Books Like “The Phoenix Project”
I’ve heard this question more than a few times: what are other good books similar to The Phoenix Project? Here I listed some other Business Fables that I enjoyed reading.
What makes a book like Gene Kim’s The Phoenix Project popular? I think it’s the story and the story telling. It’s the characters whom we can relate to. It’s their challenges that we’ve faced before. It’s the environment that’s all too familiar. It’s the mistakes the protagonists make, the lessons that stare us in the face and the victories they celebrate.
In The Phoenix Project, the authors tell a fictional story, an IT Fable. Using fictional characters in a fictional company called Parts Unlimited, the authors give us real-life lessons. And this is the common theme in the books listed below.
The first business fable (or management fiction) book I came across in the early 00s was Who Moved My Cheese?. Since then I’ve enjoyed reading this type of books. I hope you’ll like them too.
The Phoenix Project
Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill’s entire department will be outsourced.
With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with a manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited.
In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they’ll never view IT the same way again.
The Unicorn Project
This highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development.
In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals.
One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work, and to enable the business to win in a time of digital disruption. To her surprise, she finds herself drawn ever further into this movement, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the Rebellion, which puts her in the crosshairs of some familiar and very dangerous enemies.
The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms — this is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty…and opportunity.
The Goal
Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant — or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a professor from student days — Jonah — to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done. The story of Alex’s fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas, which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC), developed by Eli Goldratt.
The Goal also has a graphic novel edition: The Goal — A Business Graphic Novel.
Beyond Blame
In this concise and entertaining book, I.T. veteran Dave Zwieback describes an incident that threatens the very existence of a large financial institution, and the counterintuitive steps its leadership took to stop the downward spiral. Their novel approach is grounded in proven concepts from complexity science, resilience engineering, human factors, cognitive science, and organizational psychology. It allows us to identify the underlying conditions for failure, and make our systems (and organizations) safer and more resilient.
- Get a clear understanding of the downside of blame
- Learn how to identify (and counteract) cognitive biases in groups
- See how organizations can determine the real root cause of problems
- Establish real accountability with your organization
- Use the Learning Review Framework to fully learn from failures of complex systems
- Find practical insights and tips for moving beyond blame in your own organization
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.
Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech’s CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni’s gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight.
Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions that go to the heart of why teams — even the best ones — often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. This is a compelling fable with a powerful, yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional leaders.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has also a Manga Edition:
Thank you for reading.
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