📚​​​​ Join the Miro Community Book Challenge for a Chance to Win 🏆

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin has been one of my favorite books on leadership as a manager of people. What it taught me about accountability and the section on “decentralized command” helped change the way I led my team. 

I highly recommend the book to anyone that leads a team. It’s a super quick read and something I felt was very actionable!

I’ll be adding these books to my shopping cart @Alex Dias and @chris.herdman! Thank you for sharing! 

I’d love to hear more book recommendations from the community and how the insights from these pages have helped you create and innovate! Share a book that has inspired you for a chance to win this limited edition Miro Mug–– the perfect companion to your favorite book 📕☕!

Atomic habits by James Clear. All the progresses we can make is based on the smaller positive changes we do with our habits. This helps to improve as an individual as well as a team.

There is such a great balance and dance between the creative and operational, @Mark Tyas! Thank you for recommending this book — I can’t wait to dive in. 📚

@vprds The Creative Act is such a gem of a book. I have it perpetually sitting out on my desk at home, and whenever I need a breather I’ll read a page or two (or a whole chapter since they’re relatively short). It’s on the brink of poetic and practical, and agree that it’s truly a transformative read that encourages us to shake up old patterns and think in new ways. Thank you for recommending this!

Bringing the Rick Rubin energy into the workspace is almost mystical, you just have to watch his interviews, you know his book is a banger 🔥

I present to the Miroverse:

Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág.

Hear me out.

Millions of Cats is a children’s book about an elderly man who wants to bring home a cat for his wife. However, this task proves difficult as the man happens upon–spoiler alert–millions of cats, all adorable and adoptable in their own ways. What’s a guy to do? 

In its own right, this is a wonderful little book. The author, Wanda Gág, illustrated and hand-lettered the book herself (we love a multi-faceted queen), and I just think the style of her artwork is wonderful. I can say with confidence that her work had a huge influence on me as a child, materializing both in my gravitation to simple black & white graphics, and in my lifelong love for large volumes of tiny cats.

If you don’t believe me that this book is excellent...it is one of the only picture books to have won the Newbery Honor, and is the only American picture book to still be printed today. Objectively, a great book! 🤓

With that said, this book holds a lot of meaning for me. My late maternal grandparents kept this book at their home, and read it to me often. It is the first book that I have any memory of hearing, and as I got older I would return to it to read it myself. Perhaps coincidentally, I had a lot of kittens in my life growing up (Bob Barker would have shamed my parents, and rightfully so), and the presence of & responsibility for these little creatures was a formative aspect of my young life. This book grants me pure nostalgia, and it was a great joy for me to adopt my own copy for my young son.

Here is a great little read-aloud/flip-along version from Brightly Storytime: 

Adaptive Enterprise by Stephan Haeckel taught me how to think of a business as an open system. IN 1999, Steve set forth the foundations of Reason for Being, Principles, Roles and Accountabilities, and more. All tools that help the people in an enterprise steer it successfully. Adaptive Enterprise: Haeckel, Stephan H: 9781523631469: Amazon.com: Books

Hi @Mike Wittenstein 

This looks super interesting! Will definitely look this up for some leadership and business-thinking tips. :)

After @chris.herdman already added one of my favorite books. (By the way have you read The Dichotomy of Leadership, Chris? I found it multiplied the value of extrem ownership for me) 

My favorite book that changed most for me is never split the difference by Chris Voss it taught me so much about strategic communication and negotiation. 

When applying to Google many years ago, they recommended a few books to read.

One of them was The Design of Everyday Things

It opened up my mind into how amazing the world of design is and how great product (could) be made or how difficult and unintuitive they could be. 

Recommended to everyone, in any field. 

Really appreciate the book Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems.
It’s an antidote to some of the individual-focused books running through Silicon Valley, and instead focuses on radical change through building trust and a strong community of high performers. Written by two amazing women, it is a more collective approach than I’ve seen in many leadership / team productivity books. 

For me ’The Goal’ (which I’ve in three different versions (uk original version, nl version and in pdf) was for me 20+ years ago a ‘game changer’ and although I never worked in engineering nor a factory it remains, for me, the most clear metaphor.

In the past decade two derivatives/ spin offs have been published ’the phoenix game’ and ‘the unicorn project’ which aligns more close with ICT and development than the original one.

However, I still use the ’boy scout’ on an almost weekly basis to elaborate and educate on workflow management and agile way of working.