Read. Keep. Borrow. Return. Gift. Share. Our curated list of books covering the broad spectrum from lean theory to design thinking, strategy, leadership, story-telling and human factors. Start anywhere you fancy, read in any order and let us know what challenges and inspires you.
As always the most important thing is just to start!
We know innovation often happens in unlikely places and creativity thrives on constraints. Within the confines of a long metal tube full of people and a nuclear reactor which stays underwater for 3 months at a time Captain David Marquet ended up learning a bunch of really important stuff about people, models of leadership and how we move on from command and control. The book is both a great story and has some really practical approaches which are totally applicable even if you don’t have nuclear launch codes.
Leadership, process improvement, innovation and transformation all share a common thread — they are founded on our attempts to predict the future. Where will the market go? What factors will impact my team and organisation? What exactly will that look like?
Superforecasting provides both the knowledge and the skills to allow the better crafting, testing and evaluation of forecasts, along with a broader breakdown of how teams can function to better leverage cross functional skills and knowledge, while learning and improving these skills on the go.
Here at Luna Tractor we’re believers that creativity is not an exclusive domain of marketing teams or innovation functions within organisations; we believe that all walks of life should leverage creative and design-led methodologies and mindset when leaning into solving complex problems.
Creative Confidence is written by the founder(s) of IDEO and d.school — pioneers of creative empowerment in the business realm — and conveys the practices and principles of design thinking mixed with anecdotes of creative problem solving by individuals, teams and transformationally across whole organisations.
While growing up, my Dad said to me “Some days are going to be shit, some days work will be hard and some days people will be terrible to you…”
An honest, cavalier, raw and hilarious self-help book that bluntly suggests we stop exhausting ourselves by trying to be positive and perfect all the time — that we confront ourselves and our normality — and as a result we might just become better people at this thing called life.
* Dad wasn’t wrong. And maybe Francesa Cavallo has a point also!
Frankie the robot’s switch was accidentally flicked to ‘human’ — and the effect on her and her team was astonishing. Being Human is a self-reflective, life-lived and lessoned-learned story by Melbourne author Mark LeBusque. It reminds us that “technical competence and a robotic approach is trumped by humanastic behaviours” and that it might just be advantageous to rewire our approach in managing people through an unusual concept of ‘being human’.
Ever had an idea — yet didn’t action it?
Ever known you could change something — yet didn’t?
The barrier that separates ideas from action, or knowledge from driving change, is known as ‘resistance’ — and we’ve all fallen victim to its power.
Bedtime Stories for Rebel Girls is way more than a collection of bedtime stories for your kids. It captures the human spirit to lead change and to become remarkable; it’s a little reminder that you can put a positive dent in the universe if only you push through resistance.
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Now you’re on the way to your Luna MBA, let’s take a side-step, and experience what happens when technical practices meet storytelling, individualised communication and innovation.
At face-value, Being Mortal is Gawande’s exploration of how medicine’s technical advancement has left the customer (us real people) behind. Gawande beautifully exposes the risks of addressing human challenges with purely technical solutions. Behind all of this lies his commitment to asking the questions differently, never losing sight of the human at it’s centre.
Change, leadership and growth are all the process of moving from current states to better states. Be it technical innovation, creative processes, or difficult conversations with employees and clients; bridging the gap from where we are to where we want to be is nothing more than the process of engaging in healthy, positive conflict — to create.
Conflict without Casualties is a field guide for seeking to merge empathy and accountability, fundamental to leveraging diversity, maintaining a growth mindset, and critically, ensuring accountability of self and team.
We like how Dan Pink puts it: “Conflict Without Casualties fills a gap by showing leaders at any level how to leverage positive conflict. Practical, insightful, challenging, relevant.”
We rate this the best strategy book ever written for business people. It not only debunks all the mission, vision and values crap we have been peddling for decades as ‘strategy’ in the West, but tells you how to do it right. Turns out strategy is just like working agile – diagnose a customer problem, choose your option for addressing it (there’ll be many, and you’ll have to say ‘no’ to some), plan-do-check-act, and don’t wait five years to see if it worked.
The thing most striking about 37signals’ story was, they clued in to not having their payment feature delivered for Basecamp until after they had determined they were delivering a product of value. At the time an awkward decision is the most common strategy for marketing digital products today, subscription services are going to make us all poor!
It’s also a Luna fave for it’s philosophy on entrepreneurship: ‘What you really need to do is stop talking and start working’ is echoed in our oft quoted ‘Start by starting’.
The handbook on how to move fast, and be customer-led, without losing your mind. Turns out if you solve interesting problems for yourself, other people have the same problems and will pay you money for your insight. Such an easy read – short chapters, quick lessons, pithy conclusions.
