 Hello and welcome back to Geoff's Top 10 Tips. This one's a little bit different in that it's a response to a few questions that I've had recently. For some reason, quite a few people have been asking me the same question, so I thought I'd address it somehow. And while it's technically not 10 tips, it kind of is. So the question that people have been asking me a lot recently is, what books have inspired me? What books are my favourite books? As an author myself, I know it's nice when people tell me that my book's been useful to them, so I think it's only fair that I take a little bit of time and put a little bit of thank you out there to the books that have helped me in my career and inspired me. So here are Geoff's Top 10 Tips for what books to read. Number 10, I'm starting with a children's book. Or is it? Well, it's called The Scrum Princess. And it's written by Kyle and Demi Aratay. Apologies if I've mispronounced that. The first thing I thought when I read this book was, this is the book that I wish I'd written years ago to explain what I did as a scrum master to my kids when they were growing up. My kids grew up going to school and people asking this, what does your dad do? What does your mum do? What does your dad do? What does your mum do? And they had to try and explain that he does something with rugby, but he doesn't look like a rugby player. It was really quite awkward for them to be able to explain this to their friends. And eventually they gave up and I think they just said, yeah, he's a fireman just because it sounded cooler than a scrum master. But if they'd have had this book, they'd have had a little bit of a better understanding of what I did, and I don't think it's just for kids. I think being able to explain scrum to people in a really simple way, a story way, is really engaging. I'll come back to the idea of storytelling later in this list. You know, it's visual, it's fun, it's easy to read, all factors that help make it really effective in getting a point across. So if you've got anybody that you want to try and explain what scrum is to, the Scrum Princess is a great place to start. At number nine, we've got Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Different Stevens, though, spelled differently, but there you go. Personally, I really enjoy reading books that challenge my assumptions about what's true, what I've come to expect as normal and accepted, and Freakonomics does that in spades. So I really wish I'd have come across this when I was sort of just leaving school. I actually studied economics at school, and I actually went on to study economics at university, but I found it dreadfully dull. If the course and the studies had been like this kind of study, I'd have been enthralled, I'd have been really taken, and I might have ended up in a completely different career, you never know. For me at least, I think, if I'm honest, it really tapped into my nosiness because it really gave you an insight into the minds of real people, how you kind of assume they think and why they do what they do, and it really opened my eyes to perhaps some of the logic behind what on the face of it might seem completely irrational acts and behavior. The other thing I think was really useful about this book for me is how it really challenges the link between causality and we assume we know that A causes B, and actually often that's not the case. We don't make our decisions as much based on fact, reason and data as we would like to believe. Number eight is Love's Executioner and Other Stories by Irv Yellon, and this is a very different book. On the one hand you might be surprised by me selecting this, but I can't think of another book that I've read three times. It's a bunch of case studies from a master psychiatrist. He's been doing this for a long time and he's collected a lot of experience and insights and identified patterns in his patients. But the case studies are just fantastically written, and they actually give you a little bit of a voyeuristic insight into the minds of people. He really gets you inside what's going on for them and why their decisions are being made and how they can come to rational life, some of the things that are going on in their lives. And not only was that useful for me as a person, but it really informed my coaching practice. If you've actually read the Coaches Casebook and you read Love's Executioner, you'll see how Kim and I, this is one of Kim's favourite books as well, Kim and I, that style of Yellon has come through in how we've written the Coaches Casebook. I'm putting number seven, Product Leadership, by Bamfield and Ericsson. It was one of the books that inspired Product Mastery, I suppose my third book, Product Mastery, because it also looked into the mindsets of product managers. But from a different angle, so it looked a little bit more at case studies of successful product managers and trying to learn from what they've done, which is really helpful. An interesting read, and certainly again if you like learning about people, real people, then that's a good insight book. Number six is Drive by Daniel Pink, a classic. Most people watching this video will have probably come across Dan Pink's stuff in one form or another. He's done a few more recent books since this, but it's still a classic, underpinning the idea of what motivates people in complex environments, cognitively challenging work in knowledge economies, which is a bedrock of the philosophy of agile and scrum being successful. And so any leader who's looking to create an agile culture needs to really understand what motivates people. Number five, I'm picking Influence by Robert Cialdini. Cialdini is a slightly controversial character in some respects, and there's an argument for is this really influence that he's teaching, or is it manipulation? I guess you have to make your own minds up. But there's no getting away from the fact that on a daily basis, many, many people are trying to influence you, whether it's something as obvious as the adverts you see on the telly or the billboards, or your colleagues at work that want you to do something, or your manager that wants you to do something, or a customer that wants you to do something. You are being influenced many times every day, and you probably need to influence people every day. And knowing how people are influenced, knowing how people make decisions is useful, even if it's just to protect yourself from manipulation. But obviously I work with a lot of change agents and leaders who are looking to create some change within their organization. So knowing what sways people, knowing where people's trigger points are, knowing what tips people from, yeah, I think it's an idea, but a good idea, but I haven't really, I can't really go with it. To, yeah, right, let's give it a go. Knowing that is really powerful. Number four, and this might be an interesting choice for people, doesn't really have a name as such. I'm calling it Bicablo because that is, I think it's the company that makes it. And it's a picture book, really, and I'll give you a little bit of background to this. So when I was starting off as a facilitator, as a scrum master, and then as a trainer, there was a lot of time where I was spent stood at the front of a room in front of a flip chart. Because I'm not really a sort of Microsoft PowerPoint kind of