8 Digital Transformation Reads For The Summer Break
Find a compilation of recommended summer reads on Innovation, Digital Transformation and New Work.
by Sebastian Mueller, Chief Operating Officer at MING Labs
The year is already half over and we have just gotten started with achieving the goals set for 2019. As the summer break draws closer, you might want to take some books with you to come back to work inspired. So many things are moving in parallel, a lot of content is being published continuously and focus is hard — curation is even harder. Between the billions of lines written, millions of hours of videos produced and countless podcasts in the market; what is signal and what is noise?
We are always reading into new topics to draw inspiration for our professional and personal projects, and would love to share with you our favorites that we have picked up in the first half of 2019.
These books come from various fields, yet all of them have something to say about the topics that keep us busy on the daily — Innovation, Digital Transformation and New Work.
If you have any recommendations, please share them in the comments! We are always looking to expand our horizon.
1. Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan
Organizations are complex systems, rather than complicated systems. The difference? The latter can be fixed for good, while the former can only be improved for the better. With all the many independent parts our enterprises consist of, they are way too complex to be properly understood and improvement is never done. Brave New Work provides useful frameworks for how to think about the various elements going into this system, and how we can make lasting improvements that matter.
2. Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
To truly make a change to a process, you need to understand the assumptions behind its creation — why was it shaped the way it is today? Many of those assumptions, even if they were once true, are by now myths that have effectively been busted; yet their implications are still everywhere on display. Nine Lies About Work tackles some of the most damaging and pervasive myths that have shaped our organizations, showing their roots and better ways of doing things — from leadership, to feedback and goal setting, there are some real gems in here.
3. The Ten Faces Of Innovation by Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman
Innovation work requires not only a different approach to the business-as-usual work, but also different roles. The type of people who excel in innovation projects are typically very different from those who execute well in bigger production machines — which can lead to cultural clashes and the inability of legacy organizations to get anywhere with their innovation approaches.
Ten Faces Of Innovation nicely illustrates different characters and mindsets needed for successful innovation operations, what defines them and how to make them work well together.
4. Management Challenges For The 21st Century by Peter F. Drucker
The foresight with which Peter Drucker wrote decades ago is impressive and his work is still highly relevant today — if it has not even gained in relevance of the last decades of highly accelerating change. In an era where labor was the majority of work and people were managed as replaceable cogs in a machine, Drucker wrote about the rise of the knowledge worker who will become the core asset of the organization and who needs to work in different ways and be managed in different ways.
From strategy, to innovation, change management and knowledge work — Drucker foresaw many pressing problems that we are facing today and has relevant approaches to them on top.
5. Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle
By all accounts, Bill Campbell was an impressive character. Football coach turned top-management coach to some of the most impactful companies and leaders of today, including Google and Apple. Revered for his no-bullshit advise and the highly relevant collaboration patterns he brought from the football field into the corporation to help people work better, smarter and more efficiently. Trillion Dollar Coach has many relevant lessons for today’s leaders and tomorrow’s coaches in how we can think about people, teams and success to really make a difference.
6. Against Empathy by Paul Bloom
In design we always talk about empathy. In fact it’s the first step of the infamous Design Thinking process. Feel as your users feels to truly understand their problems and be able to frame them right. Yet is empathy actually the best tool for this, or might other related concepts such as sympathy or compassion be better suited to really make a difference at scale, for not only one user but large groups that are very hard to empathize with? Against Empathy presents interesting thoughts, arguments and examples for why empathy might not be the best way to go and what to do instead.
7. Billion Dollar Lessons by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui
Never let a good crisis go to waste — such is the now commonplace advice. The cheapest learning is from other people’s mistakes and not heeding the lessons that can be gained from that would just be wasteful. Billion Dollar Lessons presents the big, hairy failure patterns that hit corporations time and time again in serious ways, how they come to be, which biases blind us and how to overcome them.
A very useful book for any leader facing big, impactful, strategic decisions, including M&A and adjacent topics, to help raise questions before it is too late.
8. Weapons Of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
Algorithms are taking over more and more of our daily lives. Whether we know it or not, many important decisions today are being made by machines — often on the promises of “Artificial Intelligence” and being less biased than humans. Yet that promise is more often broken than redeemed, as we choose the wrong variables to include, the wrong data sets to train, and only end up teaching the machines our human biases. Then suddenly perpetrated by a machine, under the guise of neutrality and infallibility. Weapons Of Math Destruction illustrates many highly worrying patterns in algorithmic decision making today — a wake-up call to all of use and most of all the regulators in charge of protecting consumers.
Sebastian Mueller is Chief Operating Officer at MING Labs.
MING Labs is a leading digital business builder located in Berlin, Munich, New York City, Shanghai and Singapore. We guide clients in designing their businesses for the future, ensuring they are leaders in the field of innovation.
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Related Reading: 8 Digital Transformation Reads To Start The Year
