Here are 100 books that Call Sign Chaos fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have devoted my career to helping leaders navigate challenging transitions into new roles, build their teams, and transform their organizations. Strategic thinking is a key foundation of my work as an executive coach and advisor at Genesis Advisers and a professor at the IMD Business School. Whether executives are taking new roles or driving large-scale transformations, they must be able to rapidly analyze the context, craft good visions and strategies, and mobilize people to realize them. I try to equip the leaders I work with with the mental frameworks, tools, and skillsets to adapt and succeed in the first 90 days and beyond.
I liked that this book highlighted how supposedly tried-and-true approaches to innovation fail to deliver results.
The book’s insights about how to drive radical innovation informed the advice I now give executives about how to approach organizational transformation, starting with an ambitious vision, communicating the “why,” and enlisting great people to go on the journey with them.
It helped me to understand that building organizations to develop disruptive technologies requires leaders to envision things that may sound crazy until they are realized.
What Valuable Company Is Nobody Building? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there. "Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how". (Elon…
I’m a U.S. Air Force Fighter pilot who has dedicated my life to the subject of decision-making. When flying, my job is to make thousands of decisions on each flight, often with limited information and lives on the line. My calling now is to share the lessons that I’ve learned with the world to allow them to make better, quicker decisions, and to have more confidence in their thinking.
I enjoyed this book because it helped me to understand why bold ideas often don't get off the ground in big organizations.
These ideas are usually sought after and destroyed by the organization itself because the incentives of the managers who approve the ideas aren’t aligned. However, there is a solution that Safi goes into in depth.
A must-read for people who want to change the world.
What do James Bond and Lipitor have in common? Why do traffic jams appear out of nowhere on highways? What can we learn about innovation from a glass of water? In Loonshots, physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behaviour and the challenges of nurturing radical breakthroughs.
Drawing on the science of phase transitions, Bahcall shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Oceans of print…
I am a doctor who is lucky enough to have worked in many countries with many people. I wanted to do this ever since I read Albert Sweitzer’s biography when I was about thirteen. I enrolled in medicine as a single parent in my thirties, then built up experience in emergency departments, pediatrics, obstetrics, remote area locum work, and a year in a hospice before beginning my career overseas. Being a doctor was, at one and the same time, exhilarating and terrifying, heartbreaking and absolutely filled with joy. The more I was able to connect to my patients, the more I loved every moment of my work. I hope the books on this list will give that same gift to you.
I absolutely loved the simplicity and clarity of this approach.
It’s almost the opposite end of the spectrum to my first selection and a method that I found more and more common over the years of my career: checklists and flowcharts for the serious and frequent presentations in the Emergency Department, in the operating theatre, and at Triage. And Gawande was right: they did and do save lives.
More generally, I used this process all the time when I was training other staff in my posts with Doctors Without Borders. Preventing and avoiding problems with fail-safe systems is so much better than trying to solve them after they occur!
In his latest bestseller, Atul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives and how we can deal with it.
The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry—in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail. Atul Gawande makes a…
I’m a U.S. Air Force Fighter pilot who has dedicated my life to the subject of decision-making. When flying, my job is to make thousands of decisions on each flight, often with limited information and lives on the line. My calling now is to share the lessons that I’ve learned with the world to allow them to make better, quicker decisions, and to have more confidence in their thinking.
Tips on leadership and decision-making from the greatest college sports coach of all time.
He’s distilled decades of experience and wisdom into a short book that can be read in a day or two. Some of the concepts are obvious, but I’m willing to bet that a few of them are new to you.
"I am just a common man who is true to his beliefs."--John Wooden
Evoking days gone by when coaches were respected as much for their off-court performances as for their success on the court, Wooden presents the timeless wisdom of legendary basketball coach John Wooden.
In honest and telling passages about virtually every aspect of life, Coach shares his personal philosophy on family, achievement, success, and excellence. Raised on a small farm in south-central Indiana, he offers lessons and wisdom learned throughout his career at UCLA, and life as a dedicated husband, father, and teacher.
I’m fascinated by the obsession that we as a society have with making policy, but not whether policy works, and how policy is treated as a magic bullet to the social problems that we all care about. But my experience is that it’s not ideas that solve problems; it’s action that solves problems. This fascination has led me to become a professor of public policy and administration, where I have read extensively about this issue for over a decade and written two books and over four dozen articles. My work focuses on how ideas are translated into actions and how those actions impact our communities.
I like that this book takes a detailed look at 2020 from the view of the Trump presidency, based on interviews between Woodward and Trump.
One of the key themes here is that many decisions during that time were rooted in lessons learned earlier during Trump’s presidency, which helps us understand how we get stuck in doing things the way they’ve always been done. It also provides fascinating insights into how the generational crisis of COVID-19 was managed and mismanaged by the White House.
BOB WOODWARD'S NEW BOOK, RAGE, IS AN UNPRECEDENTED AND INTIMATE TOUR DE FORCE OF NEW REPORTING ON THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY FACING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC, ECONOMIC DISASTER AND RACIAL UNREST.
Woodward, the No 1 international bestselling author of Fear: Trump in the White House, has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency. In dramatic detail, Woodward takes readers into the Oval Office as Trump's head pops up when he is told in January 2020 that the pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu…
As both an author and a teacher, I’ve been using Howard Zinn’s iconic book for over 20 years. I have found it to be an effective counterweight to more orthodox texts, as well as a credible platform for stimulating discussion. In writing my own “guide” to U.S. history, I always kept Zinn in mind. While we may not always agree, the dissonance is something I’m certain Howard Zinn would appreciate. He was unafraid to "engage" with his subject matter and his readers. This is an inspiration.
Ricks unpacks the educational origins of the "Founding Generation’s" ideological orientation in this highly readable volume.
