Go here to see a collection of white papers.

Go here to see our glossary.

This page list books frequently mentioned in our work as well as a collection of white papers.

• Books by Net Objectives
• Miscellaneous
• Management
• Flow and Lean
• Systems Thinking, Complexity and Value Creation Structure
• Technical Agility

Books frequently mentioned

Miscellaneous

• Timeless Way of Building. Christopher Alexander. Suggested reading method – read the 20% of the book that is italized in 1-2 hours. Then go back and read the rest of the book more leisurely.

Management

• The Art of Action: How Leaders Close Gaps Between Plans, Actions and Results. Stephen Bungay (see 10 page summary of book here).
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. General Stanley McChrystal
• Joy Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love. Richard Sheridan (also the best book on XP anywhere)
• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. David Marquet

Agile, Flow and Lean

• The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done Stephen Denning
• The Principles of Product Development Flow: 2nd Generation Lean Product Development. Don Reinertsen
• Going Beyond Lean and Agile: Introducing FLEX – FLow for Enterprise Transformation. Al Shalloway
• Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd Applied to Business. Chet Richards
• Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. Robert Coram

Systems Thinking, Complexity and Value Creation Structure

Systems thinking and complexity tell us that the systems we are in create the behavior we get. It is important, therefore, to understand how to organize to improve our effectiveness.

Systems Thinking

• The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge
• SYSTEMANTICS, THE SYSTEMS BIBLE by John Gall

Systems Thinking and Complexity

• The Choice by Dr. Eli Goldratt
• Simple Complexity: A Management Book For The Rest of Us: A Guide to Systems Thinking by Donaldson, William PhD
• Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World by Wheatley, Margaret J.
• Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It by Chris Clearfield, András Tilcsik
• Simplicity by Edward De Bono

Value Creation Structure

These are all excellent books. They are in order of recommended reading.

• Organize for Complexity: How to Get Life Back Into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization. Niels Pflaeging. This discusses not just how to organize teams but also better concepts on management and complete organization restructuring. Here are some resources for this book:
  • Organize for Complexity slideshare. How to make work work again. “How to break the barrier of command-and-control and create the peak-performance, networked organization.”
  • Turn your company outside-in slideshare. “How to build the decentralized network organization, putting an end to centralized command and control. A paper on Cell Structure Design.”
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais. This is a tour de force on creating teams – including both theories and practices.
• Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams Heidi Helfand.  Heidi’s experience with startups and growing organizations provides insights into how to handle teams that are growing as the organization grows.
• Organize Forward Jeff Anderson. This is a very pragmatic book that expands on Organize for Complexity.

Technical Agility

• Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective On Object-Oriented Design, 2nd Edition. Al Shalloway, James Trott
• Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: A Guide to Better Programming and Design. Al Shalloway, Scott Bain, Ken Pugh, Amir Kolsky
• Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development by Scott Bain 

• Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software by David Bernstein

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Michael Feathers.

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