As I have mentioned before in the preface to a similar collection of books, I remain embarrassed by the “Digital Transformation” title of this little series of book reviews, as it really conjures images of management consultants selling snake oil. Nevertheless, having started with this moniker, I will stick with it, and hope that the title doesn’t put you off too much. Here is a collection of titles I have read over the past year or so. It is somewhat of an eclectic mix, but I think covers some of the key skills required to successfully navigate the choppy waters of tech.

How Leaders Become Strategists

Richard Rumelt

The first book is by Richard Rumelt, the author of my favourite strategy book of all time, a book, which in a parallel life, I wish I would have written myself – “Good Strategy – Bad Strategy”. Rumelt started off as a systems engineer (like me, which is why I flatter myself with the comparison), and so brings a systems-approach to deconstructing and framing strategic choices. In his latest book, “The Crux – How Leaders become strategists”, Rumelt tries to get to the heart of what makes good strategic decision-making. He argues that rather than focusing on lofty visions, goals or ambitions, leaders should dwell on the structure of the problem at hand, what he calls the ‘crux’. Drawing on examples from multiple industries he shows how focusing on a problem, rather than a goal, can give the insight required for success. Therefore we learn of how Marvel pivoted from licensing Spiderman and X-Men to third-party studios to creating its own studio to maximise the value of its other superhero franchises, or how the Louvre’s glass pyramid emerged from a problem defined as creating an entrance to the museum without obscuring the museum’s historic façade. Given this insight, Rumelt goes on to give examples of how organisations build on this insight, such as how Nvidia invested big in adapting its GPU architectures for AI training and inference ahead of the ChatGPT hype explosion or how Google launched its AdWords programme by creating a clear delineation between sponsored ads and its search results. This is a book that requires periodic re-reads.

Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company

Claire Hughes Johnson

I came across the next book through a review in The Economist, an unlikely source for this type of title. Whilst many business books focus on fleshing out a single idea or concept, “Scaling People: Tactics for management and Company” by Claire Hughes Johnson is something very different. Drawing on her experience as a senior executive at Google and Stripe, Hughes Johnson provides a useful, if somewhat hefty, hands-on, one-stop shop for the operational toolkit for running an effective tech company. It can read as a COO’s handbook, covering the essential building blocks of operational excellence. From Creating a cadence that works, through all the practices required to establish and develop high-performing teams, this book is a great reference for benchmarking your own company’s practices. In line with its practical bent, the Hughes Johnson provides several examples and templates that can be copied or adapted to your context. Although clearly not all prescriptions will be applicable to your reality (e.g. the American approach to managing people out of a company would not sit well in most European contexts), this is a book that I come back to time and again.

The Habit of Excellence – Why British Army Leadership Works

Lt Col Langley Sharp

On first consideration, a book on leadership based on an organisation more than 350 years old does not intuitively seem to be the most obvious place to look for inspiration on how to lead modern tech organisation. It was the endorsement of Matthew Syed which however brought me to read this, and can say I am really glad I did. Over the years, the British Army has been beset with all sorts of practices and issues that are anathema to modern management practice. From the regressive purchasing of commissions to the reputation of ‘lions led by donkeys of the first world war’ to the ethical quagmire and allegations of cover-ups of the conflicts of the last forty years. It is however this challenging context, coupled with the unique situation that, unlike other organisations, all the army’s top brass are recruited from within. For the army to succeed and thrive, there is therefore no alternative to effective leadership development. Lt Col Sharpe takes us on a journey on some of the key principals, explaining how leadership is important at all ranks, how it is instilled in the concept of servant leadership, the role of continuous learning and the importance of intelligent disobedience. This is underpinned by running thread of role played by empathy, emotional intelligence and resilience. On the topic of distinction between officer and non-commissioned officer or soldier leadership, this book is perhaps less useful to the rest of us, but otherwise on a manual on how to instil a culture of service-based leadership, this book is certainly worth your while.