The classical underpinnings of American representative democracy and its notions of public virtue in ancient Greece and Rome are examined very carefully. He makes a compelling case for classical rather than English or Enlightenment political influence as the determining factor in our political development. He also implies an unfavorable comparison with the present and the lack of virtue he sees as evident in our public life. The book is a tonic for our political times.
One irritating element, however, is Ricks’s insistence on including the college class of each of the Founding Generation’s members beside their name, which, of course, excludes George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Not to mention Abraham Lincoln in the following century. This gives the book an elitist tint that no doubt would have alienated Zinn.
"Ricks knocks it out of the park with this jewel of a book. On every page I learned something new. Read it every night if you want to restore your faith in our country." — James Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (ret.) & 26th Secretary of Defense
Now in paperback, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a revelatory new book about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classics—and how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation.
I have spent the last 32 years of my life working with women leaders and aspiring women leaders all over the world and helping organizations to create more inclusive cultures. As a result, I’ve been exposed to extraordinary leaders and to terrible leaders and have seen up close the impact they have on people’s lives. This has inspired me to write 7 books and thousands of articles exploring different aspects of the leader’s journey and to deliver leadership workshops in 32 countries. What do I love? Sharing the stories that inspire me.
Vice Admiral Stosz’s extraordinary career as a US Coast Guard leader culminated in her being the first (and so far only) woman to head a major service academy. I came away from her memoir hugely inspired by her honesty and courage. I also loved her vivid descriptions of long stints on the icebreakers that ply Arctic and Antarctic waters in order to prepare the way for scientific teams, often as the only woman. Her grace and goodwill in those adventure-filled situations come shining through– and sea narratives by women are very rare.
-James Mattis, General, US Marines (ret), and 26th Secretary of Defense
Today, our nation is like a ship being tossed in tumultuous seas. The winds and waves of change have divided and distanced our society, threatening to wash away the very principles our nation was founded upon. Now more than ever, our nation needs leaders with the moral courage to stand strong and steady-leaders capable of uniting people in support of a shared purpose by building the trust and respect necessary for organizations and their people to thrive.
My research permitted amazing conversations with some of McNamara’s former colleagues and their children, including Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg informed the direction of my research and shared my excitement about the sources I was looking for, especially the secret diaries of his former (and beloved) boss, John McNaughton. He is both a window into and a foil to McNamara. On substance, they were in basic agreement on most issues (from Vietnam to nuclear issues), but they chose very different paths to address their moral qualms. I think the questions they asked–including on the moral responsibility of public officials–are as urgent today as they were in the 1960s.
This book is not McNamara’s most famous nor original–it essentially weaves together his speeches to provide reflections about war and nuclear weapons–but is arguably his most compelling.
The shadow of Ellsberg and his colleagues who wrote many of these speeches is present and shows a distinct subculture that existed around McNamara, who was far more refined than the warmonger stereotype suggests and also dedicated to educating the American people about national security. It shows a man sitting atop the world’s most powerful defense establishment, grappling with important moral dilemmas, including its enormous capacity for human destruction and institutional pressures toward war.
Published shortly after leaving the Pentagon, the author discusses various aspects of his tenure and position on basic national security issues; including policy statements from the author's public addresses and reports to Congress during his tenure as Secretary of Defense.
I became a climate activist and later a researcher after my sister and her family lost their home in the Black Saturday fires of 2009 in Victoria. Their bravery and survival is a daily reminder for me, that climate change is upon us, and we are fighting for our lives as well as our children and future generations. Because my research has been focused on colonialism and race their story has opened many questions for me around the history of colonialism and whether it was coal-fired. I’m thinking about what it means for settlers to lose their homes on stolen land, and whether this recognition could prompt us to rethink land ownership, custodianship, and coexistence.
Barak’s history of fossil fuels in the Middle East and the colonial extraction and incursion of British corporations throughout the region hugely clarifies the interdependence of imperialism and fossil fuels.
We’re shown how coal's imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil causing recurring war, violence, exploitation, and more recently climate change. This powerful book thoroughly convinced me that the history of Empire is indelibly a history of carbonisation.
The Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East-as an idea-was made by coal. Coal's imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil that wreaks carnage today, as carbonization threatens our very climate. Powering Empire argues that we cannot promote worldwide decarbonization without first understanding the history of the globalization of carbon energy. How did this black rock come to have such long-lasting power over the world economy?
Focusing on the flow of British carbon energy to the Middle East, On Barak excavates the historic nexus between coal and empire to reveal the political and military motives behind…
My interest in the ancient Near East began when I was about 8 years old. One day, when couldn’t find anything to do, I started paging through a book on Assyrian art that I found in one of my parents’ bookcases. I was hooked. I wanted to know what made those mysterious ancients tick. How did they understand the world they inhabited? How did they live? What made them fight so hard and so often? I became an Assyriologist in order to answer those questions, and I’ve been working toward that goal ever since.
Van de Mieroop’s history of the ancient Near East is concise, engaging, and up to date. For anyone new to the subject this book is a great place to start. Find out about the first cities and social institutions, ideologies and religious beliefs, long-distance trade, state formation, and the wars of imperial expansion. Van De Mieroop augments his narrative with passages from ancient sources, plenty of maps and illustrations, and information about important research questions and controversies.
Incorporating the latest scholarly research, the third edition of A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 323 BC presents a comprehensive overview of the multicultural civilizations of the ancient Near East. * Integrates the most up-to-date research, and includes a richer selection of supplementary materials * Addresses the wide variety of political, social, and cultural developments in the ancient Near East * Updated features include new Key Debate boxes at the end of each chapter to engage students with various perspectives on a range of critical issues; a comprehensive timeline of events; and 46 new illustrations, including 12…
