @timhjrogers

If you want to influence people, get closer to them!

The Allen  Curve and the Dunbar Number suggest that if you want to influence people, get closer to them!

Allen Curve is frequently taught and cited in management literature about communication and innovation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_curve

Dunbar's number is a suggested limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

If you want help with managing consultation, communication or innovation get in touch.

Adapt Consulting Company

Consult, CoCreate, Deliver