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Appendix A. Appendix

Here are some additional resources that you might find helpful.

Books You Should Read

Monty and I are voracious readers. We absolutely love books and, if you ever meet us in person, there’s a good chance we’ll encourage you to borrow one.

Earlier, we mentioned the value of creating a library within your team room. Although we’re eternally grateful that you chose our book, we would be remiss if we didn’t suggest adding the following texts to your library as well. These authors deserve the lion’s share of the credit for our learnings. Without them, we would not have reached the clarity and articulation for our own cultural transformation.

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Published by IT Revolution Press, 2018.

Be Fearless: 5 Principles for a Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose by Jean Case. Published by Simon & Schuster, 2019.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh. Published by Currency, 2018.

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins. Published by Harper Business, 1994.

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown. Published by Harper Business, 2009.

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. Published by Harper Business, 2014.

Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution by Geoffrey Moore. Published by Portfolio, 2005.

Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean by Roberto Verganti. Published by Harvard Business Press, 2009.

Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate with Your Visual Mind by Dan Roam. Published by Portfolio, 2016.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. Published by Riverhead Books, 2011.

Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Published by Portfolio, 2016.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins. Published by Harper Business, 2001.

Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More by Morten Hansen. Published by Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. Published by Scribner, 2018.

Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown. Published by Currency, 2017.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella. Published by Harper Business, 2017.

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating by Alan Alda. Published by Radom House, 2018.

Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2013.

Leading Change by John Kotter. Published by Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.

Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy by Cindy Alvarez. Published by O’Reilly Media, 2017.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. Published by Random House, 2007.

Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age by Greg Satell. Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2017.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr. Published by Portfolio, 2018.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. Published by Ballantine Books, 2007.

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman. Published by Harper Business, 2017.

Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein. Published by Wiley, 2016.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant. Published by Penguin Books, 2017.

Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott. Published by St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within by Lois Kelly and Carmen Medina. Published by O’Reilly Media, 2014.

Show and Tell: How Everybody Can Make Extraordinary Presentations by Dan Roam. Published by Portfolio, 2016.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. Published by Crown Business, 2010.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal. Published by Penguin Business, 2015.

The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace by Ron Friedman, PhD. Published by Perigee, 2015.

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle. Published by Bantam, 2018.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty by Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan. Published by Harvard Business Review Press, 2000.

The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations by John Kotter and Dan Cohen. Published by Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton Christensen. Harvard Business Review Press, 2016.

The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen. Published by Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.

The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor. Published by Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries. Published by Currency, 2011.

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday. Published by Portfolio, 2014.

The Power of Company Culture: How Any Business Can Build a Culture that Improves Productivity, Performance and Profits by Chris Dyer. Published by Kogan Page, 2018.

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip and Dan Heath. Published by Simon & Schuster, 2017.

The Practice of Management by Peter Drucker. Published by Harper Business, 1993 (originally published in 1954).

The Storyteller’s Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don’t by Carmine Gallo. Published by St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017.

The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman. Published by Currency/Doubleday, 2005.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Erich Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle. Published by Harper Business, 2019.

Just a portion of the books that inspired the one you’re reading now

Useful Maxims

In his book, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, author Daniel Coyle discusses how great teams have maxims. These are short sayings that embody the belonging cues of what it means to be part of the team or organization. Monty and I just love maxims, because they’re a shortcut to bigger themes and ideas. We find ourselves using these little statements over and over when sharing our journey, expressing our learning, and encouraging others to join us on our journey.

If you ever leaf through any of our books, you’ll find these statements highlighted, tagged, and underlined. In our view, there’s nothing better than a short, pithy statement that captures the essence of a big idea.

In fact, in our culture room (see Chapter 1), we covered the wall with some of our favorites that we’ve come across over the years. I’ll list them here, without explanation. This way, you can reflect and find your own meaning in them.

Hack #1: Use a Common Language

Use a language of learning.
Change the language and you’ll change the thinking, which will change the actions and behaviors and, ultimately, change the culture.
Language should connect the board room to the team room, and vice versa.
Lean engineering is based on a language of learning.

Hack #2: Build Bridges, Not Walls

Lean = Continuous and Collaborative learning.
It’s not about a few learnings on behalf of the many; it’s about empowering everyone to learn.
Great cultures build “generalists with superpowers.”
Maintaining zero distance between the customer and each other.
Give knowledge away freely.
Working with others, for others.
Win as one.
Work the team, then the problem.
Fill the gaps between people.
Bridge builders round up, not down.

Hack #3: Encourage Learning versus Knowing

A customer-driven culture is rooted in continuous learning.
Have courage to divorce yourself from your solution.
Invalidated hypotheses are just as valuable as validated ones.
Push for high-tempo experimentation.
Value and promote small-batch learning.
Reward learning over being proven right.
You want to “de-risk” your decisions, not try and be “bulletproof.”
Constantly challenge your assumptions.
Learning happens when we trip over the truth.
Some people need the permission to be empathetic.

Hack #4: Build Leaders That Build Your Culture

Help others fall into the pit of success.
The fastest way to gain influence with someone is to help them get promoted.
If you don’t name the behavior, you can’t acknowledge it or aspire to it.
Build belonging cues into everything you do.
Help your people do heroic things.
To care about people, you must care about people.

Hack #5: Meet Teams Where They Are

Make it easy to do the right thing and difficult to do the wrong thing.
You can’t be dealt a hand that you can’t play.
One size fits one.
Value conversation over documentation.
Leverage their energy.
Make the charitable assumption.
Be passionately pragmatic.
Coach it, from the board room—to the team room.
Culture Growth = Desire – Friction.
Be a coach, not just a teacher.
Only coach the coachable.
Leading people becomes a lot more effective when you care about the people you’re trying to lead.

Hack #6: Make Data Relatable

Strive for grounded confidence.
Customer connections should be the new currency.
When telling a story, lead with your big surprises.
Avoid being data rich and action poor.
There are three faces of customer value: functional, social, and emotional.
Never settle for the what without the why.
IQ + EQ = CQ or (Intelligence Quotient) + (Emotional Intelligence) = (Customer Intelligence).