Reading
The shelf behind the work.
The books that shaped how I lead, build teams, and make decisions under pressure, grouped by the problem I use them to solve. Open any title for the longer note.
| Book | Author | What it changed |
|---|---|---|
| People are the system | ||
| Never Split the Difference | Chris Voss | Tactical empathy and calibrated questions are leadership tools, not just negotiation tricks. |
| How to Win Friends and Influence People | Dale Carnegie | Technology changes fast; human behavior does not. Influence outranks having the best technical answer. |
| Understand the machine | ||
| The Phoenix Project | Gene Kim | Security problems are usually systems problems. Ask why the secure path is harder than the insecure one. |
| The Engineer's Survival Guide | Merih Taze | Great technical work nobody understands has surprisingly little organizational leverage. |
| Speed and data are the edge | ||
| Flash Boys | Michael Lewis | Information advantage wins. Detecting in five minutes versus five days is a different risk environment. |
| Life 3.0 | Max Tegmark | Think in second-order effects: what happens when AI capabilities become cheap, autonomous, and everywhere. |
| Outliers | Malcolm Gladwell | Do not just hire talented people. Build an environment where talented people become exceptional. |
| Ownership under pressure | ||
| Extreme Ownership | Jocko Willink and Leif Babin | Leaders own outcomes. Ownership turns postmortems from blame exercises into engineering inputs. |
| Can't Hurt Me | David Goggins | The point where you feel finished and the point where you are actually finished are rarely the same. |
| Own the Day, Own Your Life | Aubrey Marcus | You cannot build a high-performing security organization if exhaustion is part of the architecture. |
| Shoe Dog | Phil Knight | Building something meaningful is uncertainty and setbacks and continuing anyway. So is most security work. |
| Curiosity and storytelling | ||
| Educated | Tara Westover | Books outside technology keep curiosity and perspective working, muscles technical leaders underestimate. |
| Tribe of Mentors | Tim Ferriss | Board-level security is storytelling as compression: complexity turned into something someone can act on. |