Update March 2019: I’ve gone through a lot of the books rather quickly this year, that’s why I’ve added a couple of other books that I’d like to read to the bottom of the list.
For the last years, I wrote blog posts (2018, 2017 & 2016) listing the books that I read in the past year and that I wanted to be reading in that specific year. As always, the past year I didn’t read all the books that I’ve listed out in the blog post as I discovered some new ones and changed my focus during the year. But I did read a lot, wherein 2017 I read maybe 10-12 books in the last year (2018) it really took off and I read around 18-20 books.
What books I didn’t get to in 2018 and have re-added to the list:
- 60-Minute Brand Strategist: The Essential Brand Book for Marketing Professionals: Having read a great book two years ago on building brand books it’s time to do more with this and refresh my memory on all the lovely brands that are out there in the world.
- Star Brands: A Brand Manager’s Guide to Build, Manage & Market Brands: Of course you want to learn from the things that the top brands in the world did right over the years.
- High-Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way: Same as the above.
- It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be: Duh!
- The Intelligent Investor: Wanting to read more about investing, this is apparently a good to book to start with to learn more.
What books I’d like to be reading in 2019:
- Measure What Matters: I already started in this book by John Doerr. So far it’s a great read about everything OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Starting at the history with Andy Grove and going into a lot of detail about how and why companies are using the goal-setting system these days and have been over the last decades. At multiple companies, I’ve worked with this system and it’s by far my favorite so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get there.
- Thinking in Bets: It got recommended to me by my good friend @RickDronkers who said it was a great read on game theory. Having heard more rumors about how cool this book is, I’d say it’s worth a shot :).
- Blitzscaling: The latest book Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh that summarizes most of the information that they’ve worked on during their research into how companies do Blitzscaling.
- Chief Marketing Officers at Work: On the road to becoming CMO I always want to hear more from people already in that position what they value most and what they seem to work on and direct their attention to.
- Conspiracy: The story about how Peter Thiel set up ways to get back at some of his ‘enemies’ is very intriguing to me and likely the main reason why this book is on my shortlist.
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: This book was on the shortlist for the biggest part of 2018 but I never got to reading it. Hopefully this year I finally read this Silicon Valley classic by Ben Horowitz.
- The Strategist: On the business versus in the business, and being tactical versus very strategical.
- Own the Room: Last year I read the book: Executive Presence which was very informative on what kind of personal skills one must have to become a better leader/manager. That’s why I don’t think it can hurt at any time to read more books on this topic. Own The Room has been on my wishlist for quite a bit for that reason.
- Good to Great: It was on a list of books read by product managers at Google and came highly recommended from some other people.
- Becoming: After having read multiple books about political figures (of both sides), I’d like to read Michelle Obama’s biography.
As always, leave your recommendations in my Twitter feed (@MartijnSch) as I’d love to know from others what I should be reading and what you recommend should be on the list or removed from the list.