Top 10 Books About Business, Technology, and Change [Best Books for Digital Transformation]

in order to educate yourself about

digital transformation and other types

of change initiatives there are a number

of books out there that can help you

learn the frameworks and the concepts

you need to know to be successful but

what are those best books that you

should be reading to prepare for a

transformation that's what i want to

talk about here today

my name is eric kimberling and i'm the

ceo of third stage consulting we're an

independent consulting firm that helps

clients throughout the world with their

digital transformation journeys starting

at a young age i've loved reading books

and i always try to immerse myself in as

much reading as possible and

being in the digital transformation

space is no different

learning new technologies learning about

change management digital strategy

process improvement business models in

general all those things are important

to successful digital transformations so

what i want to do today is talk about

the 10 books that were most influential

in helping me understand the concepts

needed to be successful in digital

transformation and i'm going to go

through these books in no particular

order but these are the ones that are

most important over the last several

decades that i've been reading books

about transformation and one caveat to

this list of books is that these aren't

necessarily books that are about digital

transformation in particular these are

books that look outside the realm of

technology and look at change and

businesses in general but these are the

ones that i think are sort of the

cross-functional

methodologies and frameworks that are

really important to understand to be

successful in digital transformation

[Music]

the first book on my list is the goal by

elihu goldratt and this is a book i

actually read in the mid 90s when i was

getting my master's degree in business

and i really liked this book even to

this day i think it's very relevant in

terms of understanding operations supply

chain business processes in general and

this is the book that introduced the

concept of theory of constraints to

business and it's also a great book to

understand how an entire supply chain

works looking at the big picture of an

entire operations and entire business

and really maximizing

the operations and maximizing the value

that you get out of those operations

it's also a book that focuses on

continuous improvement and how you can

continuously improve your business

processes and your operations and it

provides some good

frameworks for doing so and the other

reason why i like this book is because

it's written as a fable so it's not an

academic book it's not theoretical it's

actually telling a story a fictional

story from a manager's perspective who's

trying to lead change within an

organization so that's why the goal is

on my list

[Music]

next on the list is scaling up

excellence by robert sutton and this is

a more recent book

of the 10 that are on my list and the

reason i like this book is because it's

about scaling an organization but it's

not focused solely on operations and

technology and the sorts of things you

typically think about when you think

about scaling an organization it

actually focuses more on creating a

culture

of innovation in a culture of scale and

a culture that will allow you to scale

and so for example it talks a lot about

how you can spread excellence and spread

some of the best practices within your

organization throughout the entire

organization so this is a great book for

a larger organization that might have

pockets of great ideas and pockets of

best practices throughout the

organization but hasn't yet figured out

how they can leverage those best

practices across their entire operations

so those are some of the reasons why

scaling up excellence is on my list

[Music]

next on the list is e-myth revisited by

michael gerber and this is a great book

that i actually read about 10 years ago

but i think the book was written

probably 20 or more years ago and it's a

great book that's written from the

perspective of a small business that's

trying to scale for growth and some of

the bottlenecks and some of the

scalability issues that smaller growing

organizations face

but what i found is these concepts in

this book are extremely relevant to any

sort of organization that's experiencing

growth so even if you're a mid-size or

even a larger organization going through

growth or if you're a mature

organization that's struggling to figure

out how to continue growth and to return

to that era of growth

this book e-myth revisit is a great way

to lay out some of the fundamental

concepts of how you need to be thinking

about growth in general the other reason

i like this book especially as it

relates to digital transformation is

because they talk about some of the core

concepts that are so essential to

digital transformation but they're not

talking about it in the context of

digital transformation so in other words

they're talking about things like

operational repeatability and having

predictable and documented business

processes those are just basic

fundamental aspects of business that a

lot of organizations overlook especially

when they're going through a digital

transformation they tend to focus more

on the technology rather than the

operations so for that reason i love

this book as a good foundational

understanding for what it takes to be

successful with digital transformation

[Music]

next up my list is good great by jim

collins

and i love this book because it talks

about the difference between great

companies and mediocre and even

unsuccessful companies

and what i particularly love about this

book is that it's very academically

based and it's quantitatively based in

terms of research that this team did

over the course of several years looking

at top performing organizations and more

mediocre and lesser performing

organizations and what they did is they

looked quantitatively and qualitatively

at what makes

the successful company successful and

the unsuccessful ones unsuccessful

and they really bring out a bunch of

good concepts in terms of what it takes

to build a great company and to

create sustained long-term business

value in an organization

and this book may sound like it has

nothing to do with digital

transformation but it has everything to

do with digital transformation because

not all organizations and most

organizations don't think about these

things but they should be as they're

going through their transformations so

most of the concepts in this book are

things that you should understand as

you're thinking about how can we create

a vision for our digital transformation

and how can we execute on that vision in

a way that allows us to be a higher

performing organization

sounds simple enough but so many

organizations forget that nuance or that

purpose for the digital transformation

and that's why this book is so relevant

to digital transformations today

[Music]

