Here are 100 books that Unlearn fans have personally recommended if you like
Unlearn.
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Jeff has been a UX designer, team leader and product manager for over 20 years. His work in the field helped define some of the key practices product managers use today. Building a customer-centric practice is key to successful products and services and Jeff has demonstrated that not only in the products and companies he’s helped build but in the writing and thinking he’s contributed to the product managaement community.
Melissa is rewriting the book on modern product management. Her advice is hard-earned, practical, and useful. If you’re interested in starting a career in product management, this book offers up specifics on what exactly is product management and how to excel at it in modern, agile cultures.
To stay competitive in today's market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer's needs.
In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product…
Jeff has been a UX designer, team leader and product manager for over 20 years. His work in the field helped define some of the key practices product managers use today. Building a customer-centric practice is key to successful products and services and Jeff has demonstrated that not only in the products and companies he’s helped build but in the writing and thinking he’s contributed to the product managaement community.
Product discovery is the way in which great product teams learn whether or not they’re building something of value. Teresa has distilled and sharpened this practice into a set of tools and techniques that she delivers in her signature direct style. Must read for all product managers and UX designers.
"If you haven't had the good fortune to be coached by a strong leader or product coach, this book can help fill that gap and set you on the path to success."
- Marty Cagan
How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business?
In this book, you'll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help…
Jeff has been a UX designer, team leader and product manager for over 20 years. His work in the field helped define some of the key practices product managers use today. Building a customer-centric practice is key to successful products and services and Jeff has demonstrated that not only in the products and companies he’s helped build but in the writing and thinking he’s contributed to the product managaement community.
Perhaps an unusual pick for product managers but this book breaks down how to teach successfully in a world of constant distractions. Think of it as “lean startup for classes.” Product managers are teachers, evangelists, and most of all communicators. Knowing how to break down ideas into pieces your teams and colleagues can digest is critical to your success.
Employ cognitive theory in the classroom every day Research into how we learn has opened the door for utilizing cognitive theory to facilitate better student learning. But that's easier said than done. Many books about cognitive theory introduce radical but impractical theories, failing to make the connection to the classroom. In Small Teaching, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of modest but powerful changes that make a big difference many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These strategies are designed to bridge the chasm between primary research and…
Jeff has been a UX designer, team leader and product manager for over 20 years. His work in the field helped define some of the key practices product managers use today. Building a customer-centric practice is key to successful products and services and Jeff has demonstrated that not only in the products and companies he’s helped build but in the writing and thinking he’s contributed to the product managaement community.
David and Alex have written the definitive reference book for product experiments. Forty-four ways for you to learn quickly and efficiently whether you’re building something of value. This book is beautifully illustrated and infinitely practical.
A practical guide to effective business model testing
7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder's global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas.
Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean…
I teach sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management and get to know hundreds of passionate executives and young professionals every year. They are out to change organizations, disrupt markets, build social movements, and advance public policy to make the world a better place. As I coach and connect these leaders throughout their careers, I get a front row seat to their personal development. I get to observe - what makes for an effective agent of change or social entrepreneur? How can we enact social and environmental values in organizations that seem to ignore those concerns? How do we change ourselves to be more effective in changing the world?
I love Otto Scharmer’s roadmap for changing ourselves and changing the world. He confronts the ecological, social, and spiritual divides in our current moment of crisis in human civilization. He identifies the ego-centric quality of attention and consciousness that have produced those crises. And he offers an over-arching process (“Theory U”) and a set of practices for transforming self, system, and society that I have found incredibly useful.
A powerful pocket guide for practitioners that distills all of the research and materials found in Otto Scharmer's seminal texts Theory U and Leading from the Emerging Future.
Creating a Better Future
This book offers a concise, accessible guide to the key concepts and applications in Otto Scharmer's classic Theory U. Scharmer argues that our capacity to pay attention coshapes the world. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of that interior condition from which our attention and actions originate. Scharmer calls this lack of awareness our blind spot. He illuminates the…
As an innovation expert for over 30 years, I've been cautioning about
the "dark side" of innovation and emphasized the importance of
sustainability. Though in light of the urgency of our planet's
situation, we need to shift our focus from sustainability to
regeneration. The unprecedented complexity and
connectedness of today’s world demand thinking in systems,
and the kind of innovation that leads to the transformation of our
current social and economic systems so we can live in harmony
with nature. This requires us to question who we collaborate
with, what we value, and how we create value. We need to work
together differently, with different leadership, and to change our own ways of thinking.
If the first two books provide the general context and rationale for systemic approaches, the following three will offer some guidance for the other necessities for thriving in the 21st century: achieving transformational change, shifting towards urgently needed regeneration, and the twin path of developing as a person and as a leader in order to facilitate the transformational change we need.
By now (almost) everyone will have realized: we cannot continue on the trajectories we are currently on, there is just not enough planet left. But how do we go about introducing the transformative change we so urgently need?
We all know how challenging change is, be it at the personal or organizational level. Otto has developed a systemic approach that is based on collaboration and co-creation, considers systems and has been proven to work (which he illustrates through case studies from around the world).
Access the deepest source of inspiration and vision
We live in a time of massive institutional failure that manifests in the form of three major divides: the ecological, the social, and the spiritual. Addressing these challenges requires a new consciousness and collective leadership capacity. In this groundbreaking book, Otto Scharmer invites us to see the world in new ways and in so doing discover a revolutionary approach to learning and leadership.
In most large systems today, we collectively create results that no one wants. What keeps us stuck in such patterns of the past? It’s our blind spot, that is,…
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success—from fundamental physics, through evolution in biology, to how people learn, think, and decide.
