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The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

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What's it about? The Manager’s Path (2017) serves as a practical career guide for technology professionals transitioning from individual contributor roles to management positions, from mentoring and tech lead positions all the way to senior executive leadership. It addresses the unique challenges of tech, where management itself is a technical discipline, providing actionable advice and frameworks for handling the obstacles that arise at each stage of a manager’s development. You’ve been coding for years, solving complex technical problems, and suddenly someone asks you to mentor a new hire. Or maybe you’re already a manager, buried under the weight of one-on-ones, performance reviews, and the nagging sense that you’re making it all up as you go. The truth is, most engineers stumble into management with zero training, expected to figure out on their own how to turn individual contributors into high-performing teams while somehow staying technical enough to earn respect. The path...
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Assumption-Based Planning by James A. Dewar A Tool for Reducing Avoidable Surprises

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What's it about? Assumption-Based Planning (2002) offers a different way to think about strategy. Instead of trying to predict what the future holds, it gives you a method for finding the weak points in any plan – the silent beliefs that, if they turn out to be wrong, bring everything down. You'll walk away with practical tools for stress-testing your goals and making them sturdy enough to survive surprise. All of us want certainty. So, when we plan, we often draw a line from where we are now to where we want to be, and we fill that line with milestones that feel solid and real. There’s comfort in picturing the finished project after all – the thriving business, the goal achieved. But somewhere in the back of your mind, there’s usually a flicker of unease. A quiet awareness that spreadsheets don't account for chaos. The confidence we feel might just be a story we tell ourselves to avoid staring into the unknown. This lesson will strip away that story. You’ll look beneath...
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Be Yourself at Work by Claude Silver Show Up, Stand Out, and Lead from the Heart

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What's it about? Be Yourself at Work (2025) demonstrates how authenticity becomes a strategic advantage in modern workplaces. It tackles the burnout that stems from endless performance and pretense, revealing how genuine self-expression actually drives connection, innovation, and meaningful results. It also provides you with actionable strategies for building inclusive teams where people belong and feel genuinely valued. At the age of 19, Claude Silver found herself struggling up an 11,000-foot incline in the Rocky Mountains, crying hard. Her Outward Bound instructor spotted her and asked what was going on in her head. Silver admitted she was singing a Nine Inch Nails lyric: “Head like a hole, black as your soul, I’d rather die than give you control.” The instructor told her to get another song into her head. That moment changed everything. Silver realized that even when circumstances felt beyond her control, she could choose the internal soundtrack guiding her thoughts. She lea...
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Sticking Points by Haydn Shaw How to Get 5 Generations Working Together

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What's it about? Sticking Points (2013) explores what happens when up to five generations work side by side. It shows how shared goals at work are often undermined by everyday misunderstandings rooted in different generational experiences, habits, and expectations. The central message is practical and optimistic: these tensions are normal, manageable, and solvable when we learn how to work with differences instead of fighting them. You've probably been in this meeting. Someone's checking their phone. Someone else looks annoyed. One person wants to talk it through. Another just wants the follow-up email. Everyone leaves irritated. This kind of friction shows up everywhere at work: it’s present in debates about remote work, feedback styles, meeting length, dress codes, loyalty, and technology. It can feel personal, even when it’s not. But this isn't a case of the devil being in the details. The real driver is something much bigger—and much newer. For the first time, w...
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Root Cause Analysis by Matthew A. Barsalou A Step-By-Step Guide to Using the Right Tool at the Right Time

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What's it about? Root Cause Analysis (2014) explains how to investigate quality problems systematically using empirical evidence and structured methods rather than intuition or blame. It introduces the theoretical foundations of root cause analysis and then shows how to apply cycles of plan–do–check–act together with a range of quality tools to identify underlying causes of failures in manufacturing and service environments. Things rarely go wrong at a convenient moment. A product fails at a customer site, a service grinds to a halt, a complaint lands on your desk, and suddenly everyone is under pressure to “fix it fast.” In the rush, it’s tempting to blame the nearest suspect, patch the symptom, and move on. The problem is that the same issue often comes back wearing a slightly different mask, and each repeat costs more money, time, and trust than the last one. Root cause analysis offers a different way of responding. Instead of asking "Who messed up?", it asks "...
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Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern

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What's it about? Future Forward (2019) chronicles Patrick McGovern’s five-decade journey building International Data Group from a one-person research shop into a $3 billion global technology media empire. It reveals ten leadership lessons McGovern used to create publications in nearly 100 countries while maintaining extraordinary employee loyalty and editorial integrity. On a December afternoon in 1983, Patrick McGovern walked through Computerworld’s newsroom, visiting each workspace to deliver bonuses and speak with every staff member individually.This personal touch defined the founder of International Data Group, who built a technology media empire from nothing into a $3 billion global enterprise.McGovern started IDG in 1964 in a small Massachusetts house with one research report.By the time of his death in 2014, IDG had publications in nearly 100 countries: brands like Computerworld and PCWorld as well as the For Dummies book series. The company helped launch technology jour...
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The American Revolution by Geoffrey C. Ward An Intimate History

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What's it about? The American Revolution (2025) expands on the sweeping saga of the American Revolutionary War for independence from the six-part PBS series of the same name. It captures, with considerable detail and rich empathy for the individuals on all sides, the broad international context for the conflict which kick-started more than two centuries of anti-colonial revolutions around the world. The story of the American Revolution is taught in history classes and recounted by tour guides in cities like Boston and Philadelphia. But it often comes down to a handful of characters and stories about a Tea Party, a midnight ride, Betsy Ross sewing the nation’s flag, or George Washington crossing the Delaware. They tell the two-dimensional tale of an upstart British colony crying for liberty against a distant king, ultimately winning its hallowed independence. But the reality is far more complicated. For instance, the tale doesn’t include that more than 20 nations were directly i...
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