Patrick Diogenia's Recommended Reading
These are books I return to, recommend to colleagues, or simply wish more people in business had read. Some are explicitly about management or strategy; others are about power, institutions, persuasion, labor, or the peculiar things organizations persuade otherwise sensible people to do.
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If you are looking for a place to begin, these are a few of the books I recommend most strongly.
Deming is a useful antidote to the managerial instinct to blame individuals for problems created by systems. The book changed how I think about measurement, variation, incentives, and the considerable damage organizations can cause while earnestly trying to improve performance.
Ehrenreich punctures the comfortable fiction that low-wage work is simple work. The book is funny, angry, observant, and particularly good at showing how organizations transfer costs and uncertainty downward to the people least able to absorb them.
One of the books I would most like people to read before concluding that organizational dysfunction is caused by a few unusually bad managers. Jackall shows how incentives, hierarchy, ambiguity, and self-preservation can make perfectly ordinary people behave in ways they might never choose independently.
Sutherland is especially good at exposing the limits of excessively rational approaches to marketing and consumer behavior. I recommend it to anyone who has ever watched an organization optimize away the very thing that made an idea interesting.
One of my favorite accounts of what happens when strategy, ego, governance, celebrity, and corporate politics become inseparable. It is nominally a book about Disney, but much of it will feel unnervingly familiar to anyone who has spent enough time inside a large organization.
Essential reading for understanding emotional labor and the hidden work involved in producing the experience organizations expect customers to receive. Once you recognize emotional labor, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere in service organizations.
Deming is a useful antidote to the managerial instinct to blame individuals for problems created by systems. The book changed how I think about measurement, variation, incentives, and the considerable damage organizations can cause while earnestly trying to improve performance.
One of the more approachable introductions to strategic thinking because it treats decisions as interdependent: what makes sense depends partly on what everyone else is likely to do. It is game theory made useful without requiring the reader to become an economist first.
Organizations often behave as though decisions are driven entirely by facts, when stories determine which facts people notice and what they believe those facts mean. Shiller provides a valuable framework for understanding why ideas spread, persist, and sometimes move markets long after their analytical foundations become questionable.
A short, provocative challenge to the assumptions underlying digital advertising and the machinery built around attention. It is especially useful for marketers because it asks uncomfortable questions about an ecosystem our profession often has strong financial incentives not to examine too closely.
A valuable reminder that persuasion is not simply a contest over who has the better facts. Lakoff’s discussion of framing is useful well beyond politics for anyone trying to understand how language, identity, and preexisting mental models shape what audiences are willing to hear.
One of my favorite accounts of what happens when strategy, ego, governance, celebrity, and corporate politics become inseparable. It is nominally a book about Disney, but much of it will feel unnervingly familiar to anyone who has spent enough time inside a large organization.
A terrific account of the AOL Time Warner merger and what happens when incompatible corporate cultures are expected to merge simply because the spreadsheet says they should. It is also a useful warning about confusing technological enthusiasm with organizational readiness.
One of the books I would most like people to read before concluding that organizational dysfunction is caused by a few unusually bad managers. Jackall shows how incentives, hierarchy, ambiguity, and self-preservation can make perfectly ordinary people behave in ways they might never choose independently.
The brilliance of this book is how quickly an apparently familiar consumer product becomes a lens on labor, supply chains, incentives, regulation, and industrial scale. It is a useful reminder that the business model behind an everyday experience is often far more consequential than the brand experience itself.
A compelling way to think about markets in which a small number of intermediaries acquire disproportionate power over both creators and consumers. The broader lesson is useful far outside media: when everyone must pass through the same gate, the gatekeeper eventually notices.
What I like about Gergen is the opportunity to compare very different leaders through the eyes of someone who worked closely with several of them. It reinforces how much leadership depends on temperament, judgment, adaptability, and the ability to understand the institution one is attempting to lead.
I find this most interesting as a study of ambition, adaptation, identity, and the choices people make when personal relationships and public power become inseparable. Whatever one thinks of Hillary Clinton politically, Sheehy offers rich material for thinking about resilience and the costs of remaining inside extraordinarily demanding institutions.
A particularly interesting political biography because it treats presidential leadership through the lens of personality and narrative identity rather than simply recounting events. It is a useful demonstration of how the stories leaders tell about themselves can eventually shape the decisions they make for everyone else.
Lorne Michaels is a fascinating leadership subject precisely because his influence has lasted for decades inside an industry famous for volatility and enormous personalities. I am interested in the book less as a history of Saturday Night Live than as a study of talent management, institutional endurance, gatekeeping, and the unusually subtle forms power can take.
Leadership literature often focuses so intensely on the person at the top that it treats everyone around that person as supporting cast. Keil and Zangrillo offer the more useful premise that leaders are constrained—and frequently defined—by the executive teams they assemble and the operating dynamics they permit.
I recommend books here because I found them useful, provocative, unusually insightful, or worth arguing with. Inclusion does not mean I agree with every argument in a book, and this is not intended as a comprehensive reading list. I update the collection as I encounter work that changes or sharpens how I think.
Book cover images are provided through Open Library, Google Books, publisher resources, and other authorized product-image sources.
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