11 Books To Help CIOs Become Better Leaders
CIOs are expected to be experts in tech as well as business while leading diverse and complicated intiatives and teams. But they don't have to go it alone. Here are 11 books to help CIOs -- and aspiring CIOs -- get better at many of the critical facets of their complex jobs.
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Books are so old-school. Coming in at many more than 140 characters, they're tough to read in 30-second bursts. On the other hand, going old-school can have some real benefits -- benefits like being able to take advantage of wisdom gained through other executives' mistakes.
Reading a book, whether it's in paper or on an electronic device, is a great way to pick up information at your pace and the asynchronous nature of reading means that you can stop, ponder, make notes, digest information, or discuss ideas with colleagues without having to re-wind, re-load, or re-acquire contents.
CIOs are hybrid executives, required to have expertise in both business and technology. And so the books on this list span subjects that CIOs need to master. There are books on leadership, organizational structure, innovation, and a couple that are just about being a better person who happens to be an executive.
[See 10 Big Data Books To Boost Your Career.]
Now, it's important to note that this is my list. I've been reading books on management and technology for more than three decades and I've seen a lot of management fads come and go. Over the years I've talked to a lot of CIOs and managed a lot of people, and the books on this list are some that I rather wish had been available to me much earlier in my career. Beyond that, though, they're books that I have either read or are on my reading list now because I don't think any executive can afford to stop learning.
When it comes to how the books were chosen, it involved talking to people, asking questions on social media, scanning reviews, and searching to see if there were books that had been recommended by a lot of CIOs. I combined all of the books (which resulted in a list much longer than this one), then winnowed them down to 11 that I think will have a great impact on the CIOs and prospective CIOs who take the time to read them.
I recently wrote an article on books for programmers. There was some great discussion around the list and I learned a lot from the points made by readers. I'd love to hear what you think about these choices. Have you read any of them? Do you agree that they should be on the list? Is there a book that has had a profound influence on you from a management, leadership, or innovation point of view? It would be great to hear what you're reading -- and have read in the past -- that should be part of the CIO bookshelf.
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A great team is a thing of beauty. A really great team can define a career. That's why Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't by Simon Sinek leads my list of books for the CIO. Sinek took a core lesson from a Marine Corps mess hall: Enlisted Marines are at the front of the line while officers take the rear. A leader, it seems, makes sure the team members are cared for before caring for his or her own needs.
If you go to agile and scrum gatherings you hear people talking about servant leadership. The ideas are similar: If you want to find the teams that work best, look for leaders who care more for the team than for their own career. It's a powerful lesson that this book brings home in interesting and compelling ways.
A long time ago, I read an article on self-improvement that reversed the standard "change your thinking and your behavior will follow" advice. The article said that if you start acting the way a confident (or happy, or innovative) person acts, then your thinking will ultimately follow your actions. That's a very rough approximation of the approach Herminia Ibarra takes in Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader.
Some people find changing their patterns and actions almost impossible until they have internalized the ideas behind the new patterns. If you're someone who's different -- who has tried that approach and found that it doesn't work -- then this book might just be the book that lets you finally make some of the leadership shifts you've been wanting to make.
There are some people whose knowledge of Google's HR functions begins and ends with the famous (infamous?) questions in Google interviews. In Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead, Laszlo Bock, head of Google's people team, shows that Google's approach to its employees goes far beyond unusual questions to the core of the business culture they'll join if they're hired.
In some ways this is the perfect book for a CIO to read because many of the practices Bock describes will be impossible without executive support. With that said, if you're someone who's not yet the CIO, but hopes to have the title in the future, then this book is one you should read and understand. If nothing else, it will give you the information to compare what your organization is doing to what Google does, and a reason to ask which way is superior for your team.
Most of the books on this list are an author telling you what he or she thinks works best, but in Quick and Nimble: Lessons From the Leading CEOs on How To Create a Culture of Innovation, Adam Bryant lets successful CEOs do the talking while he organizes and prods them into telling you how they've managed to make (and keep) their companies among the most agile and innovative.
I like a good anecdote about a company's success and this book is full of them. There are two advantages to this approach. First, there's no question about the authority of the speaker -- these are CEOs who have done what they claim. Next, it tends to break the book up into easily digestible pieces, perfect for those who have relatively short commutes or small breaks in their day. If you like learning from other executives, this book could be your ticket.
Business has modeled itself on military organization since the dawn of the industrial age. Modern executive thinking has largely left the military model behind, but could military thinking apply to business if the military has had to adapt to a modern, more dynamic, environment? That's the question that Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell seeks to answer.
