- Community Home
- >
- Software
- >
- IT Strategy, Planning & Governance
- >
- Discover Performance
- >
- You have to read this: Discover Performance blogge...
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Mark as New
- Mark as Read
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Email to a Friend
- Printer Friendly Page
- Report Inappropriate Content
You have to read this: Discover Performance bloggers pick their top book recommendations
One thing I’m looking forward to over the holidays is finally catching up on some reading. To fill out my reading list I asked some of our Discover Performance bloggers what books they’re reading that they would recommend to IT leaders. Here are the results. It’s a wide-ranging list, but if we’ve left out any books you consider must-reads, please let us know in the comments.
Daniel Dorr
Daniel leads HP's CIO Agenda workshop program. He is responsible for conducting workshops to help CIO clients prioritize key business initiatives, the technology to address those problems and the financial impact of doing so. Read more of his blog posts.
My focus for the last year has really been on helping CIOs understand their business peers. To that end, I’ve been reading books like:
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
- Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Paul Muller
Paul leads the global IT management evangelist team within the Software business at HP. Follow him on Twitter @xthestreams, check out his blog, or watch his Cross the Streams videos on YouTube.
For the Agilistas and DevOps!
- Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble and David Farley
- Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J. Anderson and Donald G. Reinertsen
For the big thinkers!
- World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs by Peter A. High (One of the best books on IT metrics ever)
- Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes... by Charles T. Betz (Because we all love Charlie!)
For the big data crowd!
- The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarin... by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne (A hard read, but worth it to better understand the science behind IDOL)
- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (A ripping yarn that happens to be factual!)
For fun!
- Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel by Robin Sloan (A great geek novel/thriller from a San Francisco writer!)
David Wheable
David is the Global Lead of HP’s Service Management Profession, blogging about ITSM, ITIL and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAtHP or visit his HP Software Professional Services page.
Two good books discussing why we can't control as much as we think we can:
- Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I’d also recomment this book on the "physics of society," looking at how we make decisions and how aggregate behaviour can be either constructive or destructive:
- Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another - Philip Ball
Joshua Brusse
Joshua is Chief Architect, Asia Pacific and Japan, HP Software Professional Services. He writes frequently about leadership, management of organizational change, cloud, and IT Service Management. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaBrusse, read more of his blog posts and visit his HP Software Professional Services page.
I would add many but the list would go on too long …so I limited it to:
- Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness by Edward Lawler and Christopher Worley (Not a perfect book but still a good read.)
- Benefits Management: Delivering Value from IS and IT Investments by John Ward and Elizabeth Daniel
- Liberating the Corporate Soul: Building a Visionary Organization by Richard Barrett
For more insights on improving IT performance, subscribe to the Discover Performance ezine.








