Favorite Reads of 2021
This year my reading skewed more towards non-fiction for whatever reason.
Rise by Patty Azzarello was the freshest leadership book I’ve read recently, with many helpful, applicable tips. I read several leadership fables by Patrick Lencioni, including Death by Meeting, The Motive, and The Three Signs of a Miserable Job; those books were light, quick, and good, and they led me to Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which I drew upon to help my teams gel more during COVID. Jocko Willink’s Leadership Strategy and Tactics resonated with me by nicely defining the “extreme ownership” that I feel for my teams and providing strategy and tactics for how to improve myself to improve the team.
For fiction I was introduced to the genre of climate change sci-fi with Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I found thought-provoking though generally depressing. I read a few other good fiction books to even things out.