Books
Book reviews and publishers are better (and safer) gatekeepers of the information I dare expose my brain to than the vagaries of people on the Internet (for you, the reader, this includes me so close the tab!). Old-fashioned, I know.
This list is organized by the subject I was delving into at the time.
Management
Disclaimer. Unfortunately, management books are oft too long and low information density. Skimming is your friend. And in any case, the hard part about growing as a manager is not to read but to apply.
My best advice to budding managers is simple: read High Output Management, apply as much of it as you can for the next 365 days, re-read it, then repeat the whole process year after year. You’ll quickly find yourself in the 99th percentile of managers. The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker is another good candidate for the yearly read-and-apply routine!
If you’re a manager or executive at a fast-growing technology company of the Silicon Valley variety, you may want to consider the following:
- The Advantage by Patrick M. Lencioni
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
- The Amazon Way by John Rossman
- No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer
- An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson
- High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil
For engineering management tactics, refer to Lara Hogan’s excellent blog or The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier.
Strategy
Books won’t really help you land on a winning strategy. That’s the hard part. However, they will help you evaluate whether your strategy is a good one.
- Understanding Michael Porter by Joan Magretta (no-nonsense, high ROI recap of Porter’s classic work on strategy)
- 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer
New York City
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
- Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
- Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 by Mike Wallace
- The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
- Empire City: New York Through the Centuries by Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
- The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
- Here is New York by E.B. White
- The Great Bridge by David McCullough
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Energy
- The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin
- Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil (a real eye opener on the relationship between our ability to access energy and progress)
- Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
- Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard
Capitalism, Markets, and Socio-Economics
- Radical Markets by Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl
- The Age of Revolution: Europe: 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 by Eric Hobsbawm
- René Girard’s Mimetic Theory by Wolfgang Palaver (this is philosophy and psychology, but how can you understand capitalism, markets, and socio-economics without thinking at least some about what drives the behavior of groups of humans)