Books of the Year 2023
(Originally posted on LinkedIn): It’s become a habit each December for me to post about the best books that I read this year. For the fourth year, a selection of non-fiction books that I hope you might find interesting.
Starting with the topic of what is interesting, Russell Davies’s Do Interesting is a lovely meditation on curiosity, attention and sharing: I read it in a single sitting this week, and it has inspired some ideas for 2024. It’s also beautifully designed and produced by Do Books 👏
Hal Brands’s edited volume The New Makers of Modern Strategy is not a single sitting book: it’s an update of one of my undergraduate textbooks, which Kimberley Williams was kind enough to send me, and I’ve been dipping into it chapter by chapter.
Written by a former McKinsey consultant, John Horn’s Inside the Competitor’s Mindset is a highly practical look at competitive strategy, and one of a relatively small number of books that I’ve read for my doctoral research that I would also recommend to a general business audience.
Juxtaposed with a book by a consultant, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington’s The Big Con is a critical challenge on the role of the consulting industry in society.
Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge is a similarly critical view of our political system from a writer whose podcast has been a mainstay of my media diet this year (why yes, I am a middle aged centrist dad 😉).
AI has been one of the big themes of my consulting work this year and while my focus has been on tactical uses, the questions posed by Mustafa Suleyman’s book The Coming Wave (co-written by my friend Michael Bhaskar) have been in my mind since I read it.
Peter H. Wilson’s Iron and Blood is a military history of German-speaking Europe since 1500: not light reading, and not organised narratively, but especially interesting on the bits of European history that don’t feature in the UK curriculum.
Finally, on a more playful note, and ending as I began on a beautifully designed book, Eric Zimmerman’s The Rules We Break is a thoughtful and fun guide to how games help understand people, problems, systems and design. Thanks to John V Willshire for recommending this and several other good books through his posts this year.