Free Agile! Essential Reads

Everyone has different reading habits and preferred writing styles. Even though, it is remarkable, that for each of us it takes only a hand full of books, when it gets back to citations and argues on best practices and approaches. These books are our treasure chest.

While the list of publications is growing at a furios speed, many of the arguments seem to be repeating and interchangeable. Sure, there are few new publications, which will make it into our lists in the future. Though, this will not change the importance of the already listed books. It is worthwhile sharing these lists. This is the compendium of my essential reads:

Daniel Kahnemann – “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

fascinating insights into our inner world, where thinking is happening totally different than we might have thought; helps to develop an understanding for divergences in interpretation and action, even if based on identical circumstances

Simon Sinek – “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action”

tell others about the motives and objectives of you plans, and you will become better in engaging people; how to become more successful in achieving desired outcomes

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen – “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most”

communication works best, when we are on par with our conversational partners; find a great overview over the ways to create an understanding for the motivation and intentions of others

Daniel Pink – “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”

autonomy in reasoning and decisions, room for mastery beyond pure fulfilment, and worthwhile purpose are the ingredients of highly motivated people; understand where to look when establishing systems fostering continuous improvements

Peter M. Senge – “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization”

you need to look at the underlying systems to recognize how your actions and plans will affect everyone of us; learning organizations arise from holistic views considering a shared vision

John P. Kotter – “Leading Change”

facing continuous change you will need to work towards the sense for urgency to improve to build powerful alliances (“armies of volunteers”); presumably the most deliberate books on change management – great!

Nicholas Nassim Taleb – “Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder”

as our world is getting too complex to be understood anymore, we need to build systems which are agnostic to uncertainty; diversity and empowerment of others proof to be instruments to implement robustness albait we have to accept a high degree of uncertainty

Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone, Yuri van Geest – “Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)”

growth does not only begin when it becomes visible, but already long before; those who achieve exceptional performance, have a strong belief in their ideas and are prepared when success is starting to grow exponentially – beyond pure organizational capacities

Stefan Kaduk, Dirk Osmetz, Hans A. Wüthrich, Dominik Hammer – “Musterbrecher. Die Kunst das Spiel zu drehen”

it takes a lot of courage to break out of existing patterns and engage people in contributing their full potentials for a shared vision; achieving the extraordinary and feeling good about what each of us is doing have to some hand in hand, as we will not be successful by simply optimizing our existing, but limited approaches
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