How to be an Inclusive Leader

Jennifer Brown

As a white, middle-aged, middle-class (in the British definition) man, whose career thus far has been spent largely surrounded by people who are not too dissimilar to me, I must admit that I often find it difficult to find an authentic and indeed, credible, voice when it comes to speaking about equity and inclusion. This fairly short book by Jennifer Brown provides a very practical framework to help create a more inclusive culture. Whilst there is nothing particularly earth-shatteringly surprising in the four-step framework she proposes (spoiler alert, it’s unaware –> aware –> active –> advocate), the book is particularly helpful in providing the language and tools to engage with people, whether they are diversity sceptics or enthusiasts in an empathetic way. Brown explains the intersectionality of identity and privilege, how we all have a complex mosaic of characteristics and experiences, many of which we choose to keep hidden, and hence inclusion activities help everyone as a rising tide, and not a zero-sum gain. She does so in a book that manages to provide powerful examples, whilst avoiding being ‘preachy’. Once again, a book that I do dip in and out of quite frequently.

Rebel Ideas – The Power of Diverse Thinking

Matthew Syed

If there ever was a book that resonated with my thoughts on how to bring teams together, it is Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas. Earlier this year I wrote about cognitive diversity, the power of bringing different viewpoints, perspectives and experiences to solve problems. The nature of the problem is key here – the make-up of a team solving a pre-defined, well-understood problem does not have a particularly strong bearing on outcomes. However, for complex problems, particularly those with unclear paths to success, being able to provide a range of different viewpoints provides a clear edge, and can act as an antidote to GroupThink or the emergence of echo chambers. Syed explains how having a diversity of viewpoints is not sufficient, you also need a culture and mechanisms to enable different ideas, often contradictory ones to surface. Syed warns that, particularly where a problem space is particularly complicated, it is easy to get lost in its intricacies, as if ensconced within its walls. This is why an outsider mindset is essential to escaping this trap, and can open up awareness of impending seismic changes, as illustrated by the fact that most of the steam-based powerhouses of the early industrial age completely missed the transformative effects that electricity would have on industry. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Working Backwards – Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon

Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

Including this book in this list is a bit of a cheat, as I haven’t properly read it from cover-to-cover. Allow me to explain. I recently left Amazon after a fairly brief stint of just under two years. Although I didn’t spend too long there, I have found that my experience has fundamentally rewired the way I work, and I suspect for the long-term. It certainly has had a more profound effect on me than the MBA course I undertook over a decade ago. Amazon’s secret sauce lies not in its technology prowess (which of course is considerable), but rather in what it describes, quite openly, as its ‘peculiar’ culture. Underpinned by its leadership principles, the Amazon way of working consists of a set of non-negotiable practices, from working ‘backwards from the customer’ to using documents as the basis for all significant decision-making. Coupled with an approach to data and metrics that is simultaneously rigorous and sceptical, an organisational structure designed from the ground-up to scale, and a series of practices designed to help navigate the most gnarly of problems, the Amazon culture is what makes the company. This book provides as good an overview of how these practices work at Amazon as you’ll get without enduring its gruelling multi-stage interview format, as well as describing how to be Amazonian outside of Amazon. Its certainly worth the effort.

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The closest thing I have to a regular column on this blog site has been reviews of books related to digital transformation. Seeing the extent to which the terms ‘digital’ and ‘agile’ have suffered from over-exposure by bullshit merchants, I am now cringing somewhat at the title. But given that this is my third post in this series, I am going to stick with it, and trust you will forgive me. (see here for previous posts)

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Timothy Clark

The first book on my list is a bit different to the recommendations that will follow. At face value, what is a book on psychological safety doing amongst books on cloud, agile and all things digital? The obvious reason is people are at the heart of digital success. Digital transformation and business innovation inherently harness the creativity, transformation, delivery and execution of its participants. These in turn are individuals, all buffeted and driven by their own personal needs, biases, insecurities and values. It is these needs, aspirations and values that need to be harnessed for any transformation to succeed.

