Good Reads


Living is learning. And we’re supposed to share our shit, right? So here’s a list of books I’ve read that I suggest you read too. I do not necessarily agree with everything these authors say. I add these titles here simply because I think they are worth a read. I’ve tried to sort the titles by topic, but this is not an exact science, you realize…
The links lead to the respective books at Amazon (or occasionally Swedish AdLibris.)

Leadership and Management of Organizations, Projects, Operations and Teams

Management Teams by R Meredith Belbin.
Creating Effective Teams by Susan A. Wheelan
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.
The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni.
Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point by Mary & Tom Poppendieck.
Peopleware: Productive projects and teams by Tom DeMarco.
Slack by Tom DeMarco.
Leadership and the New Science by Margaret J Wheatley.
No Yelling: The 9 Secrets of Marine Corps Leadership You Must Know to Win in Business by Wally Adamchik.
The Rules of Management by Richard Templar.
The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard.
Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
Out of the Crisis, by W. Edwards Deming
I want you to cheat! by John Seddon.
Freedom from Command and Control by John Seddon.
The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership by Jeffrey Liker.
Servant Leadership, by Robert Greenleaf
Administrative behavior, by Herbert A Simon
The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management by Peter F. Drucker.
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink.
Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo.
Idealized Design by Russell L. Ackoff.
Manage IT by Johanna Rothman.
Leadership wisdom from the monk who sold his Ferrari, by Robin Sharma.
The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully, by Gerald Weinberg.
More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant’s Tool Kit, by Gerald Weinberg.
Becoming a technical leader, by Gerald Weinberg.
Radical Management by Stephen Denning.
Personal Kanban, by Jim Benson.
Solving tough problems: An open way of talking, listening and creating new realities, by Adam Kahane
Organizational Traps: Leadership, Culture, Organizational Design, by Chris Argyris
The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande.
Toyota Kata, by Mike Rother,
Systemiskt ledarskap och organisationsutveckling by Carsten Hornstrup.
Detta är lean:lösningen på effektivitetsparadoxen by Niklas Modig, Pär Åhlström.
How to change the world, by Jurgen Appelo
Change by Richard Gerver.
Commitment, by Olav Maassen, Chris Matts, Chris Geary
Theory U, by Otto Scharmer
The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel
Start with Why!, by Simon Sinek
Human side of enterprise, by Douglas McGregor
The Power of Pull, by John Hagel
The Phoenix Project, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
Dialogue Mapping: Building shared understanding of wicked problems, by Jeff Conklin
The year without pants, by Scott Berkun
Everything Connects, by Faisal Hogue & Drake Baer
Host – Six new roles of engagement, by Mark McKergow and Helen Bailey
Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux.
Six Simple Rules: How to manage complexity without getting complicated, by Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman
How Google works, by Eric Schmidt.
False Prophets, by James Hoopes

Product and Service Development and Production

User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn.
Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn.
Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck.
Lean Software Development by Mary & Tom Poppendieck.
Scrumban – Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development by Corey Ladas.
Managing the Design Factory by Donald G. Reinertse.
The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertse.
Agile Product Management With Scrum, by Roman Pichler
Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg.
Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno.
The innovators dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen
Agile Excellence for Product Managers by Greg Cohen.
42 Rules of Product Management by Brian Lawley.
Inspired: How to create products customers love by Marty Cagan.
Kanban by David J Anderson
Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications by Carl Henderson.
Designing for Growth, by Jeanne Liedtka
This is Service Design, by Stickdorn &Schneider
Discover to deliver. Agile Product Planning and Analysis by Gottesdiener & Gorman

Coaching, Facilitation & HR

Co-Active Coaching by Whitworth / Kimsey-House
Further Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring by Megginson / Clutterbuck
Career Counselling by Nathan / Hill
Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins
Agile Coaching by Rachel Davies, Liz Sedley
Coaching – vad, varför, hur by Susann Gjerde
Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change, by David Cooperrider
Solution Focus – Making Coaching and Change Simple, by Jackson and McKergow
Nonviolent Communication – a language of life, by Marshall B. Rosenberg.
Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership, by Peter Hawkins.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
The art of facilitation, by Dale Hunter
Riv Pyramiderna – igen. Agile HR from the trenches, by Peter Antman
Time to Think, by Nancy Klein
Rebels at work, by Lois Kelly and Carmen Medina
Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They’re Getting Good Advice and When They’re Not, by Chris Argyris
Let’s stop meeting like this, by Dick Axelrod and Emily Axelrod
Optimizing the Power of Action Learning: Real-Time Strategies for Developing Leaders
Building Teams and Transforming Organizations, by Michael J. Marquardt
Personality: What makes you the way you are, by Daniel Nettie
The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations by John P Kotter
The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management, by Art Kleiner
We the People – Consenting to a deeper democracy, by John Buck
Switch, How to change things when change is hard ,by Chip and Dan Heath