The story of Zappos – the most unlikely online retailer you can imagine, selling shoes on the web. Although occasionally a bit FIGJAM, the author imparts some good news for the humanists out there – online businesses succeed because of people and service. Australian retailers need to read this book, get their heads out of their asses, and start building online.
One of the most influential thinkers to emerge from the Stanford melting pot in recent times is Steve Blank, with his amazing book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Unfortunately, his brain is the size of a planet and this shows in his book – it is vast in scope, terse in tone, complex in structure and a bit of a chore to follow. Fortunately, a couple of his students wrote the cheat’s guide – and this is it. Compulsory reading to understand innovation in the modern context – not just in the form of startups, but also within larger companies.
A partner to Daniel Ariely’s book when it comes to understanding customers. I suspect WE Deming would have loved this book, with its insistence on good quality statistical proofs and proper experimental approaches. Not sure Deming would have loved some of the funnier examples, but hey, he must have had a sense of humor somewhere. A must-read to make you think twice about those assumptions on what your customers want and need.
Liker, who has remarkable inside knowledge of the workings of Toyota, does the West a big favour by describing in terms we can understand the sometimes impenetrable system of working developed on the top of Deming and Ohno’s leadership. He summarises 14 sensible and easily understood business rules — you’ll do well to write them down and have them to hand.
Warning, this is not a Dummies Guide to agile software development. It is however, one of the most thorough, extensive books you will find on the subject of agile software development. Have it handy to dip into, or read bigger chunks as an education on why agile works, what all those mysterious techniques and practices are, with a particular nod towards XP or Extreme Programming methods .
Now days Paul Graham is more famous for his Y Combinator Angel fund … but don’t be fooled, back in the day Paul was both a proper Hacker and very successful in his own right. This book is one that we have often given to leaders of technology teams who are not themselves nerds. It’s an essential guide to the mind of the software developer and explains the art and science blend that is great software development.
An excellent book that teaches us the power of the internet when it comes to communicating, and introduces the best definition of governance ever written – ‘rules for losing’. If you read carefully, Shirky provides the rational for individual organisations to rethink their org chart from being based on the limits of ‘span of control’ for bosses, and functional teams, to more communicative multi-skilled groups with a clear purpose. Sound like agile? Did to us.
In my view, Seddon has picked up the lean torch from Deming, and run hard with it in a world of service-based government and business organisations (as opposed to manufacturing). He is a detail guy, steeped in the rigor and the hard slog of transforming organisations from the top down. His vanguard website and newsletter are also well worth getting to know.
Whilst not a new principle at all (Richard Pascale wrote about it in the 1980s, by the way ignore his Seven S theories IMHO, Christensen managed to coin a brilliantly memorable phrase to describe it 10 years later, and write a book to summarise the concept that we all fall in love with the last brilliant thing we made, and refuse to move on. Sadly, people have only been discovering this book in the last couple of years it seems. Too bloody late!
One of a pair of fundamental resources around listening to customers, observing customers and designing winning products as a result. If we had a dollar for every smart-arse who said “…oh, but Steve Jobs didn’t listen to customers”; or “…like Henry Ford said, ask the customer what they want and they’ll say a faster horse”, I’d be a rich man.
This book will explain why that is bullshit, and tell you how to overcome your fear and ignorance of customers. Easy to read like Rework by 37 Signals.
The second in the series, and a worthy follow-up to Don’t Make Me Think. If you honestly work in product development, or design, or user experience and have not read these books – hang your heads in shame. Which may on fact be most of you! The most important point for agilistas is how the methodology of getting customers involved for one morning a month with your ideas can be proven to be valid against the army of marketing naysayers who demand huge sample sizes, laboratory heat map testing, and months of large scale research.
A candidate for the oldest book in our list, first published in 1975. A classic on team behavior, and the impossibility of success from just adding more resource to a project to make it happen faster. Brooks would have loved agile, and stands alongside Tim Lister and Tom Demarco as heroes from the 20th century. Obviously not required reading for any MBA that I know – they were too busy studying shareholder value and GRQ101.
James’ named this his favourite book of 2010 – a balanced and clever story of a family in Perth giving up electronics for a few months and observing the sociological results first hand. Every second chapter visits the research and theories around the impact of new media and devices on people and society. Essential reading for insight into the biases that we now live with daily – and it might well be a life saver for a few people struggling with teenagers and their addiction to online gaming, Instagram and Snapchat.
A wonderful book with a title that gives the story away nicely. Bronson’s earlier book ‘The Nudist on the Late Shift’ inspired me to up sticks from Melbourne and move to San Francisco for a dot com opportunity in 2000. This one brought me home. A collection of 50 stories of people who have struggled with this monumental question, and an emergent theme in the end.