In a previous post, I described how Google had launched a wide-ranging project, called Project Aristotle to determine what made a team successful or high-performing. They found that the best performing teams were not those with the best qualified individual team members, but those which exhibited the greatest confidence in taking on risks without fear of being embarrassed or ridiculed. In these teams, members felt safe proposing risky ideas and were prepared to be vulnerable in front of each other.

This is known as Psychological Safety, a term that has been around since the 90s, but has really taken off since the findings of the Google study became well known. In ‘The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety’, Tim Clark, a cultural anthropologist, explains how any organisation that relies on innovation for success needs to provide its teams with psychological safety. The book shows how treating employees and colleagues with respect, empathy and humility is not only the moral or right thing to do, but it is also the only way to succeed in the knowledge economy.

Clark describes his four stages, from inclusion safety on to learner safety, contributor safety and challenger safety, each building on the other, much the same as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The book draws on loads of high school examples, bringing home the universality of what it means to be empowered with trust, to be excluded from a group or simply to fear ridicule from your peers.

Any organisation hoping to drive transformation successfully should offer all four levels of safety. Change in the digital age brings about great uncertainty, and a need to continually learn new skills. Above all, leaders need to acknowledge that mistakes will be made, often with things going worse, possibly a lot worse before things get better. Having a culture of psychological safety is essential to navigating such changes without an unacceptable toll being inflicted on your team members’ well-being. At a personal level, this book is possibly the one that has had the greatest impact on me personally and which I’d recommend to anyone, irrespective of their interest in tech.

Rethinking AGILE

Klaus Leopold

We are advised not to judge a book by its cover, but I must admit that I bought this book on the strength of its title alone – ‘Rethinking Agile – why agile teams have nothing to do with business agility.’ This is a favourite theme of mine (if you’re interested in my thoughts, read here). Whilst I wouldn’t go as far as saying that agile teams and business agility have nothing to do with each other, they are often wrongly assumed to be the same thing, with many organisations feeling that they have achieved agility simply because they have implemented team-level agile.

In this richly-illustrated book, Klaus Leopold first starts off by describing an anonymous case study of an agile transformation at scale, where the company does all the right things, establishing cross-functional teams, making work visible, holding retrospectives and so on. In many ways, it feels like textbook agile. Nevertheless, the transformation quickly grinds to a halt to the consternation of the leadership team who established the programme.

Leopold explains how when hundreds of people are involved, a pure team-based agile rollout is simply not going to work. For any tech organisation of more than 30 people, while you may wish to reduce dependencies between individual teams, there is no way of avoiding them. Focusing on optimising team performance will simply result in sub-system optimisation at the cost of overall system performance.

So what’s the solution? Leopold proposes introducing three models of communications, which he calls Flight Levels, overlaid upon each other, aimed at optimising performance over different time horizons and spans of influence. The lowest Flight Level is effectively team-level agile. Flight Level 2 introduces inter-team coordination and dependency management, while Flight Level 3 is aimed at mapping the company’s strategic priorities onto a top-level portfolio.

Now, none of this is particularly original, and any experienced SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) will recognise these approaches. Nevertheless, as an easy-to-digest warning of the pitfalls of agile over-simplification and some top-level guidance on how to get your agile transformation back on track, you cannot go too wrong with this book. Oh, and did I mention the illustrations?

Team Topologies

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

If there was a book that I would single out as having resonated with me over the past couple of years, it must be Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. At its essence, the authors demonstrate how organisational design and system architecture are, whether you like it or not, intrinsically linked. They can be considered to be mirror images of each other.

Of course, this is nothing new. In the 1960s, Roger Conway, a computer programmer stated that the structure of computer systems will tend to reflect the communications structure of the organisation that produced it. This book builds upon this adage. If this principle holds true, then how best should companies organise their technology teams to produce outcomes that best meet their business needs? The answer, in the authors’ view, is the ‘Reverse Conway manoeuvre, where companies should organise their teams according to their desired architecture. In particular, teams should be structured in a way to allow most communications to take place within a team, rather than in between teams. This can only be achieved if the team boundaries closely match the boundaries of the microservices, the software components that make up a modern software system.

