100 books like How Stella Saved the Farm

When I was a biomedical science graduate student, this book was on my shelf for a couple of years before I read it. I had pulled it out of a classmate’s trash bag when I was helping him move. Later, when I became distressed because my research findings were dismissed as “controversial,” a postdoctoral fellow in my lab told me that what I experienced was actually quite normal for novel scientific findings and I should read this book.

I did, and it changed forever my understanding of science and how scientists often resist accepting from others the very thing they pursue themselves: new discoveries. When I became a principal scientist, I made a gift of this book to every new scientist graduating from my laboratory.

One of the keys to simplifying your organization, and your life, is the ability to communicate clearly, quickly, and powerfully.

Todd Cherches, the author of Visual Leadership, is a master at doing this. In his book, he makes the saying “a picture is worth 1000 words” come alive. Without needing to be an artist, Todd shows you how to use diagrams, sketches, visual metaphors, simple graphs, and all sorts of visual imagery to make your communications more powerful, fun, and memorable. 

Not only that, but Todd also practices what he preaches – so the book is filled with stories and anecdotes that make it not only a useful read, but an enjoyable one as well.  

Lisa Bodell is a fanatic about eliminating mundane and unnecessary tasks from your everyday routines.

In Why Simple Wins, Lisa provides a playbook to help you do just that – from getting control of your calendar to setting priorities to cutting back on meetings and emails. Having worked on some common clients with Lisa, I’ve seen the power of what she helps managers do – and I’ve seen how much synergy there is between our approaches. 

It’s the kind of book that you’ll have no regrets about buying.

It’s not easy to reduce complexity and drive simplification with your team or organization. 

To do so you need to become the best leader you can be. For many managers this means working on their deficiencies, bolstering their weaknesses, and trying as hard as possible to learn new behaviors. 

What Kaplan and Kaiser recommend in Fear Your Strengths however is not to focus first on weaknesses but rather to start development by becoming aware of strengths that you might be overdoing.

This is an incredibly simple, but counter-intuitive approach to leadership development.  In essence, it suggests that leaders often get into trouble by dialing up what they do well. For example, a manager who is good at strategy sometimes makes the strategy so complex that it becomes difficult for others to understand it or carry it out. 

Conversely a manager who is good at execution can sometimes get caught up… show more.

Every company wants to innovate, but it's not always clear how to do that in practice. Competing Against Luck highlights the importance of understanding what "jobs" your customer "hires" your product to do. The ‘Jobs to be Done Theory’ is one of the best frameworks I have seen to drive toward innovation and product-market fit. In the CRO world, we typically think about optimizing experience, but optimizing the product-market fit is equally as important.

For almost six decades, I have studied the histories of firms and their successes and failures in creating value. I am always looking for heavy hitters who write about their thinking/doing process. Curt Carlson qualifies.

When he was CEO of SRI International, he guided the conception and development of HDTV, Siri, the computer mouse, electronic banking, robotic surgery which evolved into Intuitive Surgical (the dominant robotics surgical firm with its Da Vinci system), and much more.

I first found Carlson via a Harvard Business Review article in which he laid out his proven steps for value creation that seem so straightforward, yet are rarely followed. I wanted a more comprehensive discussion, and I got it with this book.    

One of the best-known business books of our time is Good To Great by Jim Collins. The book has sold millions of copies and is quoted in classrooms and workplaces all over the world all the time. But far fewer people know about Collin’s Good To Great and the Social Sector. It’s a critical work by one of the great business minds about the profound differences between for-profit and non-profit worlds. Every board member needs a copy.

One of the success factors I highlight in my book is leading innovation and change.

Simply maintaining or marginally improving the status quo isn’t enough in most organizations. Many aspiring executives find the requirement to lead innovation intimidating, since by definition it means finding solutions that are different from what they are most familiar with.

Murray illustrates that the vast majority of innovations are not “bolts out of the blue.” Rather, they are often the result of taking a new idea out of one context (for example, a different field or industry) and then building on it.

The implication for me is that the successful executive needs to adopt an external perspective, i.e., looking outside his or her own organization, and find ways to identify new ideas—even if the practical application is not immediately apparent. 

Monro draws our attention to China and Islam and provides evidence of the spread of the Kingdom of Paper later in the 10th Century to China where millions were using Chinese pulp paper for money, scrolls, and other products. 

He presents a detailed history of writing in China and the use of early media, esp. silk, and bamboo strips. Paper, whatever it was made of and wherever it appeared, was a writing surface cheap, portable, and printable enough that books and pamphlets began to be mass-produced and to travel more widely through the world from the time of Cheops’ early papyrus paper. 

Monro discusses how in the pre-digital age, paper aided the rise of both universal education and universal suffrage and refers to the ‘Republic of Letters’ which transcended national divisions. In modern times the multiple uses of paper, especially as wrappings, indicate that the Kingdom of Paper has… show more.

This book is a guide to surviving an existential crisis – what Grove calls a Strategic Inflection Point – when your business is subjected to one or more of six external forces, which, if powerful enough, could destroy the business.  Some of them are obvious – competitors, regulators, customers, vendors – but others more esoteric, like “the possibility your business could be done a different way”, what today we would call being disrupted.  I read it in 2015, when the company I run, FINCA International, was facing five of these six forces, each of which clobbered us with a 10x force compared to the first three decades of our existence, when competition was weak and most external forces enabled our success. How does a CEO respond to this challenge?  Grove’s answer is summarized in the title: remain in a permanent state of dread, which to outsiders might appear on the… show more.