I’ve gathered some of my favorite books/articles here that I regularly send out to my coaching clients. Each of these is included because it contained a perspective that directly helped me in one way or another during my career. You’ll notice the list is pretty HBR-heavy. HBR tends to have supporting research behind its content. I find this approach refreshing in a world where a lot of business content is littered with survivorship bias and arguments made on anecdotal evidence.
- General management
- High Output Management (Andy Grove)
- Starting a new executive role
- Advice for a new executive.
- Seven Surprises for New CEOs (HBR, 2004). “Through our work with new chief executives of major companies, we have found seven surprises to be the most common. How well and how quickly new CEOs understand, accept, and confront them will have a lot to do with the executives’ eventual success or failure.” Every new CEO I have ever sent this to has said, “wow, this is right, wish I had known this.”
- The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter
- Articulating strategy
- What is strategy? (Michael Porter, HBR, 1996). A surprising number of “strategy” discussions in companies start without understanding what “strategy” is. This article defines it clearly.
- From Vision to Values: The Importance of Defining Your Core (Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn CEO). A practical guide to succinctly articulating company vision down to specific objectives and priorities from a very successful CEO. I had the privilege of working with Jeff at Yahoo! and saw how this works up close.
- Strategy under uncertainty (McKinsey, June 2000). “The traditional approach to strategy requires precise predictions and thus often leads executives to underestimate uncertainty. This can be downright dangerous. A four-level framework can help.”
- Core operational skills
- Annual and quarterly planning
- The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite (First Round Review)
- OKRs
- Budgeting
- Turn Your Budgeting Process Upside Down (HBR, July 2004, Robert Howell)
- How to Ruin Your Company with One Bad Process (Ben Horowitz)
- Time management
- How CEOs manage time (HBR, July-Aug 2018). “Our study, which we launched in 2006, offers the first comprehensive and detailed examination of CEO time use in large, complex companies over an extended period.”
- Advice to CEOs: Getting out from under a jammed calendar (this blog)
- Project management
- Too many projects (HBR, Sept-Oct 2018). Tips on how to deal with “initiative overload” in a company
- Annual and quarterly planning
- Core management skills
- Giving Feedback
- How to Give Feedback People Can Actually Use (HBR, Oct 2017)
- Giving a High Performer Productive Feedback (HBR, Dec 2009)
- How to Give Feedback to People Who Cry, Yell, or Get Defensive (HBR, Sept 2016)
- Good meetings
- How to design an agenda for an effective meeting (HBR, March 2015). “Always have an agenda” is pretty common advice. This tells you how to create a good agenda.
- Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting? (HBR, March 2015). The flow chart in this meeting is one of the most immediately useful I’ve ever seen.
- Hiring
- How to Hire (HBR, January 2018). By Patty McCord, formerly of Netflix
- Recruiting and culture (July 2012). I wrote this as a guest post on Fred Wilson’s blog.
- Am I micromanaging? This lecture “How to Operate” from Keith Rabois covers a challenge common to founders: am I too “in the weeds”? Search for “task relevant maturity” in the transcript. tldr; it’s ok to “micromanage” in a very particularly way, even though your team will push back on it. This tells you how to explain why you’re doing it.
- Scaling rapidly in a startup
- Giving Feedback
- Board of directors
- “Why the CEO Shouldn’t Also Be the Board Chair” (HBR, March 2020)
- Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors (book by Brad Feld)
- Navigating board dynamics (conversation with me, Jerry Colonna, and Khalid Halim)
- Mike Volpi on the art of board membership: The nature of the startup and stage of the company define ‘value-added’ as a director (Techcrunch)
- Support functions
- “The Case for a Chief of Staff” (HBR, June 2020)
- “Alter Ego” – CEO Matt Blumberg’s excellent post on what a high-performance executive assistant looks like
- Psychology of leadership
- “Pressure Doesn’t Have to Turn Into Stress” (HBR, March 2017)
- “What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology” (Ben Horowitz)
- Engineering management
- Performance of software engineering teams
- “Diagnosing and fixing software development performance” (AKF Partners)
- Engineering career ladders
- Etsy engineering ladder with blog post explaining rationale
- Sharing our engineering ladder (Camille Fournier, CTO of Rent the Runway) – includes spreadsheet and text
- Performance of software engineering teams
- Culture
- Drucker on cultural change (my blog). I explore a very heavily-quoted Drucker bit on changing culture that is actually a blatantly wrong misquote. Understanding what he was saying about how to successfully change culture is something that will save you a lot of pain. I took over from a CEO/founder at Etsy and realized much later that I had followed much of Drucker’s advice here.
- Andy Grove’s writing on centralization vs. decentralization in High Output Management is the best writing I’ve ever read on the subject. In Kindle, look at locations 1922-2088: “In the real world, of course, we look for a compromise between the two extremes. In fact, the search for the appropriate compromise has preoccupied managers for a long, long time. Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, ‘Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.’ Or, we might say, on a balancing act to get the best combination of responsiveness and leverage.”
- Collaboration without burnout (HBR, July-August 2018). Discusses concept of “collaborative overload” and how to manage it in your life and organization.
- Organizational Blueprints for Success in High-Tech Start-Ups (2002). This one is really fascinating and answers the question: how do founders’ initial blueprints on an organization impact long-term culture and company success, even after they have left?
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