What books are inspiring CIOs and technology executives? We asked Enterprisers to recommend books they've recently enjoyed to other IT leaders for spring break reading.
ACCELERATE: BUILDING STRATEGIC AGILITY FOR A FASTER-MOVING WORLD
By: John P. Kotter
Recommended by: Tom Soderstrom, IT CTO, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Book Description: It’s a familiar scene in organizations today: a new competitive threat or a big opportunity emerges. You quickly create a strategic initiative in response and appoint your best people to make change happen. And it does—but not fast enough. Or effectively enough. Real value gets lost and, ultimately, things drift back to the default status. Why is this scenario so frequently repeated in industries and organizations across the world? In the groundbreaking new book Accelerate (XLR8), leadership and change management expert, and best-selling author, John Kotter provides a fascinating answer — and a powerful new framework for competing and winning in a world of constant turbulence and disruption.
WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM
By: Steven Johnson
Recommended by: Tom Soderstrom, IT CTO, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Book Description: One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from? With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.
THE BIG PIVOT: RADICALLY PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR A HOTTER, SCARCER AND MORE OPEN WORLD
By: Andrew S. Winston
Recommended by: Brian Beams, CIO and VP of IT, Pharmavite
Book Description: We live in a fundamentally changed world. It’s time for your approach to strategy to change, too. The evidence is all around us. Extreme weather, driven by climate change, is shattering records all over the planet. Our natural resources are in greater demand than ever before as a billion more people enter the global middle class, wanting more of everything. The mega challenges of climate change, scarcity, and radical transparency threaten our ability to run an expanding global economy and are profoundly changing “business as usual.” In this indispensable new book, Winston provides ten crucial strategies for leaders and companies ready to move boldly forward and win in this new reality.
TOUCHPOINTS: CREATING POWERFUL LEADERSHIP CONNECTIONS IN THE SMALLEST MOMENTS
By: Douglas Conant & Mette Norgaard
Recommended by: Brian Beams, CIO and VP of IT, Pharmavite
Book Description: Most leaders feel the inevitable interruptions in their jam-packed days are troublesome. But in TouchPoints, Conant and Norgaard argue that these — and every point of contact with other people — are overlooked opportunities for leaders to increase their impact and promote their organization's strategy and values. Through previously untold stories from Conant's tenure as CEO of Campbell Soup Company and Norgaard's vast consulting experience, the authors show that a leader's impact and legacy are built through hundreds, even thousands, of interactive moments in time.
THE NEW DIGITAL AGE: TRANSFORMING NATIONS, BUSINESSES, AND OUR LIVES
By: Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Recommended by: Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat
Book Description: In the next decade, five billion new people will come online, posing for our world a host of new opportunities—and dangers. Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen traveled to thirty-five countries and met with political leaders, entrepreneurs, and activists to learn firsthand about the challenges they face. Packed with fascinating ideas, informed predictions, and prescient warnings, The New Digital Age tackles some of the toughest questions about our future: how will technology change the way we approach issues like privacy and security, war and intervention, diplomacy, revolution and terrorism. And how can we best use new technologies to improve our lives? More than a book about gadgets and data, this is a prescriptive glimpse of how technology is reshaping our world and the lives of the people who live in it.
ON INNOVATION: TURNING ON INNOVATION IN YOUR CULTURE, TEAMS AND ORGANIZATION
By: Terry Jones
Recommended by: Brian Beams, CIO and VP of IT, Pharmavite
Book Description: Every business needs to innovate, but few know where to start. ON Innovation, gives leaders seventy-two simple but powerful ideas they can use to create a more innovative organization. Drawing from his experience as founder and CEO at Travelocity.com and from the ten other startups where he’s worked, Jones helps readers turn innovation from an academic exercise into an everyday skill.
MINDSET: THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF SUCCESS
By: Carol Dweck
Recommended by: John Marcante, CIO, Vanguard
Book Description: World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea — the power of our mindset. Dweck explains why it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success, but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising intelligence and ability doesn’t foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. Dweck reveals what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.
THE PHOENIX PROJECT: A NOVEL ABOUT IT, DEVOPS AND HELPING YOUR BUSINESS WIN
By: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
Recommended by: Sven Gerjets, CTO, Pearson
Book Description: Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again.
THE INNOVATORS: HOW A GROUP OF HACKERS, GENIUSES AND GEEKS CREATED THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
By: Walter Isaacson
Recommended by: Sven Gerjets, CTO, Pearson
Book Description: Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens.
THE CIO PARADOX
By: Martha Heller
Recommended by: Tim Elkins, CIO, Prime Lending
Book Description: Regardless of industry, most major companies are becoming technology companies. The successful management of information has become so critical to a company’s goals, that in many ways, now is the age of the CIO. CIOs must keep costs down at the very same time that they drive innovation. CIOs are focused on the future, while they are tethered by technology decisions made in the past. These contradictions form what Martha Heller calls The CIO Paradox, a set of conflicting forces that are deeply embedded in governance, staffing, executive expectations, and even corporate culture. Heller, who has spent more than 12 years working with the CIO community, offers guidance to CIOs on how to attack, reverse, or neutralize the paradoxical elements of the CIO role.
Photo by Flickr user Simon Cocks.
