Books, apps, and tools people actually name.

recommends / book

“Okay. Two or three books. You give me a heads-up on this. So one book is Conscious Business. I don't have Conscious Business in front of me because it's actually at the office because we have Conscious Business Reading Club at Rippling. And every member of my current, my product leadership team is going through this right now, Conscious Business, Fred Kofman. It's been used in many businesses, LinkedIn most notably, as a framework for thinking about ... effectively, it's a user manual for human beings. So if you are a leader, a manager, an executive, whatever, particularly younger people in their 20s and 30s who are just sort of getting the hang of being a CEO or a product leader for the first time, this book is absolute fucking gold. It was recommended to me by Bryan Schreier at Sequoia when he was on my board at my previous company. I took way too long to take him up on the advice, wished I had read it sooner. Highly recommend Conscious Business. Changes your life. Number two, Thinking in Systems, Donna Meadows. I always mispronounce her name, Donella Meadows. She died partway through writing this manuscript. Her fellow professors picked it up and finished it for her. It is the best generic framework for thinking about how systems work. You will extrapolate from this book to every aspect of your life after you read it. And then the third is classic 1960s, The Effective Executive. It's an anachronism. It uses weird pronouns for the secretary and the executive. I'll let you guess which ones. But the book itself is so chock-full of simple enduring advice on how to be effective at leading teams. And the good shit is the stuff that's been in print for 70 years, and that's one of them.”

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recommends / book

“Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker, which is great. It's about a complexity economics, why the traditional economic model doesn't work, and also why it takes an evolutionary lens on what kinds of business plans work and how companies execute them. That I found my entree into a lot of the systems thinking and I thought it was just absolutely brilliant. And the other one is The Elements of Thinking in Systems, which is short, easy to read, very approachable. In fact, if anything, people think of it as not serious enough because it's too easy to read. It's one of those books that when you read at the beginning you'll say, "This sounds right." And then later, years later, if you read it again you'll go, "Oh my God, that was so... I wasn't ready for that yet, but that is totally the way." So she's one of the people who talks about dancing the systems. Let go and dance with the system is one of her lines, and I think it's just a phenomenal book.”

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recommends / book

“The first one is called Thinking in Systems. It's the one I give the team every now and then. It's just a really good book about how I think sometimes people see systems. Can we talk about it? It could be abstract. I think it goes into real detail on how people can intervene at various parts and how to take actions at different systems. I really enjoy that book. Not directly maybe a book I recommend, but a book that I just read that I thought was phenomenal, just to give it to readers if they want something good, it's called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It was recommending by a friend. Have you read it? You read it?”

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