16 books for 2023, but we also welcomed our son, Lukas, so in the latter half of the year, my pace declined a bit (having to decide between sleeping and reading is quite an easy choice with a newborn). For 2024, I’m committing to reading 20 books again.
Why am I writing this blog post? For the last eight years, I wrote blog posts (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2016) listing the books I read in the past year and want to read during that year. Truth be told, I often change my mind about what books to read or order new releases that take the spots of the planned books.
My favorite books of 2023
- Customer Equity: At the start of the year, I read the Customer Base Audit, which sparked my interest in the topic of customer equity. Throughout the year, I read three more books on this topic (The Age of Customer Equity, The Customer Centricity Playbook, and Customer Centricity).
- Scaling People: Claire Hughes Johnson is one of Silicon Valley’s most well-known company builders and thinkers on this topic. As the previous COO of Stripe, she managed the operational side of the business while hiring thousands of employees and increasing its revenue by billions. The frameworks in her book are very valuable for scaling companies.
- Onward: The success of Starbucks is obvious, but this book takes Howard Schultz’s perspective in building a small coffee into a global behemoth. There is a very interesting detail about his return as CEO and how they ran Starbucks during this (second) tenure.
What books I’m planning to read in 2024?
Truth be told, I often change my mind on what books to read or end up ordering new releases that take the spots of the planned books. That’s why some books that I had planned to read last year will likely make this years list, finally (Pragmatic Capitalism, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order).
- Unreasonable Hospitality: Many people recommended this book as a good follow-on after reading Setting the Table. In some ways, the job of marketers is to surprise & delight the customer and provide basically excellent hospitality. So, I’m curious to read more about this from the lens of the actual hospitality business.
- When McKinsey Comes to Town: The inner workings of consulting firms (especially McKinsey) have intrigued me for quite some time. While many people joke about them being off significantly on years-old forecasts, what they do well is being taken seriously by their clients and providing a point of view (in my cases, backed up by large amounts of data). Arguably, not all of their work is likely for the greater good, but I’d love to learn more about them by reading this book.
- Biographies: I hope to read at least the following two about a couple of very powerful women: My Life in Full by the former CEO of PepsiCo (Indra Nooyi) and Good Power by the former CEO of IBM (Ginni Rometty).
- A couple of other books: Lights Out, Rewired, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy.