Reading List

This is a quick read but very inspiring. The author has a novel perspective and fresh insights.

This book will give you lots to think about regarding how your business makes money. The content is very deep but is presented as a narrative. I have the audio book and listen to it every couple of years and get new insights each time.

Black Swans are highly improbable events, that shake our understanding of the way things are. I found this to be a fascinating survey of various schools of philosophy and it certainly changed the way I look at the world. It can be a little heady at times, but is certainly thought provoking.

Everyone who deals with clients and/or project work needs to read this. I frequently flip through this book and it reminds me why I love the work that I do. This book inspired me to move into more client-facing work. A couple of great lines from this book that I quote often are “I am my Clients” and “Do cool stuff every day–or die trying!” Tom Peters can be very irreverent, but that’s what makes his books so provocative.

Miller’s framework for clarifying your brand message is immediately practical. The StoryBrand approach helps you position your customer as the hero and your brand as the guide—a simple but powerful shift in perspective. I used the principles from this book to help design the LucidTruthTechnologies.com website, and the framework made it much easier to clarify what we do and why it matters. I have the hardcover and found it worth marking up for reference. There’s a newer version (Building a StoryBrand 2.0) out now that I’m sure is even better, but the original edition gave me exactly what I needed to get started.

Executive presence is a textbook. It is jam packed with practical information for any executive and deserves to be studied. I bought it on Kindle but then also bought the hardcover so that I can highlight it and mark it up. Topics covered include reading people and influencing the perceptions of others as well as branding and online reputation management. The book includes very interesting concepts and applications from research in the field of organizational behavior.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is trying to differentiate their service business, particularly chapter 9. It will change how you think about work. The authors discuss the radical idea of creating Transformational Experiences for clients.

This book makes the point that we all want to be fascinated and we want others to think that we are fascinating. There are seven fascination triggers–Lust, Mystique. Alarm. Prestige, Power, Vice, and Trust. The author has an online test on her website to help you determine which triggers you respond to. This book shows how marketers “push our buttons” and how you and your brands can use this insight to become more fascinating.

When you lose all track of time you may be experiencing a flow state. Most athletes and programmers have experienced this. This author has studied the conditions that are conducive to flow–very interesting. I was originally attracted to this book because of my study of martial arts, but the content is applicable to all dimensions of life and work.

This book is all about being real with clients. He argues that being vulnerable with your clients creates strong bonds of loyalty. He states that however, if you have to keep confessing screw-ups–it’s not a vulnerability issue, it’s a competency issue. I loved the book. It was well written and very engaging.

This has been a great investment to help keep me organized and enables me to “live in The Present.” I have also bought the Outlook Add-In, which I use to track and feed an enormous amount of monkeys. It dovetails with many of the other books on my list, but provided some valuable missing information. Until reading this book, I had never been able to use Outlook’s task functionality because I would abandon them after continuing to generate paper lists and post-it notes.

This book has shaped how I view the development of software for a niche markets. The book does tend to be a little redundant as the author gives multiple examples of how his concept can be extended into various markets and business models.

I am a big fan of the one minute manager books in general, but this one is required reading for anyone on my team–so that we have a common language to use in discussing how work gets done. Early in my career, I listened to a set of audio tapes called “Managing Management Time” by William Onkin, a co-author of this book that made a huge impact on how I lead organizations.

Michalowicz flips traditional accounting on its head with a simple but powerful approach: take profit first, then allocate what’s left to expenses. Instead of the old formula of sales minus expenses equals profit, Profit First uses multiple bank accounts to automatically allocate percentages of revenue to profit, owner’s pay, taxes, and operating expenses. This common-sense system forces you to live within your means and ensures profitability from day one. I now follow this approach to managing money at Lucid Truth Technologies, and it’s transformed how I think about cash flow and business sustainability.

Read everything that you can by Kiyosaki. This author and Tom Peters inspired me to participate in the launch of Visonex. The Rich Dad books caused me to rethink how I look at money.

This book makes the ancient art of rhetoric accessible and immediately applicable. Heinrichs breaks down how to structure arguments that actually persuade—not just win debates—by understanding when to appeal to logic, emotion, or character. As someone who teaches and presents regularly, I found the frameworks for identifying core issues and building credibility particularly valuable. The examples from Aristotle to Homer Simpson make the concepts stick. I bought the paperback so I could reference the specific techniques and mark up the sections on ethos, pathos, and logos.

I discovered this book at a used book store and couldn’t put it down. Recommended reading for hard-charging “Type-A” people who need to remember to stop & smell the roses.

This book will give you a new perspective on off-shoring. The author’s premise is “everything that can be outsourced will be.” You need to read this to understand the competitive forces shaping our economy.

This is another one of Ted’s books, and it’s a practical guide for anyone considering the leap into cybersecurity consulting. Ted covers everything from getting started and finding clients to pricing your services and managing the business side of consulting. The book is filled with real-world advice from someone who’s been there. I typically recommend this to anyone who mentions they might want to become a consultant—it’s the roadmap I wish I’d had when I started. I am honored to be a case study in the book, and I’m grateful to Ted for including my experience alongside other practitioners who’ve made the transition.

Ted is a good friend of mine and fellow SANS instructor. This book cuts through the noise and provides practical, actionable advice for cybersecurity professionals who want to advance their careers beyond just being good at their technical work. The reality is that doing your job well isn’t enough—you need to build your brand, network effectively, speak at conferences, write, and create visibility. I always recommend this book to people who ask me how to rise to the next level in cyber. To this day, when I flip through it, I am reminded of ideas of how I can elevate my game.

This book has been a tremendous resource for understanding how the various types of testing can integrate very nicely into agile development methodologies.

This book has lots of great advice for scaling up your software development systems.

Eric Sink’s book contains several well written essays on software development and the issues of a small software development shop. Anyone involved with software development will find the essays insightful and refreshing.

This book contains the incredible wisdom of Frederick Brooks. Brooks was a software project manager during the early days of software development at IBM. He coined the well-loved project management phrase, “Nine women can’t make a baby in a month.” His book discusses many of the problems that agile development methodologies attempt to address. His wisdom and use of metaphors makes the book quite readable.

A good quick read on the process of figuring out what you want the software that you are developing to do. The author suggests that you shift the focus to the conversation with your users and that you capture the requirements in the form of test statements that are related to the user story.