My Book Reading List

Forever changed the way I think about risk, probability and complex solutions. Failures are not anomalies but outcomes and redundancy is complexity.

Disorder is the source of insight. Focus where the system is breaking, iterate, and improve. Don’t just endure failure, adapt through it. People often hide failure; we should surface it, learn from it, and repair fast.

I read The Goal early in my career, and across data, sales forecasting, SCM, and manufacturing one lesson stayed constant: every process has constraints. Goldratt taught me that instead of only adding capacity at the constraint, you must also manage what flows upstream into it.

In software, SaaS, and AI, I have repeatedly faced the tension where the next solution can cannibalize today’s high-margin business. This remains my go-to framework for balancing current optimization while investing in the next technology curve.

Geoffrey Moore built this directly on Christensen’s work. Four zones, one rule: the incubation zone does not compete for resources with the performance zone. Most companies get disrupted because leadership treats them as the same fight. This separates them.

Sharpened how I think about competitive advantage. Most businesses are strong for a moment. Helmer's seven powers show you which ones are actually durable and why. Separating businesses with real structural advantage from those just having a good run changes how you think about strategy, career, and where to place bets.

It is human nature to chase the leader and compete in the bloody battle of head-to-head competition. This book is fundamental on looking at the total addressable market and going to where others are not. Very much the Wayne Gretzky philosophy: skate to where the puck will be, not where it has been.

A classic of competitive strategy. Every book on market positioning written since draws from this one. Treacy and Wiersema's three disciplines give every function in the business a shared language for how you choose to compete: operational excellence, product leadership, or customer intimacy. Pick one. Absolutely foundational.

This is a great team read. Most of the time, when I am scaling growth, I am working with exceptionally lean teams that are carrying multiple priorities. This book becomes a team mantra: in everything we do or stop doing, does it make the boat go faster? Winning is often not one big breakthrough, but hundreds of infinitesimal moves executed well. It is amazing how much pride this mindset can bring to a team.

Nobody writes honestly about what it is actually like to run a company. Horowitz does. The gap between the business book version of leadership and the reality of making impossible calls, keeping a team together when everything is on fire, and doing things that have no good answer is enormous. This book closes that gap.

Eight CEOs, completely different industries, one common thread: they all thought about capital allocation differently from their peers. Thorndike's argument is that how you deploy what the business generates matters more than how much it generates. I read this as a CRO responsible for the top line — and it changed how I think about where to invest in growth and what return I should expect from every dollar spent acquiring and retaining customers.

The transcontinental railroad did not just connect two coasts. It reorganised American commerce for the next century. Every AI platform company right now is playing the same long game. The infrastructure that wins becomes the infrastructure everything else runs on.

This book was a Christmas present from my parents in my senior year of college. Tuchman's argument is simple: intelligent institutions repeatedly act against their own interests. The why is the lesson. Brilliantly written. Some of the best business books are not business books.

The research conclusion here changed how I build revenue teams: the best commercial performers are not relationship builders, they are challengers. They push back on the customer's thinking. In a market where buyers come in already informed, the edge is the ability to reframe the problem and teach something new. I have used this framework to rebuild revenue organisations more than once.

Applied in isolation, GTM is just another sales wrapper. Applied correctly, it aligns marketing, sales, product, and customer success to execute strategy together. This is a great team book for driving organisational pivots across every customer touchpoint. A mediocre GTM with full organisational execution is ten times better than a brilliant GTM that only has sales buy-in.