next on the list is in search of

excellence by tom peters and this is a

classic business book that was written

in the 80s so it's roughly 40 years old

and it's actually the first business

book that i really fell in love with

that i thought was super critical and

super fundamental to understanding

business in general and it's a book that

i read in undergrad while i was studying

business and it's a great book

especially if you're starting out in

business maybe if you're earlier in your

career it's a great way to talk about

what makes great organization successful

it's much like the last book on our list

jim collins is good to great

but obviously this was written earlier

and it gets it even more fundamental

core concepts of what makes good

organizations and high performing

organizations different from other types

of organizations in the world so again

sounds like nothing to do with digital

transformation but if we're viewing

transformation as something that should

improve our business and make us better

make us a higher performing organization

than we are today in search of

excellence can be a great resource for

understanding that

[Music]

concept so i've talked about five books

so far that i think are extremely

relevant to digital transformation but

there's five more i want to cover at a

high level the first one on this

last five of sort of the lightning round

review is innovator's dilemma by clayton

christensen and i love this book

especially if you're in the high tech

industry

in a product intensive organization or a

company that's really focused on

innovation innovators dilemma is a

really good book to understand

what it takes to be successful with

innovation but more importantly it talks

about why speed and being first to

market isn't necessarily the most

important thing when it comes to being a

more innovative organization

instead the book focuses on what makes

the most successful and most innovative

companies successful

and different than the organizations

that might have been faster to market

might have had a really good idea that

preceded the other more successful

companies but focuses on why those

initial early pioneers of a certain

vertical didn't succeed but others did

for example the book talks a lot about

technology and how sometimes the

bleeding edge technology the first to

market is actually the first to fail

and what happens is sometimes those

early pioneers of certain types of

innovations they overshoot what the

needs are for the customers so they get

too far ahead of where customers heads

or needs are right now but the more

successful organizations hit it more on

the bull's-eye in terms of what the

customers need when they need it and

they get that innovation right so it's

more about getting the right kind of

innovation not necessarily more

innovation another great book to think

about is blue ocean strategy by w chan

kim

and this is a more recent book in our

top 10 list and this is probably the

most high level strategy type of book in

our list here and the reason i really

like this book is because it forces you

to really think about

what types of markets you want to be

competing in as a business so a lot of

times businesses get fixated on

competing in what the author would call

the red ocean which is the bloody red

competitive ocean that's well dominated

by a bunch of players it's highly

competitive and what the book focuses on

is helping organizations understand how

they can move out of the red ocean into

the blue ocean and the blue ocean

strategy is basically creating a niche

for yourself or opening up into a new

market that doesn't have any competition

so it's less bloody it's less red and

more of a blue ocean so that's a reason

why blue ocean strategy is such a great

book to understand especially if you're

thinking about your business model and

how you can improve that in the future

another great book is tipping point by

malcolm gladwell and i love this book

because every great

sociological

advance in history has some sort of

tipping point so as society or culture

or an idea in general reaches the masses

they inevitably reach a tipping point

along the way where it's not overnight

that these

new ideas are adopted by society but

they actually reach a tipping point and

something causes them to suddenly reach

with the masses or the mainstream

and when you think about digital

transformation you're trying to

introduce new ideas new business

processes new roles and responsibilities

new technologies a lot of new things

within the organization

so you need to find that tipping point

of adoption how can we reach that

tipping point where people actually move

from resisting

the changes to actually embracing those

changes and so the tipping point

provides a lot of

good best practices to help from a

change perspective during digital

transformation

the next one on my list is the five

dysfunctions of a team by patrick

lencioni and this is a great book

especially as you think about how to

build a transformation team how you're

going to involve stakeholders throughout

the organization and it talks about how

teams interact in general and how from

more of a change management or a

cultural perspective

organizations interact and can be most

effective from a team perspective so

five dysfunctions of a team is a great

book as well and finally competing for

the future by gary hamel this is a great

book that talks about from an operations

and a strategy perspective how

organizations can be more successful and

again it gives a great framework that's

relevant to any sort of transformation

as you think about how can we improve

our business and make our business

better as a result of the transformation

we're going through so these are just 10

of the books that i found to be most

relevant in my experience but there's a

lot of books i haven't read there's a

lot of books that i have intentionally

not included in this top 10 list and you

may have other ideas as well of books

that you've read that you thought are

particularly relevant to transformations

or maybe even business in general so i'd

love to hear in your comments below what

books have you read that you found to be

most helpful in enabling a digital

transformation or any sort of change

initiative

and another resource that i'd point you

to if you're looking for reading would

be to go to our resource center on our

website and download some of the content

that we have and i've included a link to

that resource center and on that

resource center you can download a

number of ebooks and white papers and

blogs and things of that nature that

will help you through your digital

transformation most notably our digital

transformation report which is an annual

report we put out each year and it talks

about best practices behind digital

transformations and change in general as

well as independent software rankings

digital strategy best practices and

things of that nature so i encourage you

to check that out as well so i hope you

found this information useful and hope

you have a great day

you