Interaction Design, UX, Usability, IA and HCI

Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman.
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman.
Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug.
Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen.
Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville & Louis Rosenfeld.
Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder.
Measuring the User Experience by Tullis & Albert.
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper.
About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper.
Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko.
Effect Managing IT by Mijo Balic and Ingrid Ottersten.
Impact Mapping by Gojko Adzic.
Jävla Skitsystem by Jonas Söderström.
Designing Interactive systems by David Benyon.
LeanUX by Jeff Gothelf.

Web Analytics and Web Optimisation

Always Be Testing – The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer by Eisenberg / Quarto-vonTivadar.
Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions by Tim Ash.
Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity by Avinash Kaushik.

Web Site Management

Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson.
Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works by Janice Redish.

New Media & Media Studies

Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins.

Music Business

All you need to know about the Music Business by Donald S Passman.
The Music Industry – Music in the cloud by Patrik Wikström.

Business, Marketing and Startups

The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank.
Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson.
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore.
Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler.
Do more faster by Brad Feld & David Cohen.
Getting Real by 37signals.
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.
Free – the Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson.
What would Google do? by Jeff Jarvis
Tribes by Seth Godin.
Purple Cow by Seth Godin.
Linchpin by Seth Godin.
The entrepreneur’s guide to Customer Development by Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits.
The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time by Chris Murray.
The Lean Startyp by Eric Ries.

Strategy & The Future

Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish
Scenarios: The art of strategic conversation by Kees van der Heijden
Scenario Planning – The link between future and strategy by Mats Lindgren and Hans Bandhold
Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz
Paradigms – The art of discovering the future, by Joel Arthur Barker
Strategy Safari, by Henry Mintzberg
Lords of Strategy, by Walter Kiechel
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt
Built to last, by Jim Collins
The Future of Strategy, by Johan Aurik, Martin Fabel and Gillis Jonk

Creativity and Innovation

The Art of Innovation – Lessons in Creativity from IDEO by Tom Kelly and Jonathan Littman.
The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida.
Managing Creativity and Innovation by Harvard Business School Press.
The Idea Agent by Andreas Breiler and Jonas Michanek.

Thinking and Teaching Tools – Problem Solving

Problem Solving 101 by Ken Watanabe.
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt.
Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono.
Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step by Edward de Bono.
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam.
Blah-Blah-Blah: what to do when words don’t work by Dan Roam.
The Art of Problem Solving by Russell L. Ackoff.
Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers by Dave Gray
The Art of thinking clearly, by Rolf Dobeli

Systems Thinking & Complexity Theory

The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows.
Systems Thinking for Curious Managers by Russell Ackoff.
An introduction to general Systems Thinking by Gerald Weinberg.

Internet related stuff

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky.
Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe.
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.
Content by Cory Doctorow.
The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig.
Free Ride by Robert Levine.
Cult of the amateur by Andrew Keen.
Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski

On Writing, Copywriting and Journalism

The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe.
The Gang Who Wouldn’t Write Straight by Marc Weingarten.
Write to Sell by Andy Maslen.
On Writing by Stephen King.
The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman
Sälj det med ord by Mattias Åkerberg, Christer Wiklander.
Copyhackers (several titles) by Joanna Wiebe

Just plain Interesting

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Risk, The Science and Politics of Fear by Dan Gardner.
The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford.
The Logic of Life by Tim Hartford.
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions by Francis Wheen.
Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky by Paul M. Johnson.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.
Intellectual Self Defense by Normand Baillargeon.
Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg.
Nonsense, How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language by Robert J. Gula.
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer.
Use Your Head by Daniel and Jason Freeman.
Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Demon-Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark, by Carl Sagan

Philosophy, Religion and the History of Ideas

Essays by Michel de Montaigne.
Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar – Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes by T. Catchcart and D.Klein.
Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens.
Collected Writings: Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.
Letters from a Stoic by Seneca.
Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor.
Buddha in blue jeans by Tai Sheridan.
Why I am a Buddhist by Stephen T Asma
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig

Funny and Clever

On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt.
Holidays in Hell by P.J O’Rourke.
On The Wealth of Nations” by P.J O’Rourke.
Peace Kills by P.J O’Rourke.
Eat the Rich by P.J O’Rourke.