The best books I read in 2022

4 min readDec 20, 2022

In November 2021, I wrote an article about the pleasure of listening to audiobooks. Despite being the busiest year ever with founding & growing RevoData, operating as the CTO a.i. of a rapidly growing scale-up BridgeFund, and still managing a decent work-life balance, I could listen to 27 audiobooks. In this article, I will share with you some of my highlights.

This post is not intended to provide book summaries. Instead, it reflects my personal findings and experiences.

Crucial Conversations

I regularly talk to shareholders, CEOs, CTOs, and other C-level people. According to the book, these are called decisive conversations. I often struggled with these conversations as the consequences can be severe. I avoided certain conversation topics way too often. Putting additional stress on myself and the teams I’m leading.

This book has been eye-opening and provided me with the proper means to deal with decisive conversations constructively. I could apply the things I learned from the book immediately, and to continue developing my crucial conversation skills, I enrolled myself in a 2-day in-person classroom training in May 2023. Already looking forward to it!

Accelerate & Team Topologies

Both books, in my opinion, are a must-read for leaders in the Technology space. Team Topologies focuses heavily on organizational structures to optimize tech teams and their ability to deliver, whereas Accelerate touches on broader topics, such as processes and practices. I’ve used the content from both books to optimize the structure of the teams I’m responsible for and execute process improvements.

The biggest thing I still struggle with is that in smaller organizations with Technology teams with less than 50 employees — it’s challenging to help them create focus as often these teams have multiple technology responsibilities combined into one team.

The Making of a Manager

When being a manager for years, just transitioning into management, or still operating as an individual contributor (and not planning to move into management) — I honestly believe this book is for all people what to improve their skills and gain more experience on when you need to communicate what: up, down, and lateral.

Rocket Fuel

Are you a visionary or an integrator? Do you know the difference? Did you know you can be both? It all depends on your role, but it’s good to be clear about this with your business partner. Read the strengths and weaknesses of both in this summary, and let me know which type you are.

No Rules Rules

I honestly believe that giving employees more freedom and responsibility is pivotal in increasing their accountability, increasing creative ideas, and becoming fast-paced. You take a leap of faith, but I promise you, it will pay off in the long run! With RevoData, we’re building talent density and I can’t wait to see what the future brings as we reduce controls.

Surrounded by Idiots

Recommended to me by a dear friend, this book helps you how to communicate and deal with people that have a different ‘color’, e.g. behavior types. I’ve taken many personality tests before and this book builds on a similar concept. The downfall of these concepts is that you often have to put your conversation partner into a ‘box’ and find the appropriate means of communication. I often made mistakes in identifying people’s colors and messed up with how to best communicate with them. These mistakes you learn from and won’t make again — but I already notice I need to refresh my memory regularly to keep it top of mind.

Closing

When writing this post, I noticed that I miss out on so many valuable learnings from all of the books I’ve read. Every book is almost worth a post on its own. Feel free to DM me if you want to discuss specific books and/or to share your recommendations.

My complete list of books: