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A collection of my writings, articles, and resources that is not represented on other pages.

Articles & Coverage

Productivity

Mark’s Uncurated Reading List

A collection of books I’ve found useful over the years. Some have personal notes.

Marketing

  • Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries & Jack Trout
  • The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout

Strategy

  • Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
  • Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach by Charles W. L. Hill
  • The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
  • Good to Great by Jim Collins

Negotiating

  • Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury

Leadership

  • The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
  • Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson — “If only he’d realized he could have stopped being a jerk many years earlier”

Misc

  • Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  • What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
  • Sapiens
  • Deep Work by Cal Newport
  • Moneyball by Michael Lewis
  • Slack by Tom Demarco
  • Built to Last
  • The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive
  • The Five Temptations of a CEO
  • Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove
  • Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go by Beverly Kaye & Julie Winkle Giulioni

Software Development

  • Dynamics of Software Development by Jim McCarthy — “More extreme than Kent Beck! A very readable book. Some of his insights are really profound, others are just plain wacky. This book has the most pretentious bibliography I’ve ever seen.”
  • Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck — “This book presents extreme points of view — so naturally I strongly disagree with some ideas and strongly agree with others. A good book because it makes people think!”
  • Rapid Development by Steve McConnell — “This is a rigorous great book, filled with useful stuff. The best practices section at the back is the best part.”
  • Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

Design Patterns

  • Design Patterns (Gang of Four) — “Great stuff, but perhaps suffers from over expectations from the community. If you’ve written lots of systems you’ve used all these patterns before — now you have names for the patterns.”
  • Design Patterns Explained
  • Head First Design Patterns

Operations & Lean

  • The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
  • Lean Solutions by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones
  • The Machine that Changed the World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos

Programming

  • Code Complete
  • The Pragmatic Programmer — “Nothing profound, just a good straightforward description of how good programmers use tools to create solid systems — the kind of thing you often don’t learn at school.”

Perl

  • Learning Perl
  • Programming Perl
  • Perl Cookbook

C++

  • The C++ Programming Language — “The ultimate reference for the language itself, though I wouldn’t take the design stuff in this book too seriously. Not for the beginner.”
  • Effective C++
  • More Effective C++ — “Good practical style for using C++ well. Read them!”
  • Exceptional C++ — “Challenging C++ stuff. A great read for the experienced C++ programmer — you are guaranteed to learn things you didn’t think of before.”

Java

  • The Elements of Java Style
  • Effective Java by Joshua Bloch
  • Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz

Product & Business

  • Crossing the Chasm
  • The Signal and the Noise
  • How to Measure Anything
  • Thinking Statistically
  • The Lean Startup
  • The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
  • The Product Manager’s Desk Reference
  • Take Charge Product Management
  • 42 Rules of Product Management
  • Inspired — Create Products Customers Love
  • Rocket Surgery Made Easy
  • Don’t Make Me Think
  • Inspired: How to Create Products People Love
  • Tuned In
  • Where Good Ideas Come From
  • Rework — “Written for business, but can be applied to PM.”

Amazon’s Leadership Suggested Reading List (Circa 2018)

This is the reading list that was circulated among Amazon’s leadership teams when I was there. Books marked with (S-Team Book Club) were selected for the senior leadership book club.

S-Team Recommendations

  • Creation: Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand (S-Team Book Club)
  • The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
  • Moneyball by Michael Lewis (S-Team Book Club)
  • Slack by Tom Demarco (S-Team Book Club)
  • The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (S-Team Book Club)
  • Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (S-Team Book Club)
  • Built to Last by Jim Collins
  • Good to Great by Jim Collins
  • The Three Signs of a Miserable Job by Patrick Lencioni
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
  • Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni
  • The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni
  • The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni

Benchmarking

  • Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove

Career

  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey
  • Fearless Change by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising
  • Getting Things Done by David Allen
  • Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go by Beverly Kaye & Julie Winkle Giulioni (Talent & Development Team Book Club)

Communication

  • On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Customer Experience

  • Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service by Ari Weinzweig

Development

  • Dynamics of Software Development by Jim McCarthy (S-Team Book Club) — “More extreme than Kent Beck!”
  • Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck
  • Rapid Development by Steve McConnell
  • Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

Design

  • Design Patterns (Gang of Four)
  • Design Patterns Explained
  • Head First Design Patterns

Inventory Management

  • The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox (S-Team Book Club)
  • Lean Solutions by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones (S-Team Book Club)
  • The Machine that Changed the World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos (S-Team Book Club)

Presentations

  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte — “Will change the way you look at and think about display of data”
  • The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte

Programming

  • Code Complete
  • The Pragmatic Programmer — “Nothing profound, just a good straightforward description of how good programmers use tools to create solid systems.”

Perl

  • Learning Perl, Programming Perl, Perl Cookbook — “No serious Perl programmer should do without these books.”

C++

  • The C++ Programming Language — “The ultimate reference for the language itself.”
  • Effective C++ and More Effective C++ — “Good practical style for using C++ well. Read them!”
  • Exceptional C++ — “Challenging C++ stuff. A great read for the experienced C++ programmer.”

Java

  • The Elements of Java Style
  • Effective Java by Joshua Bloch
  • Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz

Project Management

  • Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell
  • Working Backwards

SCRUM

  • Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle — “A bit old now but still stands as the Scrum bible.”
  • Agile Project Management with Scrum — “A bit newer and has a wider scope.”

Selection Management

  • The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

Software Management

  • The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins
  • Peopleware (S-Team Book Club) — “Still a timely look at the biggest issues in software development, the sociological ones”
  • The Mythical Man-Month (S-Team Book Club) — “A classic! Amazing how lessons from the IBM 360 are still relevant, and how the same mistakes are made over and over”

Vendor Management

  • Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury

Product Management

  • Crossing the Chasm
  • The Signal and the Noise
  • How to Measure Anything
  • Thinking Statistically
  • The Lean Startup
  • Steve Jobs
  • The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
  • The Product Manager’s Desk Reference
  • Take Charge Product Management
  • 42 Rules of Product Management
  • Inspired — Create Products Customers Love
  • Rocket Surgery Made Easy
  • Don’t Make Me Think
  • The Innovator’s Dilemma
  • Inspired: How to Create Products People Love
  • Tuned In
  • Where Good Ideas Come From
  • Rework — “Written for business, but can be applied to PM.”