“Inspire Change” by Brian Solis by The Brian Solis is licensed under CC BY 2.0
I love to read and am always looking for an engaging book. One of the ways that I deal with my daily commute is to listen to audiobooks, which has augmented and somewhat replaced reading physical books, which is my first preference, or ebooks, which I do for convenience, especially when traveling. My friends and colleagues know about my insatiable appetite for good books and so regularly send me recommendations.
At work, I have been on a quest to create a high performing culture and have used books to help make that transition. Recently, Primed to Perform was recommended to me and it is my new favorite organizational change book. I have been recommending it to anyone who will listen and even gave it as a birthday gift last week.
The premise of the book is that you need to promote both tactical and adaptive performance to excel. Most organizations focus almost exclusively on tactical performance. What I love about this book is that it combines a whole bunch of research about personal and organizational change management, and puts it into an easy-to-understand and measurable model.
The model is called Total Motivation (ToMO) which assigns weights to the reasons why people do their work. Higher ToMo scores are directly correlated with the success of an organization. It is an elegant theory that incorporates many of the positive business principles and gives a way to measure how your organization is doing in creating a culture that is high-performing and fun. There is a great talk by the authors at Microsoft Research that you can view here.
We will be using this book this year as we continue our change in the Temple Information Technology Services team. We have already taken the group ToMo test as a baseline so that we can measure whether we are making progress in creating a more higher performing group.
Here is a list of some other books that have been very impactful as I have studied how to make deep change in organizations and myself.
- Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown
- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
- The Power of Story by Jim Loehr
- Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Grenny, Patterson, Maxfield, McMillan and Switzler
- Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change by Grenny, Patterson, Maxfield, McMillan and Switzler
- The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps and Helping Your Business Win by Kim, Behr and Spafford.
I would love to hear your recommendations to add to my reading list. What books have been impactful to you on your leadership and organizational change journey?
Emphatic +1 on “The Power of Habit” and “Crucial Conversations.” Both have helped me greatly in work and in life. Thanks for the other recommendations!