Reading Room - July 2016

If you work in IT, you need to constantly scan the horizon for what's new. As a leader, you also need to keep your eye out for trends that impact your organization or your teams and to refresh your professional skills along the way. Here are two recommended reads for July. Enjoy.

The Phoenix Project - (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford). This book is for the true geeks in the world. It describes a fictional situation that is all too real for many of us. Through the eyes of the protagonist, we learn about the dysfunction of IT in a manufacturing company and how he goes about solving the problems he encounters. It's an interesting read and speaks to many of the challenges we all face in IT, regardless of the industry you're in. Highly recommended.

The Goal (Eliayahu Goldratt). My good friend and Quality Analyst friend Nels Hoenig recommended this to me years ago and I really enjoyed it. It's the precursor to The Phoenix Project (and those authors mention this book and author by name as a nod to that) and is another story about a fictional character in a manufacturing facility who is faced with many problems. The story unfolds as the character unwinds problem after problem to get to the root causes of issues. This groundbreaking book is celebrating its 30th Anniversary - read a classic this summer!