Title: Competing Against Luck Recommendation: 8.5/10 Summary:  Summary:  Conventional wisdom is wrong. Understanding your customers is not the best way to drive innovation. Understanding customer jobs, their day-to-day, predictably reveals opportunities to remove friction and innovate.  In a world obsessed with data to better understand customers, this is a great reminder that data doesn’t tell…

Title: The Advantage Recommendation: 8.9/10 Summary:Although Patrick Lencioni argues it’s the single greatest advantage, organizational health is often ignored. Placing executive teams at the center of organizational health, he declares they too often reflect golf teams, everyone on their own, when it should be a basketball team, working together. “Hey, your side of the boat…

Title: Sprint Recommendation: 8.8/10 Summary: The longer assumptions remain unexamined, the greater the risk. To minimize the lift to check assumptions three Googlers developed sprint, a problem-solving approach. A sprint is limited to 5 days, because… – Weekends lose continuity – After 5 days distraction & procrastination creep in – We become more attached to…

Title: Invent & Wander Recommendation: 7.7/10 Summary: 700 characters is a cruel constraint on this rich read.  Although it’s a compilation of shareholder letters & speech transcripts, freely available across the web, I can honestly say I would not have read this content had it not been a book. You get a front-row view into…

Title: The First 20 Hours Recommendation: 7.3/10 Summary: Love learning but feel constrained by the time investment needed to achieve worthwhile results? Although it might take 10,000 hours (right, Malcolm?) to develop world-class mastery of a new skill (an important caveat), Josh Kaufman breaks down a systematic approach to rapidly achieving intermediate skill proficiency.  Applying…