Michael’s Bookshelf

I love to learn. I love to read. Reading and thinking about what I’ve read has been the #1 thing in my life that has helped me develop and grow.

Welcome to Michael’s Bookshelf. Here you will find the books that made me; both new and old. If they give you one-tenth of the joy and education which they have given me then I will feel like I have done a real good in the world.

As always, I’d love your thoughts and for you to share your recommendations too!

Helping; How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

Edgar H. Schein

How do you pick just one Ed Schein book? For goodness sake, just read the whole canon again and again! There has been no single teacher or author in my life that has impacted my thinking (and acting) more than Ed Schein. I first met Ed when I was getting my MSOD at Pepperdine and he spent a week with our cohort. I won’t turn this into a 10,000-word treatise on the brilliance and utter humanity of Ed Schein, but I could. All I will say is that Helping is a great place for the newbie to start. You are introduced to the idea that help should be helpful, which sounds silly until you start to think of all the unhelpful help you receive daily. You are also introduced to humble inquiry, which is not just a technique, it is a way of being that could change the world if enough of us practiced it. You can go on from here and read Humble Leadership, Humble Inquiry, and Humble Consulting, all of which are excellent and take a slightly different tack to the issues. Or you can go back to the foundations and read Organizational Culture and Leadership. Yes, Ed literally wrote the book on corporate culture (the first and still the best). Or you can go even deeper into his Process Consultation books, which form the basis of the best consulting out there.

Whatever you choose to do, read Ed. Learn why personization (not personalization) matters so much in our organizations and world. Find out where you are fooling yourself every day and where you are the only one who doesn’t see it. There is so much to learn. Listening to Ed will make you a better person, full stop.

Dancing on the Edge; Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century

Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester

Get ready to think. Dancing on the Edge will challenge your beliefs of how the world works. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Graham Leicester and I always leave our conversations inspired and thinking better than when they started. (Graham, we need to chat again soon, it has been too long!)

Dancing on the Edge is an exploration of culture and how it changes or can change. Culture change is a concept that I have wrestled with for my entire adult life. I was able to study and learn from the best; Roger Harrison, Ed Schein, Peter Block, and many more. What I have come to understand, and what Graham and Maureen say better than many, is that changing something that you are so intimately integrated with and into is not a simple linear process. Change is probably the wrong word. It makes you think of simple things like changing a tire. But change of a culture is more of an awakening.

In this wonderful little book, you will start to see what a more evolved, more conscious you can think like. And, yes, I realize that sounds a little “woo hoo” or “New Age”. But the simple fact is that we need to advance in our ways of seeing our world to effectively change it. Drawing on Bob Kegan’s groundbreaking work, Graham and Maureen talk to us about who we need to be and how we need to act (much more than what we “need to do”) in order to grow as people and to see ourselves and others in such a way as to allow us to come together and to truly change.

Buy this brilliant little book, read it, tell me what you think. Learn. Grow.

Do More Great Work

Michael Bungay Stanier

It would have been really easy to recommend The Coaching Habit or The Advice Trap. The first is a modern classic, the second is the hot new release from this brilliant thinker, a great teacher, and my dear friend. (Although his planking skills are questionable, but that’s another story). However, when thinking about all that Michael has contributed to this world, and to me personally, it is Do More Great Work that I wanted to talk about, lest this little gem get lost in all of the deserved accolades for his latest books. Do More Great Work is where Michael first illustrates the difference between Good Work and Great Work, a foundational idea that often gets lost. The space between Good Work and Great Work is so much smaller than between Bad Work and Good Work. But it is this space where the greatest leaps of being happy and wholly human take place.

Throughout the book we are given simple maps and simple tools to learn to understand ourselves; who we are, what we want, and who we could be. While The Advice Trap or The Coaching Habit will help you as you help others to be better, Do More Great Work helps you help yourself to be better, a more self-defined, a more self-aware version of yourself. A decade after its release, this book remains a somewhat hidden gem in the quest for us to be better people. Don’t just read it, use it!

Immunity to Change

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

We sabotage our own dreams every day and we don’t even know we’re doing it, learn how to let the change you want happen!

The Day After Tomorrow

Peter Hinssen

It’s been said that the future is here, it’s just not distributed evenly. Learn how to see past the false assumptions to what tomorrow is already bringing and how to disrupt yourself before the world does it to you.

Willful Blindness

Margaret Heffernan

The bottom line? Desperately trying to avoid and ignore those things that scare you is what is going to bring them about if you don’t start to see yourself, and your intrinsic motivations, much more clearly.

Drunk Tank Pink

Adam Alter

You only think you’re thinking. You’re not, you’re just reacting to things that are making your choices for you, and you don’t even know it…until now.

The Startup Way

Eric Ries

Agile, lean, design…the principles of technology are changing how our society works. Don’t wait, upgrade yourself now!

Hit Refresh

Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols

An honest look at the need to reinvent yourself when you are at the top of your game, not when you’re already on the way out.

A Theory of Everything

Ken Wilber

See the pattern that organizes everything around you and jumpstart your evolution as a human being.

Drive

Daniel H. Pink

You’re not really motivated by money, don’t fall for that. You want to be seen, you want to choose, you want to make a difference!

The Culture Blueprint

Robert Richman

The great unicorn of modern business; culture change. It’s not a program, it’s personal.

Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart

Mary Beth O’Neill

Have the courage to speak the truth and the heart to pull people closer in, even when the truth comes between you.

On Being Certain

Robert A. Burton, MD.

The only thing absolutely certain is that you are not really remembering what happened. A disconcerting and liberating look at how we live by our own lies.

The Answer to How is Yes

Peter Block

You want to learn how to do it? Then do it! The guide to get you off the sidelines and into the race.

Team of Teams

Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell

How humanizing trumps organizing every time—even in the most trying of situations, people can reinvent how they work if they take down the walls they built for themselves.

The Digital Matrix

Venkat Venkatraman

We hear about digital transformation all the time. This book gives you all you need to know to understand what that actually means for companies and consumers today.

Designing Organizations

Jay R. Galbraith

Helping organizations learn that design is change since day one.

Trump and a Post-Truth World