Team of Teams' long run on the New York Times Bestseller List indicates that there are a lot of executives who want the answer. And the answer is "yes." McChrystal entered the theater of war in 2004 with a force that was unparalleled on earth -- and unprepared for the battle at hand. He re-thought the way military units work within themselves and with one another. In doing so, he changed the way the US military fights and provides lessons to change the way your business works.
How many times have you heard the old canard, "Fast, Cheap, and Good: Pick Two"? In another book informed by military experience, Dan Ward says that you can have all three, and he shows how it can happen in F.I.R.E.: How Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained and Elegant Methods Ignite Innovation.
Ward is a technologist who spent years running procurement projects in the Pentagon. Like McChrystal, he knows what it takes to make projects happen in a huge organization, but he also understands how to make that knowledge applicable to smaller companies. There are lessons aplenty here, as well as enough good stories to keep the action moving along while you soak up the knowledge gained in one of the world's largest bureaucracies.
If you are looking for an introduction to the world of DevOps, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford could be the opening you've been waiting for. Told in novel form, The Phoenix Project delivers three key lessons that will help you understand what DevOps is and how it could apply to your business.
This book isn't a dive into the deep end of DevOps and it probably won't have anything new for someone already immersed in the discipline. But for the executive wondering whether it's time to move the organization to DevOps, this book could be a great first step toward finding the answer.
We find comfort in the thought that everything going on around us is the product of mechanical processes and therefore can be known and predicted. The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is here to tell you that this is not the way the world works -- and that's OK.
In the first edition of this very popular book, Taleb showed that much of modern life exists because of rather random events with rather enormous repercussions. In the new edition, he includes a chapter on what to do with that information -- and it turns out, there's a lot you can do with it. Funny and profound, this book might well be one that you find yourself closing frequently so you can digest the ideas inside. When you do digest them, they'll likely make you a better manager -- and they will certainly make you a more careful consumer of predictions and models.
It seems that every executive wants the organization they lead to be innovative, but very few know how to get to innovation -- or even, in many cases, what it truly means to be innovative. Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs by Larry Keeley, Helen Walters, Ryan Pikkel, and Brian Quinn defines innovation and talks about the process of becoming innovative in a beautifully illustrated, fast moving book of examples and cases.
In the nearly 20 years that this book has been out, it's been read by thousands of executives and it still has a lot to offer. The odds are good that you'll want to dig deeper after reading this book, but that's OK -- it will at least point you in the right direction for your intellectual shovel to point.
OK, here's a bit of intel on me -- I'm a talker. Blame the fact that I'm a Southerner, or just that I like to hear myself talk, but I love a good conversation. So for me, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle confirmed many things I already felt true. What she did, though, was provide a research-based foundation for pressing forward with the idea that texting, email, and instant messaging can do many good things, but they can't replace sitting down and talking.
There's no point in going into all the data on machine-mediated communication these days, and in the distributed workforce some of that will be necessary. But Turkle makes a strong, passionate point about the relative power and appropriate uses of device communication and human communication -- and human communication comes out well on top. Get this book and start talking to your team members and your management. The organization will be the better because of it.
I'm a fan of polymaths. And I'm an even bigger fan of finding insight in unexpected places. That's why I've been intrigued by producer Brian Grazer and was eager to explore his book A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life, written with Charles Fishman.
Each week, Grazer schedules a "curiosity conversation" with someone from a different field -- often someone he's never met. These conversations feed his curiosity and this book is, in large part, a defense of that curiosity. It seems strange to have to defend something as basic as curiosity but in today's results-driven world there can seem little room for something as "frivolous" as a basic curiosity about life. In Grazer's view (and in mine) the curiosity is what informs innovation and good results -- and curiosity for its own sake should be encouraged and nurtured.
So I'm left curious about your thoughts on my list. Good? Bad? Incomplete? Frivolous? Let me know and let me know your list. I think it could be the start of a beautiful conversation.
I'm a fan of polymaths. And I'm an even bigger fan of finding insight in unexpected places. That's why I've been intrigued by producer Brian Grazer and was eager to explore his book A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life, written with Charles Fishman.
Each week, Grazer schedules a "curiosity conversation" with someone from a different field -- often someone he's never met. These conversations feed his curiosity and this book is, in large part, a defense of that curiosity. It seems strange to have to defend something as basic as curiosity but in today's results-driven world there can seem little room for something as "frivolous" as a basic curiosity about life. In Grazer's view (and in mine) the curiosity is what informs innovation and good results -- and curiosity for its own sake should be encouraged and nurtured.
So I'm left curious about your thoughts on my list. Good? Bad? Incomplete? Frivolous? Let me know and let me know your list. I think it could be the start of a beautiful conversation.
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