My 10 Favorite Books in 2023

When I look back at another year that goes by, what remains are the meaningful moments of joy, pride and insight, the new people I met, the new things I learned and the books I read. I read more fiction this year, but the majority of the books were still a mix of leadership, personal development and business. It wasn’t easy to pick my favorite 10, so I organized them into categories and picked a couple in each one.

?Novels

• Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus. This book resonated with me at so many levels and I loved the main heroine, Elizabeth Zott for the complex character that she was. It’s a beautiful story, inspiring, funny and profoundly human.
• Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, is a story about friendship, evolution, human diversity and video games. Zevin is a real wizard when it comes to character building and human psychology. I was simply fascinated.?

?Autobiography

• Open, by Andre Agassi is about becoming and evolving both as a top performer and a better version of oneself. I knew little about Agassi’s background and I liked the style and the sincerity of his writing. If you need some motivation in your life to dust yourself up and try again, this is the book for you.?
• That Will Never Work, by Marc Randolph. We sometimes have?an idealized image of what a successful business is, but we don’t always hear about the long road to success. This is a very honest book written by the co-founder of Netflix and I liked how it demystified many wrong ideas about what makes a successful business and how to build something great from an idea,?through hard work and a lot of trial and error.?

?Organizations and teams

• The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, by Daniel Coyle explores why certain organizations and teams are effective while others aren’t. By exploring ?many real life stories, Coyle manages to deconstruct what makes a great culture. He?builds a practical framework that can help leaders?create more belonging, embrace vulnerability and establish?a shared purpose in their teams.??
• The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki is a book about collective intelligence. It explores how a diverse group of individuals can collectively make better decisions than even the smartest individual among them. The stories that Surowiecki chose are fascinating and come from very diverse fields of expertise. This is a book I want to reread in 2024.?
• Humanocracy. Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini. When organizations grow larger and more complex, they need structure and processes to operate effectively and avoid chaos. But this also leads to more bureaucracy, lots of low value activities and emloyees who are disconnected from customers and markets. Humanocracy presents a framework for?creating organizational ecosystems that recognize and foster every individual's potential and talents and lead to high performance and profitability.?

?Personal development and mindset

• Creative Confidence. Unleashing the Creativity Potential Within Us All, by Tom Kelley and David Kelley, founder of IDEO U and the Stanford Institute of Design, known as the d.school. This book was such an inspiration, showing that we are all born creative, but we need to find courage to uncover and activate that creativity we lost somewhere on the way. Creative confidence gives readers some practical tools and a framework that anyone can use.
• 13 Things Mentally Strong Women Don’t Do, by Amy Morin. Relying on her rich experience as a psychotherapist and also on her personal life experiences, Morin is able to articulate and explain complex issues that affect women’s self confidence and wellbeing, in?a very simple and insightful way. I recommend this book to any woman who wants to better understand herself and to any man who wants to be more supportive towards the important women in his life.
• Efffortless. Make It Easier to do What Matters Most, by Greg McKeown. I must admit that after reading Essentialism, I was a bit skeptical about this one. I thought it was like the sequal of a great movie that often leaves you dissapointed. But I liked it as much as the first one. Also one I plan to reread next year so I can apply more tactics.?“Effortless?offers actionable advice for making the most essential activities the easiest ones, so you can achieve the results you want, without burning out. Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing them in the right way. It's about a whole new way to work and live.”?gregmckeown.com

The full list from my 2023 Goodreads Reading challenge here.