Where this book excels is in giving real-world examples on how to structure your teams and your software, to best meet the demands of your business. The default orientation proposed is described as a ‘stream-aligned team’, often referred to as a product or feature orientation. These teams are focused on creating end-user experiences, and as such contain the expertise necessary to bring software to end-users. This is strongly at odds with the traditional functional or specialist orientation of many technology organisations, but the authors argue that this is the only way to achieve speed in product delivery. Other topologies are described, including platform teams orienting around platforms, where the aime is to maximise the reuse of software by other teams.

What sets this book apart from others in this vein is the way in which the approaches are grounded in the fundamentals of how we work as humans. The limits of cognitive loads when dealing with complexity, context-switching, and the criticality of forming strong working relationships and effective communications act as the guiding narrative throughout the book. This is a book I revisit frequently.

Reaching Cloud Velocity

Jonathan Allen & Thomas Blood

This book was recommended to me by Patrick Bartsch, a former colleague at Jaguar Land Rover, and a self-professed AWS ninja. Firmly positioned as a guide to CIOs and CTOs migrating to the cloud or wanting to make more out of their cloud investment, this book provides an excellent 360-degree view of how to succeed in building your business using public cloud technology

Although all the examples relate to AWS, Amazon’s cloud offering, most of the lessons will be equally relevant should your organisation be using Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. All the tech fundamentals of modern cloud platforms are covered here, including how best to manage cloud migrations, make the best use of the latest technology in terms of containers, machine learning and edge compute and how to design for scale, resilience, security and compliance. Whilst most companies have a focus on the software that drives business value and customer features, it is normally the behind-the-scenes efforts to simply keep the lights on that are more likely to keep CTOs awake at night, and this book does justice to these.

However, where I thought this book was particularly strong was in its treatment of the management, leadership and cultural drivers of success. Covering the leadership principles used at Amazon, the book takes Peter Drucker’s axiom that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ to heart. The authors cogently argue that cloud computing will do nothing for your business if your operating model, leadership style across the entire business do not come together to drive business agility in its broadest form. The book starts off with an oft-repeated quotation that ‘friends don’t let friends build data centres.’ By the time you are done with this book, you will realise that it is not just data centres that cloud providers will take care of, but a large chunk of your software and operations activities. And that is not a bad thing.

Doing Agile Right

Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk, Steve Berez

This list is brought to a close by a book whose tagline I love, ‘Transformation without the Chaos.’ It was indeed this tagline that brought me to overcome my bias against books written by consultants. In this case, all three authors being partners at Bain & Company.

Doing Agile Right is a book targeted at senior leaders, and starts off in a rather surprising way. It describes how agile really works, what is at the heart of team-level iterative product development. The reason is simple – many of the leaders who are accountable for digital programmes have never themselves participated in an agile team.

The authors then go to outline the challenges when scaling it across the enterprise. Like ‘Rethinking Agile,’ an appropriate emphasis is placed on managing interdependencies, but sensibly, rather than proposing their own tools and methodologies, the book outlines and critiques the current more popular ones being used. The strongest sections relate to agile leadership, a topic that is in my opinion under-explored. Agile leaders need to reconcile their natural tendency to give bold targets and direction, with the bottom-up planning and team empowerment that is the bedrock of the agile philosophy. The authors describe how for an agile journey to be successful, leaders need to reappraise how they add value, and how they give their teams the space to succeed and fail.

Without explicitly mentioning at any point, the book leans heavily on the principles of psychological safety described above. Leaders are asked to over-communicate, embrace and live the change they want to see adopted across the organisation and accept that there will be many failures along the way. As would be expected from a book written by consultants, due focus is given to the mechanics that need to be put in place to support agile delivery, from planning and governance through organisation design and processes. Anyone looking for a one-stop view of what an organisation-wide agile journey looks like can do a lot worse than reading this book.

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