Suggestions for next book

[elle]

Books for book club

Business-related:

1. The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well by Michael Lopp

   Many people think leadership is a higher calling that resides exclusively with a select few who practice and preach big, complex leadership philosophies. But as this practical book reveals, what's most important for leadership is principled consistency. Time and again, small things done well build trust and respect within a team.

2. The Essential Deming by W. Edwards Deming

   Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality. It's a set of articles, essays, and notes on management and quality control.

3. An Elegant Puzzle: systems of engineering management by Will Larson

   Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions of complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies.

4. Conscious Business by Fred Kofman

   ...fosters personal fulfillment in the individuals, mutual respect in the community, and success in the organization

5. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher

   ...offers a proven, step-by-step strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict.

6. Powers of Two by Joshua Wolf Shenk

   ...draws on neuroscience, social psychology, and cultural history to present the social foundations of creativity, with the pair as its primary embodiment.

7. The making of a manager

   It's an everything-you-need-to-know field guide to rocking your job, earning your confidence, and leading your team to new horizons.

8. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

   Where does great culture come from? How do you build and sustain it in your group, or strengthen a culture that needs fixing?

9. Unlearn by Barry O'reilly

   This innovative and actionable framework from executive coach Barry O’Reilly shows leaders how to break the cycle and move away from once-useful mindsets and behaviours that were effective in the past but are no longer relevant in the current business climate and may now stand in the way of success.

10. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

    Poker champion turned business consultant Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result.

11. Leadership & Self-deception: Getting Out Of The Box by The Arbinger Institute

    Leadership and Self-Deception uses an entertaining story everyone can relate to about a man facing challenges at work and at home to expose the fascinating ways that we blind ourselves to our true motivations and unwittingly sabotage the effectiveness of our own efforts to achieve happiness and increase happiness. We trap ourselves in a "box" of endless self-justification. Most importantly, the book shows us the way out.

12. The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael D. Watkins

    proven strategies for conquering the challenges of transitions—no matter where you are in your career.

13. The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right

    "The Checklist Manifesto," which explains how a short, straightforward medical checklist can greatly reduce the chances of failure in life-or-death situations (and some less serious ones, for that matter). Himself a surgeon, Gawande argues that the medical field has, in some ways, become too sophisticated for its own good. "The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably," he writes. "Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us."...Curious whether this approach could work in medicine, Gawande hunted for situations where checklists were used in his own field. Even skeptical readers will find the evidence staggering. Gawande found a host of studies that show dramatic drops in death or infection from a certain procedure once a hospital implemented a checklist for doing it right. Marshaling anecdotes and analysis, he implores the medical community to use checklists more widely. He also makes the case for rethinking teamwork and leadership in hospitals.

Social

14. How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi.

    Kendi helps us recognise that everyone is, at times, complicit in racism whether they realise it or not, and by describing with moving humility his own journey from racism to antiracism, he shows us how instead to be a force for good. Along the way, Kendi punctures all the myths and taboos that so often cloud our understanding, from arguments about what race is and whether racial differences exist to the complications that arise when race intersects with ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality.

15. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

    Author's journey, personal tragedies, and what it means to be black in America

16. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls "antifragile" is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call "efficient" not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear.Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.

17. Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta

    This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrödinger’s cat. Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.

Money-related

18. Financial Intelligence, Revised Edition: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean by Karen Berman and Joe Knight

    teach the basics of finance to managers who need to use financial data to drive their business. It also addresses issues that have become even more important in recent years--including questions around the financial crisis and those around broader financial and accounting literacy.

Design-related

19. The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

The ultimate guide to human-centered design. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.

Self exploration/learning:

20. A Mind for Numbers by by Barbara Oakley

    The learning strategies in this book apply not only to math and science, but to any subject in which we struggle. We all have what it takes to excel in areas that don't seem to come naturally to us at first, and learning them does not have to be as painful as we might think!

21. Mindset by Carol S Dweck

    Teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports.

22. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

    Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.

23. Quiet revolution by Susan Cain

    Unlocking the power of introverts

24. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

    ...aims to help readers channel creative energy, unlock potential and overcome the fears that stop us from reaching our fullest potential.

Programming-related:

25. Making Software

    Many claims are made about how certain tools, technologies, and practices improve software development. But which claims are verifiable, and which are merely wishful thinking? Essays that discuss topics such as: are some programmers really ten times more productive than others? Does writing tests first help you develop better code faster? Can code metrics predict the number of bugs in a piece of software? Do design patterns actually make better software? What effect does personality have on pair programming? What matters more: how far apart people are geographically, or how far apart they are in the org chart?

26. Ruby under a microscope by Pat Shaughnessy

    Ruby Under a Microscope will guide you through the internals of some of Ruby's most-used facets. Using experimentation, theory, and two truckloads of diagrams, you'll clearly see how Ruby is implemented.

27. Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen Fourteen of the classic "Gang of Four" patterns are considered from the Ruby point of view, explaining what problems each pattern solves, discussing whether traditional implementations make sense in the Ruby environment, and introducing Ruby-specific improvements. You'll discover opportunities to implement patterns in just one or two lines of code, instead of the endlessly repeated boilerplate that conventional languages often require.

28. Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce

    ...describe the processes they use, the design principles they strive to achieve, and some of the tools that help them get the job done.

29. Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

    ...offers start-to-finish strategies for working more effectively with large, untested legacy code bases.

30. Clean Architecture by Bob Martin By applying universal rules of software architecture, you can dramatically improve developer productivity throughout the life of any software system.

31. A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout

    how to decompose complex software systems into modules (such as classes and methods) that can be implemented relatively independently.

[tomdalling]

32. Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck

This is the "original" TDD book.

[antoinemacia]

33. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

Increase profitability, elevate work culture, and exceed productivity goals through DevOps practices.

34. A Seat at the Table

Agile, Lean, and DevOps approaches are radical game changers, providing a fundamentally different way to think about how IT fits into the enterprise, how IT leaders lead, and how IT can harness technology to accomplish the objectives of the enterprise.

[nickspragg]

35. Design for Cognitive Bias by David Dylan Thomas - Available August 2020

We humans are messy, illogical creatures who like to imagine we’re in control—but we blithely let our biases lead us astray. In Design for Cognitive Bias, David Dylan Thomas lays bare the irrational forces that shape our everyday decisions and, inevitably, inform the experiences we craft. Once we grasp the logic powering these forces, we stand a fighting chance of confronting them, tempering them, and even harnessing them for good. Come along on a whirlwind tour of the cognitive biases that encroach on our lives and our work, and learn to start designing more consciously.

[nickspragg]

36. Disability Visibility

First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.

[elle]

37. Australia's second chance: What our history tells us about our future
38. Feminist city - an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world.

[elle]

The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business Whether you work in a home office or abroad, business success in our ever more globalized and virtual world requires the skills to navigate through cultural differences and decode cultures foreign to your own....where people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together.

Summary: https://blog.12min.com/the-culture-map-pdf/ Also: https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/

[elle]

The Psychology of Computer Programming

This landmark 1971 classic is reprinted with a new preface, chapter-by-chapter commentary, and straight-from-the-heart observations on topics that affect the professional life of programmers.

Long regarded as one of the first books to pioneer a people-oriented approach to computing, The Psychology of Computer Programming endures as a penetrating analysis of the intelligence, skill, teamwork, and problem-solving power of the computer programmer.

[elle]

Closing in favour of https://github.com/Blackmill/book-club/issues/101