YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

Create Change Via the Executive Team Reading List

You can’t out-train a bad diet.

—Anonymous

I’m in my fifties, but I still eat like a teenager. Although I love to exercise, I am a bon bon–snarfing dietary degenerate. Cookies and candy are my downfall.

The mind operates under similar principles. Although you may have outlined a set of exercises for your brain, you may not be conscious of what your brain is fed. Well-balanced mental nutrition is of the utmost importance, and minimizing “sweets” like ubiquitous Internet clickbait is necessary to keep your brain fighting trim.

“As if we aren’t busy enough,” you mutter. “Now this guy’s going to recommend a book club for my executive team?” Yup. As I’ve mentioned throughout this book, a strategic road map to true transformation includes creating new habits for yourself and your organization. Creating new habits is partially about how you work with your direct team. Every executive can pay lip service to the idea that lifelong learning is essential, yet how many of us shortchange this belief? Improving the content you digest to drive organization change is a great complement to all the other tools for competing in the digital era.

I’ll refer to this as a “reading list,” but it includes podcasts. There are many ways to formulate the group activity: meet once a week to discuss; have someone write an “implications” memo from a book; have the author come talk to the team; or just share the content.

AMAZON’S S-TEAM BOOK CLUB

When I was at Amazon, the S-team (of which I was not a member) was reading many different books. The broader organization would often “take the hint” and also read the books. In Brad Stone’s excellent book The Everything Store, the appendix is a list of books that were part of Jeff Bezos’s reading list. I’ve included only two of these books on my list (The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement and The Mythical Man-Month).

Books

•   The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox (1984)

The Goal is the essential book on the theory of constraints and getting to root-cause understandings. Stylistically, it has influenced me in telling personal stories to deliver business recommendations. If I could only write something as impactful as The Goal . . .

•   The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks (1975)

Brooks outlines the complexity of large software development projects, and the principles are applicable to other large projects. The Mythical Man-Month will influence your perspective on small teams and creating services in your business.

•   The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos (2015)

“Pedro Domingos demystifies machine learning and shows how wondrous and exciting the future will be.”

—Walter Isaacson

•   Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella and Greg Shaw (2017)

This is a story about both leadership and company transformation.

•   The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (2011)

Ries blends together many key elements of continuous improvement, hypothesis testing, and metrics that matter.

•   Zero to One by Peter Thiel (2014)

“An extended polemic against stagnation, convention, and uninspired thinking. What Thiel is after is the revitalization of imagination and invention writ large.”

—The New Republic

Podcasts

•   a16z Podcast

Ignoring some of the intellectual snobbery that goes on, the Andreessen and Horowitz team creates great conversations with founders and other experts.

•   Internet History Podcast

The host, Brian McCullough, does fantastic preparation and talks to guests who have shaped the Internet. You can learn a lot about business models, innovation, and history through this podcast. Really great interviews and lessons.

•   Recode Decode

Kara Swisher gets great guests and talks about many of the challenges of innovation and Silicon Valley.

•   IoT-Inc. Business Show

Bruce Sinclair, the author of IoT Inc., has great guests discussing many of the technical and practical aspects of IoT. Sinclair does an excellent job diving down to key points of costs, value, and other practical aspects.

•   ETL

The ETL (Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders) is a Stanford live-presentation format podcast that has company founders come and talk to an audience.

WHAT’S YOUR DIET?

Big wave surfer and waterman extraordinaire Laird Hamilton once wrote, “Potato chips in = potato chips out. That’s the rule.” In other words, improve the input to fuel the output. Sharing with others and creating a group exercise just magnifies the impact. Yes, it takes time and commitment. We all agree that lifelong learning and the development of leaders in our company are essential. Here’s a fun, cheap, and impactful way to do it. Now where are those Pringles?