Must Reads for Work/Life Rebels, Strategists, and Thinkydoers

a perpetual work in progress

The Books I Recommend Every Day

(affiliate links, and purchasing through Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores!)

The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul, via Bookshop.org | via amazon.com

In short, this book changed my life. I noticed very early in my career when I was working as a developer that my happy place was not in front of a computer: it was in front of a white board. That trend continued into my creative agency years, where I was even happy to find myself at a whiteboard with colleagues late at night or on a weekend collaborating on pitches. I was infamous for my sticky notes (I think in stick notes). This book helped make that all make sense, and has changed the way I work every day ever since reading it. It helped me learn what my brain needs to be able to do its best thinking (spoiler alert: it needs my body); and helped me stop wondering what was wrong with me for how I process information and helped me find the confidence to experiment with my information processing and develop approaches to thinking that work best for me.

The cover of The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier has a subtitle of: "Say less, ask more, & change the way you lead forever." The copy is on a brightly colored background, with about 2/3 of the field being turquoise and about 1/3 being yellow

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

by Michael Bungay Stanier, via Bookshop.org | via amazon.com

This is another gamechanger book for me. I had a few leadership roles where I led as a subject-matter expert: I was the mentor who saw my job as to “protect” my reports, and solve their problems. Mid-career, I bumped into this book, and I don’t even remember how. It was my first exposure to coaching — to the practice of asking questions so that others can develop their own answers — and gave me a framework to build my “non-default” mode for leadership. It helped me learn when to mentor, and when to coach; when to be a subject-matter-expert-leader and when to sit back and lead by asking questions. This helped me learn to identify boundaries with my work: “Do I want/need to own this? Or, do I want to ensure my report owns this issue with autonomy — with my support?” If the former, I can interact in “expert mode,” if the latter, coaching is the right tool for the job. This is an accessible, easily-digestible framework for some excellent foundational coaching skills for leaders.

Objectives and Key Results: Driving Focus, Alignment, and Engagement with OKRs

by Paul R. Niven and Ben Lamorte, via Bookshop.org | via amazon.com

I consider this book the “definitive work” on Objectives and Key Results. It’s a thorough resource, covering OKRs in detail, including for scale in large organizations. This book has been my most recommended for OKR experts ever since a student recommended it to me, and will remain so alongside my own!

The OKRs Field Book

by Ben Lamorte, via Bookshop.org | via amazon.com

This is the book I wish existed when I started my own OKRs coaching journey.

Every copy of Measure What Matters sold to an executive should come bundled with a copy of this book, and a copy of Objectives and Key Results (by Paul Niven and this book's author, Ben LaMorte). When the executive reads Measure What Matters and decides, "I want some of THAT!" they can then hand both of Ben's books to whichever lucky soul is caught without a chair when the music stops who is voluntold they're leading the organization's OKRs effort.

I have personally completed a LOT of OKR coaching hours (I stopped counting at 2,000) and I have neither read nor seen anything else as complete, helpful, and useful for new and experienced OKR coaches. Ben's books are complete works -- they fill in all the gaps that many other resources leave open for folks to "figure out." But this book especially is designed and formatted to be very useful -- it's a great front to back read for learning, but it's also a helpful reference that high-integrity coaches who care about the results and impact of their work will go back to over and over as their careers progress.