This book presents a way of thinking and realistic knowledge that our formal education shuns. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even…
I was born, raised, and living in Iceland, the country that has been number 1 in the world for gender equality for decades. I am a leadership & personal branding coach, mentor, and Ambassador for the New Paradigm for Gender Equality. My mission is to empower people to become better, bolder, and brighter as the leading light in their industry by branding their x-factor, that gift what they were born to be.
When I read Coaching for Performance, I was in the early days of my coaching career. The book opened my eyes to the power of coaching. Not only as a tool for professional coaches but, more importantly, a tool that can help the average Joe and Jane to become the leader in their own lives. Make a difference by using proven tools and techniques to better understand themselves and others around them.
Coaching for Performance is the #1 book for coaches, leaders, talent managers and professionals around the world. This is the definitive, updated and expanded edition.
"The proven resource for all coaches and pioneers of the future of coaching." Magdalena N. Mook, CEO, International Coach Federation (ICF)
An international bestseller, featuring the powerful GROW model, this book is the founding text of the coaching profession. It explains why enabling people to bring the best out of themselves is the key to driving productivity, growth, and engagement. A meaningful coaching culture has the potential to transform the relationship between organizations and employees…
My grandfather was a labour activist in Hull in the UK and my father had many classic labour texts such as the book by Tressell, listed below. That got me interested in the world of work and later more specifically in managing people. I moved from studying economics to employment relations /human resource management. Given that most of us (workers) spend 80,000 hours of our lives at work - more time than we are likely to spend on any other activity during our lifetimes - how we spend these lives has remained a source of fascination
Much work on management talks of talent and people being the most important asset, whose ideas and skills should be fully utilized.
This book points to another side of organizations, where stupidity and idiocy reign despite the presence of smart workers (think of people who have important information to convey but are quiet at meetings as they are worried about not being seen as team players). This can help organisations in the short run (less conflict and everyone getting on with the job) but in the long run is problematic.
The authors point to how top-down management marginalizes critical voices and reinforces conformity to existing practices, and in so doing can embed stupidity.
Functional stupidity can be catastrophic. It can cause organisational collapse, financial meltdown and technical disaster. And there are countless, more everyday examples of organisations accepting the dubious, the absurd and the downright idiotic, from unsustainable management fads to the cult of leadership or an over-reliance on brand and image. And yet a dose of stupidity can be useful and produce good, short-term results: it can nurture harmony, encourage people to get on with the job and drive success. This is the stupidity paradox.
The Stupidity Paradox tackles head-on the pros and cons of functional stupidity. You'll discover what makes a…
I've been fascinated throughout my career by what makes an effective leader. I read about leadership; I carefully observed effective leaders; and I worked hard to become a leader. After a 40-year career, I concluded that nonprofit leaders required a leadership model that met the unique challenges of leading a nonprofit organization and that I was the right person to write the book. I'm proud of The 5 Truths for Transformational Leaders. I believe the book addresses the unique challenges of leading a nonprofit organization. I hope you discover how to use its principles to make a bigger difference in achieving your organization’s mission. Nothing could be more important for the future of our nation.
I’ve had the good fortune to work with Noel to develop a leadership program for Boys & Girls Clubs leaders that is based largely on the content of The Cycle of Leadership.
Noel believes the most successful leaders are teachers. To succeed they need a teachable point of view about how the organization will succeed. The teachable point of view is shared relentlessly shared at every opportunity with all stakeholders.
Part of this conversation is inviting feedback. Thus, the cycle, leaders teach, they receive feedback, and their teachable point of view evolves. One of my greatest learnings from this book was a deeper understanding of how the mission of an organization needs to be the basis for decisions and actions. This provided me with the courage and conviction to act.
In The Leadership Engine, Noel Tichy showed how great companies strive to create leaders at all levels of the organization, and how those leaders actively develop future generations of leaders. In this new book, he takes the theme further, showing how great companies and their leaders develop their business knowledge into "teachable points of view," spend a great portion of their time giving their learnings to others, sharing best practices, and how they in turn learn and receive business ideas/knowledge from the employees they are teaching.
Calling this exchange a virtuous teaching cycle, Professor Tichy shows how business builders from…
This manual addresses the need to ensure that people are at the centre of the organisation. There has never been a timelier reminder of the need to ensure that leading, supporting and developing staff are critical aspects of creating the right organisational culture to grow and develop. Written with sensitivity,…
I sometimes describe myself as a stealth Zen teacher working in the business world. I've founded and been CEO of three companies, including the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, a company I helped create and launch inside of Google's headquarters. I'm an executive coach and consultant to CEOs and leaders in the corporate and non-profit worlds. Prior to my business career I was a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center for 10 years. I'm the author of 5 books.
Though written more than 30 years ago, I continue to return to it for solid business, entrepreneurial, and life advice.
Peter Senge's theories can help businesses to clarify their goals, to better understand threats, and to recognize new opportunities. He introduces leaders and managers to a new source of competitive advantage, and offers an empowering approach to work.
Mastery of Senge's five disciplines enables managers to overcome their obstacles to growth and creates new futures for them and their companies. The five disciplines are drawn from science, spiritual wisdom, psychology, cutting-edge management thought, and Senge's own work with top corporations that employ his methods.
One of the seminal management books of the past 75 years, The Fifth Discipline is an international multi-million-copy bestseller. Written in an engaging and accessible way, with diagrams and illustrations, it will change the way you think and therefore way you and your team grows and develop. In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organisation's ability to learn faster than its competitors....
'Senge explains why the learning organization matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principals, offers some basic tools for practicing it, and shows what it's like to operate under this system.…
