The Defining Experience Book List

The books I recommend for anyone wanting to learn more about design, leadership, product, and business. With a bit of psychology, behavioral science, organizational development, and emerging tech thrown in for good measure.

Design Leadership

Design Leadership Ignited: Elevating Design at Scale

Design Leadership: How Top Design Leaders Build and Grow Successful Organizations

Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need

Design Ethos

Dieter Rams: Ten Principles for Good Design

Bruce Mau: MC24: Bruce Mau's 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in your Life and Work

Strategic Design

Strategic Design: 8 Essential Practices Every Strategic Designer Must Master

Design in Context: A Framework for Strategic Differentiation

Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary

Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design (Design Thinking, Design Theory)

Contextual Design: Design for Life (Interactive Technologies)

Service Design

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World

Designing Experiences

Good Services: How to Design Services that Work

Product

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products…

Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)

Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

The Experience Economy, With a New Preface by the Authors: Competing for Customer Time, Attention…

Culture

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

The Insider's Guide to Culture Change: Creating a Workplace That Delivers, Grows, and Adapts

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation…

Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace

Future of Work

How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams To Do The Best Work of Their Lives

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

Transformation

Leading Change, With a New Preface by the Author

Designed for Digital: How to Architect Your Business for Sustained Success (Management on the…

Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World

Business

Principles: Life and Work

Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture

Strategic Execution: Driving Breakthrough Performance in Business

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact

The Infinite Game

The Personal MBA 10th Anniversary Edition

The Visual Mba: Two Years of Business School Packed into One Priceless Book of Pure Awesomeness

Innovation

Innovation Engine: Driving Execution for Breakthrough Results

This Might Get Me Fired: A Manual for Thriving in the Corporate Entrepreneurial Underground

Operations

The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations

Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams

Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

Communication

Story 10x: Turn the Impossible Into the Inevitable

Leadership + Management

High Output Management

It's Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best

Scaling Leadership: Building Organizational Capability and Capacity to Create Outcomes that Matter…

Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership

The Performance Pipeline: Getting the Right Performance At Every Level of Leadership

The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You