100 books like Thinking in Systems

In diving into this book, I couldn't help but draw parallels between Maxwell's teachings and our foundational principles of Organizational Behavior Management (OBM). Although Maxwell isn't exactly a card-carrying behavior scientist, his wisdom on topics like vision, influence, and commitment resonates deeply with OBM practices I've come to advocate for.

He's revamped the book with modern examples, making it all the more relevant in today's business world. Yet, the core truths—those unshakeable leadership tenets—remain. Through my lens, blending Maxwell's insights with OBM's evidence-based strategies can empower anyone navigating the complex world of leadership.

This isn't just another leadership book; it's a bridge between traditional leadership wisdom and the pragmatic, results-driven approach of OBM. Highly recommended for those with a passion for melding theory with real-world solutions.

I often think that so many problems in the world could be solved with better communication. More and more we stick with people who think like us, because the challenge of bridging ideological gaps seems too great.

So, how to talk to people who have values that are in opposition to yours? How can you connect with people whose experiences have given them a life that you can’t relate to? In On Dialogue, David Bohm gives us a way to tear apart the fear and hesitation of the no-man’s land between ourselves and people we don’t understand.

There are always people with whom we don’t know how to communicate. We can’t let that stop us from trying. Bohm’s book will give you the tools to do just that.

We are all going to lose someone we love. We are all going to go through the pain of people we care about dying. We are all going to contemplate our mortality at some point and wonder if what we’re doing has much of a point, if we could do better, and if we could make life a little less painful somehow.

Keisha Blair lost her husband when they were both in their thirties, when their son was 8 weeks old. She shares what she learned about building from that wreckage in Holistic Wealth. The book puts the pain of loss front and center, and then offers insights from stories and interviews on how to take care of our money, our relationships, and our spirituality, and thus ourselves.

Low desire and mismatched libidos are the #1 problem a sex therapist deals with and too often one partner is labeled high desire and the other partner is labeled as low. But very often the real problem is that partners operate in different desire frameworks and need to create a shared desire framework.

This is especially true of heterosexual couples, and Nagoski’s book is important reading for men and women alike who want to find common sexual ground.

Most people, I think, when they start to understand the world better, they start to see the endless ways that it could be improved. Some of us though, we get stuck in the ideas of improvement, and never figure out how to just get on with it.

Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize and has other thought-provoking books. But I like this one. The Country of First Boys is a series of essays that are technically about various issues in India, but which are easily extrapolated to depressingly common situations in most other countries. Central to the essays is the theme of not letting the idea of a perfectly just society get in the way of the business of reducing injustice. We can debate utopia until we take our last breath, but in the meantime, Sen inspires us that there is much we can do now to improve the world… show more.

To fathom the mystery of consciousness, one needs to be ready to violate the entrenched convictions of conventional mindscience and let your mind roam freely over more inventive and limber perspectives.

Such as the literary inventions of Jorge Borges. His short stories/essays (it’s never really clear which category is more appropriate) are all wildly creative and astute models of sentience. I learned more about consciousness from “The Library of Babel,” “Tlön," Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “The Lottery of Babylon” than I did from any neuroscience text.

Not all the problems of an organization belong to other people.

Sometimes you’re part of the problem. One of the issues people struggle with is managing their increasing workloads and maintaining a high level of quality. Deep Work helped me understand how much focus we need to get into the flow and produce at a high-level.

If you’re someone who feels like they’re always nibbling at the edges of productive work, but never quite getting into a deep flow of things, then this is the book for you. 

There are many authors who attempt to capture the human experience of consciousness in words. Pioneers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner all pushed the bounds of literary convention to try to express the subjective stream of consciousness that all humans, presumably, revel in.

Nevertheless, I think the very best literary modeler of human consciousness adopted the same approach as the very best scientific modeler of human consciousness: instead of jumping in and examining consciousness with a microscope, he stepped back—way back—and chronicled everything that was going on all at once... and out of this beautiful turbulence emerged a clear-eyed vision of experience itself.

Tolstoy paints a tapestry that is shockingly cosmic in its vastness, while simultaneously zooming in for microscopic close-ups of the tiniest action—and then showing that it is the holistic interplay of all these levels of purpose and intention that gives rise to the marvel… show more.

The authors view procurement transformation as a continual transformation evolving to meet dynamic economic, political, and supply chain requirements. I fully support Chick and Handfield’s premise that raw power will be replaced with collaboration. “Collaboration is the new way,” they assert, adding. “The old adversarial posture of procurement is as outmoded as it is inappropriate.” Chick and Handfield call for a clear break between older or past-generation procurement practices and those of today. In short, they argue that everything done and learned in the past will not be useful in the dawn of procurement’s new value proposition, where the goal for all parties is value, not just lowest cost pricing.

This book hits the nail on the head with an accurate assessment of the frustration buyers and suppliers have as they go through a virtual tug of war on procurement: procurement practitioners are pressured to become more strategic and innovative, and at the same time are pressured to save on costs. Organizations want solutions to close the gaps when they lack core competencies. Yet suppliers argue that investing in unique customer requirements or innovations is risky because buyers will simply take their ideas and competitively bid on the work. Hence the industry is at a crossroads, with buyers and suppliers wanting innovation but neither willing to invest due to the conventional transaction-based commercial structure of how buyers and suppliers work and procure together.