This is an evergreen blog post maintained by Dr Junade Ali CEng FIET containing a list of the key resources used by Engprax to understand our approach in the various services we provide.
Marketing Brutal Simplicity of Thought - M&C Saatchi Internal training manual for M&C Saatchi marketing agencies - provides insight into the need to brutally simplify messages in order for them to be consumed. Great book for reading on branding. Don't expect think content with this book - starts with an opening speech and then photographic examples of the simplicity of thought.
Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist - Sally Hogshead Excellent book on how to write copy in order to fascinate, communicate and attract maximum value for a brand. Very useful for technical writing too.
Crossing the Chasm Book - Geoffrey Moore Classic book on marketing and product management for high-growth start-ups, with approaches used by companies backed by Y Combinator.
The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick How to conduct market research in a fair way to understand if your product is really viable, by specifically talking to customers.
Investigations The Fearless Organization - Amy C. Enmondson Insight into the necessity for people to be able to speak-up and raise the alarm when things go wrong.
The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail - Nick Wallis Insight into the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history, the Post Office Horizon IT Scandal.
This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends - Nicole Perlroth Classic book on cybersecurity. Broadly accurate from information I'm aware of.
Computer Science / Maths Foundation Mathematics for Computer Science: A Visual Approach - John Vince Introductory to understand mathematical concepts of Computer Science, useful for visual learners and also a great ongoing reference for an office environment.
Hello World - Hannah Fry Non-technical introduction into Artificial Intelligence and the reality of how these technologies are implemented.
Diplomacy / Intelligence Nine Lives: My Time As MI6's Top Spy Inside Al-Qaeda - Aimen Dean Biography of an MI6 spy who worked inside Al Qaeda. Fascinating insight into the world of espionage.
Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea Book from a British diplomat who served inside North Korea about his time there serving as a diplomat, and thoughts on handling the associated geopolitical situation. Fascinating read.
Psychology / Philosophy / Wellbeing Dopamine Nation - Dr Anna Lembke Insight into the pleasure-pain balance, and how too much pleasure and too little pain, can lead to pain. Insight into the neuroscience of this phenomena and real-world case studies of treating addiction.
Being You - Anil Seth Insight into the new science of consciousness, presents one of the most compelling insights into how human consciousness operates.
Happy - Derren Brown Introduction to stoic philosophy. See A Little Happier - Derren Brown for a shorter version.
A Book of Secrets: Finding comfort in a complex world - Derren Brown Fills in all the gaps of things which are missing from stoicism from Happy . Perhaps more valuable than the previous book, Happy , but that book should be read first to gain the necessary baseline information.
Essays on Free Knowledge - Larry Sanger Essays on the philosophy of knowledge from Wikipedia's ex-founder Larry Sanger - who has now turned his back on the project.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness Paperback - Richard H. Thaler, Cass R Sunstein How psychology can be used to influence decisions, and how it is used in nudge theory with public policy initiatives.
Continuous Improvement & Operational Excellence The Long Shot - Kate Bingham Dame Kate Bingham was responsible for the UK Vaccine Taskforce which led to the UK deploying a clinically approved COVID-19 vaccine before any other country in the world, with the fastest deployment of any G7 country. This book tells the story of how it was achieved.
The Goal - Dr Eliyahu Goldratt Classic book on continuous improvement and introduces the Theory of Constraints to improving. Goldratt has many subsequent books which are worth reading which extend on this knowledge.
Goldratt's Rules of Flow - Dr. Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag This book provides simple and actionable steps needed to transform any team, including software engineering teams using some fundamental rules of flow:
Avoid bad multitasking, control your WIP. If you don’t want to get stuck, verify full-kit before you get going. Triage to ensure you are working on the right priorities. Ensure synchronization between your tasks / people / resources. If you keep going back to the same projects and you don’t get the desired results, look into the option to increase the dosage. Avoid unnecessary rework by finding what causes it. Standardisation is recommended when improvising is costly. Abolish local optimum, global optimum is what matters. A Case Study in Community-Driven Software Adoption: How Google SRE Changed Its Behavior Without Changing Its Culture - Richard Bondi Those engaged in transformation projects often attempt to change organisational culture in order to achieve the change they want, this case study argues that there is a different and often easier way.
Management The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - Patrick Lencioni The dysfunctions that make teams dysfunctional. Great read. Would recommend reading much of the successor books by Lencioni and his public talks for further information on this.
The First 90 Days - Michael Watkins How to set yourself up for success in the first 90 days of starting a job.
Tribal Leadership - David Logan Not a book, but an excellent TED talk on what makes high functioning tribes .