guy, I would do a lot of writing on flip charts. And my handwriting was terrible. It made my flip charts very messy, very difficult to read, and really people just couldn't wait to get rid of them, you know, throw them away. And I thought, well, if I'm going to develop myself and become a better trainer, a better facilitator, one of the things that I really need to work on is my presentation skills, not just verbally, but also with the pen and paper. So I invested a bit of time and money in this graphic facilitation. And the Bicablo pictures were really useful for me because I found it quite difficult to think of things, to draw. For me, it was more of a challenge of thinking of actually drawing. So having this almost catalog of ideas, of templates, of examples that I could pull out, and it's indexed, so I can say, oh, I want something for strategy. I look up strategy and it's got some ideas for what might visually represent strategy. Really, really useful for me. Book three, I've got How to Change Anything by Professor Damian Hughes. I'm a big fan of Damian, and some of you will have seen Damian speak at the Scrum Gathering this year. I think he's written about 11 books at the time of recording this video, and I probably could have picked any of them. But I'm picking this one because it's the one that stands out most for me. The title always quite grabbed me, you know, how to change anything. It was at a time when I kind of still believed the statement that people don't like change. And, you know, I don't believe that anymore. I think people do like change. I think people just don't like it when change is forced upon them and they don't feel in control, and they don't feel that change is achievable. So how to change anything, I was like, yeah, how can you change anything? For me as well, but also in terms of my role. And Damian writes really, really well. It's really easy to read, really easy to understand. The books are quite small and to the point. You don't find him like a 500 page book just to make one point, gets to it. It's reasonable, there's challenges in there. So if you're looking at interesting and getting change made, look at one of Damian's books. At two, I've got Time to Think by Nancy Klein. And what first grabbed me about this was there was a quote, I don't know what edition the book was, but there was a quote on the front page from somebody at British Telecom. And at the time I has not long left British Telecom. And my thought was, this does not remind me of British Telecom. So basically, I really won't do it justice here. But the main premise of this book is give yourself and give other people time to think. Stop, enjoy and embrace a little bit of silence, a little bit of thinking time every day within your meetings and better results will flow. And I thought that just doesn't match my experience of BT. But obviously it's a huge company and I wasn't in the same pockets. But that's what grabbed my attention. And I was naturally one of those people. When I first started being a scrum master, the first thing I needed to learn was how to be quiet and how to count to 10. I remember somebody telling me just count to 10. So I can count to 10. No, no, actually count to 10. And before I responded, because I found it too difficult to avoid providing a solution or giving an answer when there was a problem or a question that needed answering. And every time I did that, the best that I could do was repeat something that I knew. And if I'm listening, I might learn something. But equally if I'm listening, then somebody else has the opportunity to come up with a solution and their solution, generally speaking, is more likely to be successful than mine. And that's not because I'm an idiot, although we might debate that point. It's because it's their solution. And people are more invested in their solution being successful than they can ever be in my solution being successful. They want to be right. They don't necessarily care if I'm right. So I did a workshop with Nancy Klein years ago and it was a great workshop. Lots of, lots of learning from it. And I took one really, really thing that's stuck with me forever since. And it's one of my favorite quotes of all time now, which is, when you're thinking about whether to say something, so you're in a coaching conversation or you're just talking to somebody, ask yourself the question, is what I'm about to say more important than what they're about to think? And if it isn't, shut up and let them think. And that was a really difficult skill for me to learn. And it's something that I still have to work on. But that time to think was the sort of light bulb moment for me in terms of to bring that into practice. So if you find yourself in a coaching role or looking to increase engagement and ownership and other people, maybe time to think. And my number one book, and I feel a bit bad about putting this at number one because it's a little bit cliche because it's such a famous book, is The Goal by Eli Goldra. But it was one of those groundbreaking, mind-blowing books for me back at British Telecom. I wasn't a big reader. I never have been a big reader at school and university and just the prospect of a thick book is quite daunting. And if any of you have seen The Goal, it is quite a thick book. So relatively early on in my reading career, that was a really daunting prospect. And it was about, really, if we're honest, quite a dry subject. Manufacturing processes, optimizing, being more efficient, more effective, lean, continuous improvement, which aren't really sexy topics when you're in your early 20s. And yet, despite all that, I read that book so quickly and I recommended it to so many people and I went to look at it on my shelf and I realized I'd given it to someone else again and so I'd have to go and buy myself another copy. It's a great way of explaining the real fundamental underpinning of lean and a lot of the agile concepts. And it's in a novel format. And I said I'd come back to this idea of storytelling. So Goldratt, what he did amazingly well there was he took a dry subject and he put it into the guise of a novel, a story, something, a narrative that I could understand even though I'd never worked in a manufacturing plant and I probably never will, I could understand what was going on. He showed me the challenges through the eyes of the protagonist and I could imagine being that person and seeing those challenges and coming up with the same initial incorrect solutions that he did. It's been an inspiration for a lot of people and a lot of books including myself, hence the way that I wrote Scrum Mastery and Product Mastery with case studies and stories and people, actual scenarios. So there we go. There's my top ten books. It was actually quite hard to get down to ten. There are so many books that could have been on that list and I am an artist about what number to put them and in the end I thought well if I did this video again for a time or a year's time it could well be a different top ten but there it is right now my top ten books that have inspired me in the past and that are still inspiring me now. I hope that was useful for you. All that's left is for you to like the video if you haven't already subscribe to the channel, tell people about it and tune in next time for another episode of Jeff's Top Ten Tips. Thank you.