Measure What Matters

Silicon Valley is renowned for its striking number of businesses which have grown from garage start-ups into global giants - Apple, Cisco, Google, HP and Intel, to name a few. But what is the secret to their outstanding success? Hoffman and Yeh explain that it’s simple: they’ve learnt how to blitzscale. Featuring case studies from numerous prominent tech businesses such as AirBnB and WeChat, this book offers a specific set of practices for catalysing and managing dizzying growth in burgeoning start-ups. 

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs, (2018) by venture capitalist John Doerr, details a simple but highly effective goal-setting technique called "Objectives and Key Results", or OKRs. The OKR method is a management philosophy that pairs concrete objectives with actionable steps. (Disclaimer: This is NOT the original book. If you’re looking for the original book, it is available from Amazon and Audible.)  

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Leaders by General Stanley McChrystal, Jeff Eggers and Jason Mangone, read by Paul Michael. Retired four-star general Stan McChrystal has studied leadership his whole adult life, from his first day at West Point to his most recent work with the corporate clients of the McChrystal Group. In this follow-up to his best sellers My Share of the Task and Team of Teams, McChrystal explores what leadership really means, debunking the many myths that have surrounded the concept. He focuses on 13 great leaders, showing that the lessons we commonly draw from their lives are seldom the correct ones. 

How do you inspire a diverse team to work together, going all out in pursuit of a single, challenging goal? How do you get your team to commit to bold goals? How do you stay motivated despite setbacks and disappointments? And what do you do when it looks like you're headed for failure? In Radical Focus, Christina Wodtke combines her hard earned experience as an executive at Zynga, Linkedin and many of Silicon Valley's hottest companies to answer those questions.

In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle, New York Times best-selling author of The Talent Code, goes inside some of the most effective organisations in the world and reveals their secrets. He not only explains what makes such groups tick but also identifies the key factors that can generate team cohesion in any walk of life. He examines the verbal and physical cues that bring people together. He determines specific strategies that encourage collaboration and build trust. 

Understanding and developing the mind throughout life - the new audiobook from the creator of the chimp management mind model and author of the million-copy selling The Chimp Paradox. The Silent Guides explores some neuroscience and psychological aspects of the developing mind, unconscious thinking, behaviours, habit formation and related topics in an easy to understand way. It then offers practical ideas and thoughts for the listener to reflect on using 10 helpful habits as examples.

How do today's most successful tech companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla - design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently from the vast majority of tech companies. In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides listeners with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love.

This book teaches you how to identify your smallest viable audience; draw on the right signals and signs to position your offering; build trust and permission with your target market; speak to the narratives your audience tells themselves about status, affiliation, and dominance; spot opportunities to create and release tension; and give people the tools to achieve their goals.

Radical Candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on the one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It is about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism - delivered to produce better results and help employees develop their skills and boundaries of success. Great bosses have strong relationships with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees.

As creators of Google Ventures' renowned 'design sprint', Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products like Gmail and YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own personal habits and routines, looking for ways to help individuals optimise their energy, focus and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days.

 How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter - that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance - and what drives it - using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for listeners to apply in their own organizations. 

Artificial intelligence does the seemingly impossible - driving cars, trading stocks, and teaching children. But facing the sea change that AI will bring can be paralyzing. How should companies set strategies, governments design policies, and people plan their lives for a world so different from what we know? In Prediction Machines, three eminent economists recast the rise of AI as a drop in the cost of prediction. With this single, masterful stroke, they lift the curtain on the AI-is-magic hype and show how basic tools from economics provide clarity about the AI revolution and a basis for action by CEOs, managers, policy makers, investors, and entrepreneurs.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work is a direct successor to Rework, the instant best seller that showed listeners a new path to working effectively. Now Fried and Heinemeier Hansson have returned with a new strategy for the ideal company culture - what they call 'the calm company'. It is a direct attack on the chaos, anxiety and stress that plague millions of workplaces and billions of people working their day jobs. Working to breaking point with long hours, excessive business, and a lack of sleep have become a badge of honour for many people these days, when it should be a mark of stupidity. 

Both Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google as seasoned Silicon Valley business executives, but over the course of a decade they came to see the wisdom in Coach John Wooden's observation that 'it's what you learn after you know it all that counts'. As they helped grow Google from a young start-up to a global icon, they relearned everything they knew about management.

From the brilliant and innovative head of Google's people operations, the ultimate guide to attracting the most spectacular talent to your business and how to ensure that the best and the brightest succeed. Google receives more than 1,500,000 unique applications for jobs every year. This book shows you why. How to learn from your best employees - and your worst. Why you should hire only people who are smarter than you are.