What books should IT leaders read?

Kim Scott: Just Work: How to Root Out Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying to Build a Kick-Ass Culture of Inclusivity

Charlton Mcllwain: Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter

Virginia Eubanks: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Cathy O’Neil: Weapons of Math Destruction

Alex Rosenblat: Uberland

Cyd Harrell: A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide

Francis Frei: Unleashed

Philip Wylie/Kim Crawley: The Pentester’s Blueprint

Machine, Platform, Cloud

Who moved my cheese? By Spencer Johnson.

Since the pandemic strike last year, this book was very helpful to me and to every single person I’d recommend it regardless of the department they were in.

Many people read it in the past, now it’s important to read it again.

For the ones who hasn’t read it yet, it will take less than an hour to do it so.

The Phoenix Project.

I've become a big fan over the last year of Patrick Lencioni's books on business and on leadership. He's got a book called The Advantage: Why Organizational HealthTrumps Everything Else In Business and another called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. To be clear, most business books I look at as, you know, at most blog posts that get turned into like 200 and some pages, and they're mostly nonsense and useless. His books I think are really, really practical and they've literally changed the way I lead and how I think about approaching meetings. How I think about approaching team building. How I think about growing and building culture. And I think it's just been really remarkable and I feel really lucky to have discovered his books.

When you're starting to form a team, he talks a lot about how important it is to earn and build trust. An exercise he suggested that I think is really great, particularly if I've got a new team or a team that is a little bit disengaged or upset about something, is he suggests having a round table where everyone in the meeting introduces themselves and talks about some challenge they overcame as a child. Not in some deep psychiatric chair type of thing, but just like, talk to me about something that you went through that was a challenge that you overcame. And what it does is it starts to reveal a really personal and open side of people. He recommends that the leader starts first so that he or she exposes their vulnerability right out into the open. I found that a really nice way to really start to craft and to catalyze an early foundation of trust when you're trying to build a team, which is vitally important.