Books which changed my life in 2021

This year was one of reflection. Covid-19 has become part of our life and a lot of people reconsidered what they wanted to do going forward. I did not change my reading habits, ingesting still an average of about 2 books a week since the year began. A lot of other things in my life have changed. In this post I picked a few books which influenced my professional life in 2021 more than the other. Some of these may be great stocking stuffers for your colleagues and friends in the upcoming holiday season.

The year started in a divided nation. Joe Biden became president, but people were divided along their strong opinions not giving an inch to opposing views. It is hard to recognize and admit that you are wrong. In business life, fear of losing your job may prevent you from speaking up about the wrongs you encounter. Adam Grant's "Think Again" is one of these books which helps to recognize mistakes you made, shows ways to correct them and praises the advantages of very successful organizations who encourage admission of failures and their corrections. It turns out that there are right ways deal with wrongs.

Major corrections and changes are taking place in the industry I have been working in for more than three decades by now. Larissa Zimberoff takes us in "Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley's Mission to Change What We Eat" on a tour to the R&D kitchens fueled by Silicon Valley venture capital with a current rundown of the new technologies and foods which attempt to disrupt the way we eat. Not every nutritional idea will succeed, but some will change the way we formulate our meals. This is even more timely right now, as we see Beyond Meats stock price falling and Belcampo Meat outright collapsing not even making it to their 10th business anniversary. Things are moving faster than ever. The lifecycles of the products on grocery retail shelves get shorter and menus in our restaurants are becoming more dynamic, more and more of them getting digitalized.

"Delivering the Digital Restaurant: Your Roadmap to the Future of Food" by Carl Orsbourne and Meredith Sandland talks about the changes we see on the other end of the supply chain. The rise of UberEats, Postmates, GrubHub and others have changed the way consumers get food and altered the economics of the food service industry. As I was driving yesterday to my favorite grocery store, I passed a 'chick-fil-a' food delivery vehicle indicating the desire of the chain to take back ownership of food delivery as part of restaurant operations. Carl and Meredith do a stellar job talking about the implications of these changes to food service establishments and show ways to mitigate these challenges and turn them into business opportunities.

A final book on change I would like to mention is "A World Without Email" by Cal Newport. Our workplace has changed over the past two decades and connects us ever closer via professional social media platforms (Slack, MS-Teams) and email. This book makes the case that these automation tools are becoming detrimental to our productivity in the office and makes a strong case to disconnect from the "always-on hyperactive hive mind" during work. Cal illustrates his observations with a lot of research and short biographies of progressive and successful forms of organizational alternatives.

By midyear, I changed my professional affiliation and joined Centric Software, the market leader for product lifecycle management (PLM) software for consumer goods. With all the changes happen, I wanted to be front-and-center part of helping my clients to change the way we eat and work and make their business more agile to adapt to these changes. To get a head start on my new endeavor, I binged on a series of books about PLM and some business biographies on fashion companies. Vivek Kale's "Enhancing Enterprise Intelligence" was standing out at that time. This is not a book you read for its stellar or entertaining writing, but for its content. Vivek puts together a range of treatises on all major parts of Enterprise Systems(ES), such as ERP, MES, CRM, SCM, BI and of course PLM. It is a great reminder on the role each of these systems play, how they play together and where the battle lines are drawn. Great information for people who buy or sell any of these big ticket software products and need a 10,000 ft view on the interplay of them.

When you start selling a new product or service, you need to be able to compensate for the lack of depth you may have in your new field. Even with my long career at CSB-System, I always faced sales opportunities with new and business requirements I never heard of before. The one thing which helps in almost all situations: profound business knowledge. Bernhard Marr's "Key Performance Indicators: The 75 measures every manager needs to know" is a reference book about KPI's. More people talk about them than actually understanding what they are and how they work and how they impact a business. It is very schematically structured and you encounter at times some very well known figures, but you also find on occasion a number that you may want to pursue in your line of duty. I even found 3 that applied to my new job, one traditional ("time-to-market") and two fairly unknown ("Innovation Pipeline Strength" and "Return on Innovation Investment (ROI^2)"), measures we help our clients to improve.

We also help our clients in their efforts to implement systems for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG). In "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need", Bill Gates takes a very analytical view at the problem we are all facing and dissects the numbers for each industry, reflects on the current technology available and illustrates what it takes to be climate neutral. This title is a special treat when you enjoy it as an audiobook read by Wil Wheaton, one of my favorite narrators and voice actors.

Last but not least another stellar audiobook performance: "Gap Selling" by Keenan. My job and my passion is selling technology investments to enterprises in the consumer goods space. In that profession, I like to listen once a year to a motivational speech about how to sell. Keenan reads the book himself with an utmost level of conviction and aggressiveness which makes your heart pumping a little faster and your blood boiling. It is like chugging down Red Bull from a fire hose, in the best tradition of the Wolf Jordan Belfort.

I hope you find something for you, for a friend or a colleague of yours. This was a personal tour of the year in books. If you would want a personal recommendation on books or enterprise software, feel free to reach out any time. Feel free to connect with me on goodreads for a complete list of books I recommend.