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Ask HN: What are some good books for a new CTO to read?
I am CTO for some time now, but i now just realised that i may be missing different soft skills. What are some good books to read?
- giantg2 6y agoGetting to Yes; Exactly What to Say; The Coaching Habit These are a few that I read and found useful. I'm not a CTO, just an intermediate developer.
- sarcasmatwork 6y ago"Jocko Willink - Extreme Ownership" is a good start. I've got his older books and newest book on my desk to read next. Good leadership skills and perspectives etc.
- maps7 6y agoWhile the concept is good the presentation of it is very.. not to my taste. From what I remember, it relates a lot back to Willink's military background. After you read a lot of it you realize a lot is common sense.
- rocketpastsix 6y agoEach point they (there is two authors, not just Jocko) make has two points: how they learned it from leading SEALs in Ramadi and then how they helped a company apply it to their leadership. The audiobook definitely has that military style to it: they speak is short, very terse sentences not using more words than necessary. It took me a minute to get used to it however I quite enjoyed it overall. Yes it's a lot of common sense, but when you are running a company or a team, it's easy to have blinders on and miss these obvious things.
- stevenalowe 6y agoPeopleware, Evolutionary architecture, Domain-Driven Design, Ship It
- commonturtle 6y agoI'm not a CTO (yet?) but I've begin to grok some of the stuff involved in managing teams of engineers. 'The Manager's Path' by Camille Fournier was really helpful. Lots of very practical advice for all sorts of technical leaders: senior ICs, front-line managers, managers-of-managers, CTOs.
- mxxx 6y ago+1. Great book.
- mars4rp 6y agoBullshit Jobs - David Graeber
- aprdm 6y agoRadical Candor is great!
- poushkar 6y agoI've put this list together for Tech Leads, but the non-technical parts of it are very much relevant for CTOs as well: techleadcompass.com
- laurentl 6y agoDaniel Jarjoura recently published a fairly complete reading list that might be useful: https://techleadership.substack.com/p/the-product-leader-reading-list https://techleadership.substack.com/p/the-product-leader-rea... Some books I’ve read and enjoyed and/or found useful: The hard thing about hard things, the innovator’s dilemma, High output management, Accelerate, The Phoenix project (though I much prefer The Goal)
- laurentl 6y agoAlso, you might find the Rand leadership Salck (https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/ https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/) to be a good place to have discussions with peers on all sorts of topics.
- daniel-tlt21 6y agoThanks for the mention! On top of the books mentioned in the article, I would really advise you to read Will Larson's Elegant puzzle
- AnonHP 6y agoI’m getting a non-functional page for that link. The page says that the content has moved to tlt21.com, but provides no links (I checked after disabling blockers on my browser too). If I go to tlt21.com, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to find this article.
- minhaz23 6y agohey not op but try this webcached page and make sure you dont let it load completely or else you'll get a page not found error: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_fkbEoFW24cJ:https://techleadership.substack.com/p/the-product-leader-reading-list+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_fkbEo...
- laurentl 6y agoSeems I can't reply to parent so putting the link here: https://www.tlt21.com/the-product-leader-reading-list/ https://www.tlt21.com/the-product-leader-reading-list/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]