Recommended Books

The clearest map I know for why teams underperform — start with trust, everything else follows.

Makes the biological case for safety and service as the foundation of leadership.

Care personally, challenge directly — the framework I return to before every hard conversation.

The definitive story on moving from a leader-follower model to leader-leader.

A mirror for whether you make the people around you smarter or smaller.

Andy Grove's operating manual for managers — output-oriented, dense, and still the sharpest thinking on leverage I've found.

Still the best distillation of what separates a coder from a craftsperson.

The research behind what actually makes engineering orgs fast — measure these things. This became a required/encouraged reading for leaders at Nike.

A novel that teaches DevOps and flow better than any textbook. Conceptually based on the book "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt.

The other side of the Phoenix Project — the developer’s view of the same transformation, and a love letter to great engineering culture.

A short, opinionated argument for fighting complexity as the core job of design.

The language I use to reason about how team structure shapes the systems we ship.

The book I recommend most. Meaning is a choice available in any circumstance.

Two thousand years old and still the most personal leadership book ever written — a man holding himself to account.

Stoicism made practical: the impediment to action advances action. A go-to when I feel stuck.

The counterweight to ambition — how ego sabotages us at every stage, and what to do about it.

A tiny 1903 essay on how our thoughts shape our character and circumstances. Read it in an hour, chew on it for years.

Short chapters of hard-won wisdom on living deliberately, especially in the second half of life.

Kahneman’s masterwork on the two systems driving how we think — humbling reading for any decision-maker.

The behavioral-economics classic on how reliably — and predictably — our decisions defy logic.

Computer science as life advice — when to stop looking, how to schedule, when to trust randomness. Right up my alley.

Kaizen for individuals: small, compounding improvements beat heroic effort.

The framework that named so much of what I believe about character-first effectiveness.

A tactical guide to teaching yourself hard skills fast — the playbook behind my own learning projects.

The premise that the quality of your life comes down to the quality of the questions you ask yourself.

A dense toolkit for taking deliberate control of your decisions, emotions, and standards.

The granddaddy of success literature — dated in places, but the core idea of definiteness of purpose endures.

Timeless personal-finance wisdom dressed as ancient parables. I’d hand it to any young person.

Pressfield on what comes after you beat Resistance — the work of a lifetime of making.

A demanding, rewarding argument for living in the present instead of the story in your head.

Alan Watts on why the search for security is itself the source of insecurity. Freeing.

Four simple commitments that, taken seriously, quietly rewire how you move through the world.

Thich Nhat Hanh finding the common ground between two traditions with extraordinary gentleness.

The Dalai Lama and a Western psychiatrist on happiness as a skill you train, not a mood you catch.

A raw, honest founder story — and personal, given my years at Nike.

Tesla in his own words — equal parts genius, eccentricity, and vision decades ahead of his time.