The Top Books Recommended by Operations Pros

Sean Lane: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hypergrowth. My name is Sean Lane. One of the reasons we started this show was to offer up a place where operators could hear directly from those who had been there, done that before them, to help our listeners skip over the pain that our guests had endured and get the answers to the test. And in the 60 + episodes that we've produced on this show, we've learned a lot from our guests, but if you're a regular listener to the show, you also know that I ask our expert operators where they learn, where they go to for their own role models and their own growth. At the end of each episode, I ask each guest for the best book they've read in the last six months, and over the history of the show, we've compiled quite the list. So today I'm going to highlight some of those books and the themes raised by our guests and these aren't all just straight business books. In fact, we've had a pretty wide variety offered up by our guests. So instead of trying to fit all the answers into a single category, I've done my best to group them into different categories that range from scaling companies, to sales and marketing, to history, to leadership, to personal development, and on today's episode, I'm going to highlight some of my favorite answers from each of those categories. By the way, if you want the full list, we've compiled them all for you on Drift's blog, and we've included the link in the show notes. Okay. Just like we do at the end of each episode, let's hear what our guests are reading. Ready? Here we go. Best book you've read in the last six months?

Speaker 2: So we just did A Brave New Work, which is a great book by a consulting firm called The Ready. They do transformational processes, and they have a thing called the Business OS, which is about finding tensions in your business. And it's a great way to bring leadership together and talk high level, and also find out how you can kind of build an organization that people want to work at.

Sean Lane: Best book you've read in the last six months?

Speaker 3: The best book I've read in the last six months is probably a Leading Sales Development by Jeremy Donovan and Alea Homison. Super fantastic. It's very much focused on leading sales development as opposed to the specific, tactical implementation ode. It's like one level up. And it has a bunch of really great statistical analysis and studies in it as well. So it's practical and academic and has a lot of science in it, but also art and two very high quality sales development leaders wrote it.

Sean Lane: Best book you've read in the last six months?

Speaker 4: Radical Candor. It was actually recommended by my-

Sean Lane: crosstalk Right on the tip of your tongue.

Speaker 4: Yeah, it was actually recommended by my manager. And actually a lot of our leadership team recommended it and we're actually going to be doing, I think, a leadership session on it. But up to this point, I mean, I've managed teams for so long, but I have never read that book and I've been hearing and more about it and somebody recommended it here at inaudible to me. And so, yeah, top of mind for me.

Sean Lane: Best book you've read in the last six months?

Speaker 5: That's a great question. I would say I'm late to the game, but I read that negotiation book Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, an amazing book. I also really like... Oh, I'm going to give you a second one, because this one's really good too Indistractible by Nir Eyal,. It's really awesome, I think, especially for the Ops audience because it talks about being able to focus in a world of so many distractions like Slack and all that stuff. So I've been reading that and it's been really awesome to just implement some of those practices and see how it's helpful in getting stuff done.

Sean Lane: Best book you've read in the last six months?

Speaker 6: Oh, wow. The best book I've read actually is nothing to a business. It's Factfulness, think I got the heading right. And it's really about social economics and classes of poverty and how actually the advancement of the world as a society actually is so much, it's progressed so much more than what the cable news networks were make you feel, right? It's a great perspective of just the world and how far we've come on healthcare and death rates and poverty. It really opened my eyes to thinking about the world in a way that I found to be really enlightening and inspiring.

Sean Lane: Best book you've read in the last six months?

Speaker 7: Okay. The best book I've re- read in the last six months is The Big Short.

Sean Lane: Oh, interesting.

Speaker 7: So, I enjoy books that are vaguely entertaining and to have some financial components to it. And so I was particularly interested in the financial collapse. My husband works in the financial industry. I went through it on the other side. And so reading about it and kind of reading it from the author's perspective and kind of remembering it from my side. And I think there's a lot of things we're watching in this market as well, but it is a more entertaining read for me.

Sean Lane: Best book you've read in the last six months?

Speaker 8: Oh, God. I haven't been reading lately. This is like a trick question. Okay. The best book I've read in the last six months is actually a book on growing garlic where it's this farmer. He was actually in a Netflix documentary.

Sean Lane: That's amazing.

Speaker 8: And he has this very poetic way about talking about life on the farm, and it's eerily similar to your life as a startup founder. And it's about all of these romantic things about like hard work, and nerdery. It's a really good read whether you're interested in growing garlic or not.

Sean Lane: Oh, that's awesome. Do you remember the name of it?

Speaker 8: It's called A Garlic Testament.

Sean Lane: A Garlic Testament. All right. We've got to add it to the list. Add them all to the list. Reminder, if you want to see the full list of books that have been given out by our guests, check out that post on Drift's blog. The link is in the show notes. Big thank you to all their guests who have shared their book recommendations with us over the past 60 + episodes. For those of you who have been asking my personal answers for the last six months on a business side, Range, and on the non- business fiction side of things, Project Hail Mary was phenomenal. If you liked what you heard, make sure you're subscribed to our show so you get a new episode in your feed. Every other Friday, we'll be back with one of our normal guests in our next episode. And if you feel like you took something away from this or any of our previous episodes, make sure you leave us a six star review on Apple Podcasts, six star reviews only. All right, that's going to do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.