A bit out of character for a generalist book-list, because it is strictly a how-to guide on value stream mapping — the lean tool for figuring out how to improve your business through better flow, attention to value delivery, and reduction in waste. A hard read, but lots of pictures and the concepts are vital, and not explained as well in many other books. You’ll learn to appreciate that Deming and Ohno had some hard-arsed principles behind their designs for work, if nothing else.
If Shook’s book is the reading equivalent of agile jerky (an acquired taste, and tough to chew through), this Dummies Guide is the plain pork sausage. A great introduction to Lean thinking, it is necessarily shallow but impressively broad in scope (like all Dummies Guides I guess). If someone is freaking you out with their use of Japanese words like Heijunka, have this guide handy.
For such a large book with a grandiose title, the down to earth, funny and insightful way it is written is inspiring. I once helped make a book called The Successful Manager’s Handbook, which was an all-time bestseller, and I think this one is the replacement for people having to build 21st century organisations. Lots of stuff on managing Agile, plus managing the big picture of a company full of talented people in an agile way. If I lived my life twice over, took copious notes on the way, plus had 75 more IQ points, I might have written this book before Jurgen did. It still wouldn’t have been as good.
Another vintage piece of writing, ignored by managers for decades since 1987 when it was first published. Luckily they did a second edition in 1999 which you might be able to get your hands on, and at $10 for a Kindle edition versus $32 and freight for the cellulose model, you have no excuses. I had the pleasure of meeting Tim Lister in NZ at an SDC conference, and found the secret to writing in the informative, witty style of this 25 year old book – be witty, warm and informative in person!
On the list above, we named Steve Blank as a smart man from Stanford. Here’s another one. A lot of people are foolishly ignoring this book as only being relevant to smelly university kids starting a dot com in the garage, when in fact it has the most potential to influence the way mainstream corporations learn to innovate.
This 1998 book is your shortcut of all the important research and knowledge from the 20th century on why people live, work and play the way they do. Pfeffer is yet another Stanford person (if they ever meet, morning tea in the staffroom must be bloody amazing at Stanford) and his ability to bring together multiple threads of history and science is unparalleled. If it is news to your boss that people and profit are linked in some way, have them read Chapter 2.
The oldest book on this list by decades, and still remarkably readable despite being 100 years old last year. This book is to some extent, for agilists and lean thinkers, the root of all evil. Written about a series of worker experiments carried out between 1880 and 1910, at several US steel companies and beyond (see his mate Henry Ford for example), Taylor pioneered time and motion studies and the belief that the worker needs to be managed to be efficient. It’s important to read to understand the context Taylor was working from, and reflect on just how irrelevant that is to innovating businesses 130 years later.
No Luna degree would be complete without studying and passing the exam on the greatest vehicle ever made. You never know when you will find yourself on the moon and needing to re-start the old girl or begin that restoration project in the shed.
A remarkable, if slightly repetitive set of stories showing us the unpredictable path to true innovation. He starts with the story of Palchinsky at the turn of the 20th century who may have just invented Agile approaches analysing the Russian economy even before the ship building yards of the first world war; Of course he was exiled to Siberia for his efforts. He also explores our aversion to variation and experimentation – the tendency for governments and corporate bosses to love large and grandiose projects instead. As Hardford points out the proliferation of iPhone and Android apps has hidden the uncomfortable truth which is innovation is harder, slower and costlier than ever before. All the easy problems have already been solved. I’ll leave you with a quote from the book to inspire you to buy and read it.
‘Return on investment is simply not a useful way of thinking about new ideas and new technologies. It is impossible to estimate a percentage return on blue-sky research, and it is delusional even to try. Most new technologies fail completely. Most original ideas turnout either to be not original after all, or original for the very good reason that they are useless. And when a original idea does work, the returns can be too high to be sensibly measured.’
It is quite hard to imagine a world without so many of the things invented at the PARC labs. So often we talk about wanting innovation in our organisation, but I think without really appreciating the investment, genius and insanity it really takes. Don’t even talk about building an innovation lab in your organisation until you’ve read and appreciated these stories.
How to innovate with minimum viable products and rapid customer feedback.
Olsen has downloaded his years of experience in developing and managing products into a step-by-step, easy to understand instruction manual. The Lean Product Playbook provides a detailed yet easy to follow process on how to create great products, but more importantly it explains how to avoid the pitfalls of going too far down the path without validating your product is right for market.
The catchphrase of the product management world at present is “Product-Market Fit”, and this book provides a detailed definition of exactly what this means, why it’s important, and how to find it. It’s worth noting that Olsen’s focus is software products, however the process is still relevant and translatable for non-technical equivalents.
This book is recommended for anyone new to product management who is looking for an easy-to-follow, tried and tested guide on how to develop products. It’s also a great refresher for those who have worked in the field and want to understand and implement Lean tools and methods.
