As we get towards the end of the year, here is a summary of some of the boks that I’ve read over this past year – hopeflly it will provide an inspiration for some of you to add to your 2023 reading list. I’m struggling to pick out a particular theme, but if I had to, it would probably be disruption – through either technology or teams.
If you’ve got any suggestions for books to add to my 2023 list, please feel free to drop some suggestions in the comments.
📚 Oliver Burkeman – Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How To Use It
This book kept on popping up on recommendations, and I either picked it up as part of my Prime membership, or it was on offer earlier this year.
Overall, whilst it was a bit of a drawn out book that ould have been condensed into a much shorter book, that I was torn whether it was a prt of the message, or was counter to it. It is built around the premise that we all have 4000 weeks between being born and the age of 77. By embracing that limitation, rather than fighting againt it, we look at how we spend our time differently and focus on what is important. This has been a common theme for me over the past few years, so it did quite resonate with me and was a helpful reminder.
‘There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.’
📚 Anne Boden – Banking On It
Anne Boden is the founder of Starling Bank and this is the story of her journey trying to establish a new business model and disrupt the banking industry – an industry steeped in tradition and heavy regulation!
Lots of Anne’s story resonated with me, as anybody who works in transformation or change. Anne told her full story, warts and all – at points had I not known the final outcome, I genuinely felt it was all over! A helpful reminder to keep pushing on if you believe in the mission! A fascinating read in a parallel industry to the Aerospace industry. The quote below is a helpful reminder of the importance of R&D and the people side of capability.
‘The only way to win is to learn faster than everyone else.’
🎧 Dave Grohl – The Story Teller
A guilty pleasure for me. Music is my first love (there’s a song in there!) and I grew up with bands like Metallica, Guns and Roses and Nirvana (which may surprise those that know my hard dance tendencies!). As such, Dave Grohl, the drummer from Nirvana and the main man behind The Foo Fighters, has featured throughout my life. This is his autobiography and I plumped for the audible version told by the man himself! His tale pre-Nirvana, learning to play drums on his pillows before he could afford a drum kit, his early days touring America in a beat up van, dealing with the death of his best friend and breaking his leg mid-gig and then demanding to carry on the gig sat in a chair with a doctor (whi happened to be a fan at the concert) holding his leg in place until the end of the gig. A great insight into the man, his life and the rock scene. I have even more respect for him now than I did before!
‘What you think, you become, What you feel, you attract, What you imagine, you create.’
📚 Colin Bryar, Bill Carr – Working Backwards
This is one of many books on Amazon and the culture within the Company – written by 2 former Vice Presidents in Amazon and tells of how Amazon was run internally. From banning use of powerpoint and replacing them with “narratives” – literally a several page document that the first 20 minutes of a meeting are devoted to reading and the outcome from the meeting is a refined narrative, to how to track metrics (spoiler alert – don’t focus on the output metrics!) and the embedding of tenets into each team as a means of both distilling strategy and empowering individual teams – this is a great insight into how a business that started in Jeff Bezos’ garage grew into the multi-billion dollar empire it is today and lots of lessons we could all take from it. One I will keep coming back to.
‘One of the many benefits tenets can bring is strong alignment among everyone involved. They also provide a set of guiding principles to rely on to help with decision-making.’
📚 Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga – The Courage to be Disliked
This appeared in the Prime list as a freebie (and it still is at time of posting), so I downloaded it on an impulse. Its a non-traditional book in that it is based around a conversation between a philosopher and a student, but once you get into the swing of it it becomes one of those books that I had to keep stopping to mull over what I’d just read and process it – not because it was difficult to read, but because it got my brain thinking and I then couldn’t focus on the next section. Fortunately it was broken up well to allow for that.
It builds on Adlerian psychology and Stoicism (as well as Freud and Jung) and points out that a lot of the things that stress us are due to us taking on other people’s “tasks” (as Kishimi refers to it) and that our own “tasks” may be different to other people’s “tasks”. They may both be different (and why we end up having argumentative conversations) and neither “task” is wrong. Once we understand that, and then once we understand how we ourselves fit into our community, that we start to find happiness.
This is a book that I will be revisiting as there is so much to take in – a great starting point if you have an interest in Stoicism…. or just want to understand yourself/people a bit better!
‘None of us live in an objective world, but instead in a subjective world that we ourselves have given meaning to. The world you see is different from the one I see, and it’s impossible to share your world with anyone else.’
🎧 Vassos Alexander – Running Up That Hill
Another audible listen for whilst I was out running. I’m a big fan of the Chris Evas Breakfast Show and enjoy Vassos’ stories, so thought I’d give this a try. Just a great celebration of Ultra running. As some of you know, I started running a few years ago in defiance of having various issues with my feet. Whilst I’ll never be a long-distance runner, listening to Vassos’ tales of running a mountain race in Wales with a sprained ankle and running the gruelling 153mile Spartathlon in his home country of Greece was a truly inspirational tale and made my 5k runs I was doing whilst listening to it pale into insignificance!
📚 Simon Sinek – Leaders Eat Last
After reading “Start with Why” last year, this year I tackled “Leaders Eat Last”. I’ve a lot of respect for Simon Sinek.
Leaders Eat Last builds on Start With Why and looks at how we can inspire deep commitment in the Company’s vision and mission – as the tag line states “why some teams ull together and others don’t”. He looks at the model of the US Military – in particular the marines – and that is where the title of the book coes from, where he observed that in the Mess Hall, the officers held back and let the soldiers eat first.
Some great insights, with research to back it up. A key one for me was summarised by the quote below:
‘Empathy is the single greatest asset to do your job’
There is so much more, though, including a look at how different generations (because we have to pigeon hole based on something!) are motivated, which got me thinking – particularly when it comes to Millenials and the challenges we face in Engineering, and in particular Aerospace, with the skills shortage coupled with the long life-cycle of an aircraft programme.
As a book, there were a lot of good insights, but I can’t help but feel it could be summarised in some of Sinek’s great TED Talks and videos rather than the book. That doesn’t mean that
📚 Julie Starr – The Coaching Manual
This was a book on the syllabus for the Coach Development Programme that I completed towards the back end of the year. A great book for developing yourself as a coach to others. It was massively helped by the programme running in parallel, but as a stand-alone book it was jam packed with theory, advice and practical examples on how to be an effective coach.
📚 Ben Rich, Leo Janos – Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of my Years at Lockheed
This has been on my reading list for some time, and this year I jumped in and gave it a read. As the title suggests, it is the personal memoirs of Ben Rich, who was in charge of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works for 2 decades following Kelly Johnson’s retirement.
Some great tales of the development of some of the most famous aircraft to come out of Lockheed – the U2, the Blackbird and the F117 “Stealth Fighter”.
A great book for so many reasons – for anyone working in the Aerospace or Defence sector, this is probably why we joined and the stories told certainly resonated with working within the Tempest Project and the Advanced Projects teams at BAE, as do Mr Rich’s reflections on the industry and challenges we face – such as the ever tightening national budgets, the bath tub in aerospace projects and the conflict that brings with ensuring that we have a workforce with the skills and the technologies needed to discharge the needs of our nations when it is needed. The Skunk Works is sucessful because it operates in a very different way to most mass production-focussed businesses. It is a great example of Agile principles….. before Agile was a label that the consulting industry got it’s hands on.
“Control is the name of the game and if a Skunk Works really operates right, control is exactly what they won’t get.”