What books have inspired you and why?
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I’d probably go for Turn the Ship Around by L David Marquet, and his ideas on intent based leadership.
I found it easy to engage with, and like that it was based on his lived experience. It didn’t feel overly sugar coated. It was easy to see clear take aways that I could use with my team to help empower them and help them to engage more in the changes that we were trying to implement.
I love Black Box Thinking by Mathew Syed. Using a diverse range of case studies, but particularly comparing and contrasting the medical and aviation industries, he calls out how celebrating and learning from failure can be incredibly powerful, and conversely how hiding it away is very dangerous.
It inspired a lot of my thinking about really radical transparency, and is just a great read as well.
Probably Accelerate (XLR8) from John Kotter. All his books on landing change are great, but this is the one for me that really resonated in terms of how to drive change (both in terms of how the organisation works as well as what it does) not as a top down command and control waterfall programme, but as a bottom up, agile, innovative, evolving thing based on a clear vision or opportunity. And it’s a great read.