Some authors take multiple books to fully flesh out the ideas outlined in the first, so there are some doubles recommended here.
I also found it impossible to rank books, so instead I took roughly the top 20, grouped them into themes, and then ranked the themes based on how important I think they are.
1. Deming is the primary writer of the type of management we need to be competitive: Deming, The New Economics & Out of the Crisis.
2. There is a wide variety of ways for humans to organise. Nobody is forcing the default capitalist bureaucracy on you, so be creative: Graeber, Bullshit Jobs & Dawn of Everything & The Democracy Project.
3. How people are motivated: Pink, Drive.
4. How to create a high-trust, less authoritarian, open, collaborative environment within a traditional hierarchy: Marquet, Leadership is Language.
5. Communication: Voss, Never Split the Difference. Faber, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen.
6. How to help organisations who don't want to admit what their problem is: Weinberg, Secrets of Consulting.
7. How to structure organisations and processes to deliver maximum value: Reinertsen, Principles of Product Development Flow. Ward, Lean Product and Process Development. Womack, Machine That Changed the World.
8. How to innovate cheaply: Westrum, Sidewinder.
9. How to estimate things properly: Hubbard, How to Measure Anything. Tetlock, Superforecasting. Savage, The Flaw of Averages.
10. How to train people to be experts at things: Hoffman, Accelerated Learning.
11. How people fail at decisions: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow & Noise.
I had to leave out a few about statistics, causality inference, project portfolio investment that didn't make the top 20 cut.
I also found it impossible to rank books, so instead I took roughly the top 20, grouped them into themes, and then ranked the themes based on how important I think they are.
1. Deming is the primary writer of the type of management we need to be competitive: Deming, The New Economics & Out of the Crisis.
2. There is a wide variety of ways for humans to organise. Nobody is forcing the default capitalist bureaucracy on you, so be creative: Graeber, Bullshit Jobs & Dawn of Everything & The Democracy Project.
3. How people are motivated: Pink, Drive.
4. How to create a high-trust, less authoritarian, open, collaborative environment within a traditional hierarchy: Marquet, Leadership is Language.
5. Communication: Voss, Never Split the Difference. Faber, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen.
6. How to help organisations who don't want to admit what their problem is: Weinberg, Secrets of Consulting.
7. How to structure organisations and processes to deliver maximum value: Reinertsen, Principles of Product Development Flow. Ward, Lean Product and Process Development. Womack, Machine That Changed the World.
8. How to innovate cheaply: Westrum, Sidewinder.
9. How to estimate things properly: Hubbard, How to Measure Anything. Tetlock, Superforecasting. Savage, The Flaw of Averages.
10. How to train people to be experts at things: Hoffman, Accelerated Learning.
11. How people fail at decisions: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow & Noise.
I had to leave out a few about statistics, causality inference, project portfolio investment that didn't make the top 20 cut.