By Carolyn Pittis

The great shift now happening in business is the shift from Industrial Revolution-born top-down management practices of the mechanical age to ones enabled by our greater understanding of human organizations and the human brain. How ironic that in the digital age, it all does come down to people! Humans, it turns out, are both the weakest – and strongest – drivers of change, but not always in ways we expect. This growth in biological understanding, together with the global scale of technology networks, provokes us to think about how we can grow businesses – and the global culture of a connected planet – in fun new ways.

Everyone is a potential leader in this digital economy, with a tribe of followers just a click away. Executives and managers can’t possibly have all the new knowledge – or scale it – fast enough to direct workers efficiently any longer. Yet, organizations often remain mired in antiquated hierarchical expectations of how much individual humans are capable of, and how organizations should work. Emerging research shows how this combination may now short circuit market responsiveness – and why completely new ways of working are called for. Acting and adapting on a smaller scale may be vastly more important than extensive long-range planning – which can no longer account for all the variables in our business landscape. The most important thing may be to truly empower your workers to do, measure what works best, and then iterate what works quickly.

Many of the best thinkers about change have been published in book form. The best way to inspire yourself and your teams is to read widely and broadly about contiguous industries and businesses; about historical trends in technology; about the laws of the natural world; and within the newer disciplines of behavioral economics, and neuroscience – and then connect the dots in new ways for yourself and your organization. No one likely has the answer to the specific situation you are trying to solve, but many have their answers for what worked for them in similar situations. Our job as change leaders is to look, listen, compare, sift, and most importantly, decide to act and measure our results in order to learn what works. And then share it.

How many of the books below have you read?
What is missing from this list that would make it better?
Email us suggested additions!
We plan to do an annotated and updated version of this Transformation Reading List soon!

Published: 2010-2013

  • Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. 2010.
  • Christensen, Clayton. How Will You Measure Your Life? 2012.
  • Duhigg, Charles: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. 2012.
  • Fisman, Ray and Tim Sullivan. The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office. 2013.
  • Fried, Jason and David Heinemeier Hansson. Rework. 2010.
  • Gerntner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. 2012.
  • Grant, Adam. Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. 2013.
  • Harford, Tim. Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. 2011.
  • Johnson, Clay A. The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. 2012.
  • Kaku, Michio. The Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. 2011.
  • Kesler, Gregory and Amy Kates. Leading Organization Design: How to Make Organization Design Decisions to Drive the Results You Want. 2011.
  • Lanier, Jaron. Who Owns the Future? 2013.
  • Lencioni, Patrick. The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. 2012.
  • Maddow, Rachel. Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. 2012.
  • Magretta, Joan. Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy. 2012.
  • Marr, Bernard. Key Performance Indicators: The 75 Measures Every Manager Needs to Know. 2012.
  • Ruen, Chris. Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity. 2012.
  • Rushkoff, Douglas. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. 2013.
  • Steel, Piers. The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done. 2011.
  • Thompson, John B. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. 2012.
  • Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. 2010.

Classics: Before 2010

  • Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. 2009.
  • Christensen, Clayton. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. 1997.
  • Covey, Stephen R., A. Roger Merrill, Rebecca R. Merrill. First Things First: To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy. 1994.
  • Deming, W. Edwards. Out of the Crisis. 1982.
  • Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. 1984.
  • Lewis, Michael. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. 2003.
  • Moore, Geoffrey. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers. 1991.
  • Porter, Michael. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. 1998.
  • Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. 1990.

Good Books You May Not Have Heard Of: Before 2010

  • Covey, Stephen M.R. The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything. 2006
  • Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. 2001.
  • Klingbert, Torkel. The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory. 2009.
  • Krogerus, Mikael and Roman Tschappeler. The Decision Book: 50 Models for Strategic Thinking. 2008. (First American Edition 2012).
  • Langer, Arthur M. IT and Organizational Learning: Managing Change Through Technology and Education. 2005.
  • McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. 2009
  • Duggan, William. The Art of What Works: How Success Really Happens. 2003.
  • Hurst, Mark. Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. 2007.