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10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management

This book has great advice on managing your professional and personal business. Hyrum Smith gives an excellent model on how beliefs act as the “window” through which we view the world. The Feedback Loop Model for Action is an extension of his work.

The Logical Thinking Process

Eliyahu Goldratt introduced the Theory of Constraints, bringing focus to system-level thinking about business processes. H. William Dettmer clearly explains how to use this process to find and fix root cause issues using logical diagramming techniques like the Current and Future Reality Trees.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

Scott Adams makes a great argument for valuing systems over goals. Every time you use your system to move towards an objective, you are succeeding in the sense of taking positive action. If your only success criteria is achieving a goal, you are unsuccessful at every step until the goal is obtained!

Built to Last

While examining what was common among sucessful companies, Collins and Porras distilled a framework for communicating the purpose and goals to an organization. The key idea is to make clear the unchanging core values and purpose of an organization while envisioning the strategic goals that will require change to achieve. It’s a good way to keep the objective of a strategic push summarized on one page. The challenge is to avoid overdoing it: we’ve all seen Dilbert-type mission statements that don’t really say anything. Use it as a tool to help reach a goal and not as an end in itself!