A practical guide to modern project management. It’s being written right now. Read it for free.
Books
Lallygag a second longer. These pages are spellbinding.
Project management
A Practical Guide to Managing Web Projects
The name says it all: practical walkthrough written by a great guy who understands our culture, our history, and our human patterns and how they all fit together to make project bliss.
A quick read about how checklists used in a variety of industries have saved time, lives, and heaps loads of patience. Read it.
Crack the Client Code: How to Discover the Hidden Wealth in Each Client
Learn how to improve your relationships with existing clients and how to build stronger relationships with new clients.
Interactive Project Management: Pixels, People, and Process
This book digs deep into the core of digital project management, through the techniques and into our hearts. A must read for anyone managing digital projects.
A great way to beef up the documentation and process side of your PM bag of tricks. Way less wordy than PMBOK or other resources. Not for digital so much as an overview of PM, but still a great resource.
A fantastic book by Brett Harned (and featuring our very own Rachel Gertz). Learn how to better estimate and plan tasks, scout and address issues before they become problems, and communicate with and hold people accountable.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
This book isn’t just for your physical spaces. The principles allow you to clear clutter from your brain and focus on tidying up your projects. For good.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We do in Life and Business
The Power of Habit argues that most of our basic actions are not actually the product of well-considered decision making, but of habits that we often do not realize exist. After taking you through laboratories, board rooms, and classrooms to harness this new science, this book will have you planning all the ways you can shake up your team and your processes.
Follow along as this free online digital PM book gets written from front-to-back.
Communication
Discussing Design: Improving Communication and Collaboration through Critique
This book presents techniques, tools, and frameworks for helping members of your design team give and receive critique so you can actually strengthen your designs, products, and services, rather than use “feedback” mechanisms to simply assert authority or push agendas.
Just because you don’t fly with the crowd doesn’t mean you don’t fly. A short book about challenging the flow and defining your own way of doing things. Great for PMs who need a little emotional support.
No Logo: 10th Anniversary Edition with a New Introduction by the Author
Most of what we do intersects with the purchase and selling of goods and services. Naomi Klein gives us a crystal clear picture of the consumer market and our role as creators and consumers. A good book to tuck under your belt in your role as a PM.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Change people, situations, and things in an intuitive way. Based on case studies and social psychology. One of the best Heath books we’ve read. Read this, if it’s the last thing you do.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
A fun, well-written and clear pathway for navigating team dynamics.
The Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Rise above your competitors, take hold of your client relationships, and take your business to new heights be rethinking how you sell your ideas and your services.
A crash course on hiring design services. Read this, then buy a copy for all of your clients.
Your Brain on Love: The Neurobiology of Healthy Relationships
We are a product of the way our caregivers raised us. Stan blows the lid off how we interact with others based on our early attachment styles. Not just a helpful guide for love relationships, but also for uncovering how to relate to other people that are very different from us. Must listen!
Operations
Aaron Dignan maps out what the future of work can look like when we rethink how power and decision making is organized and distributed in our organizations. The result is one of the best, practical books on setting up and maintaining a more democratic company.
An incredible case study and practical method for building employee-owned, democratic, people-first organizations. It’s not a new method, but one that needs reviving if we want to take diversity, inclusion, and systemic change seriously.
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.
Brené Brown cracks wide the way to create happy people at work. Through vulnerability comes strength, wisdom, and better leadership.
Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
The first book we read on workplace democracy. A quick solid read on why and how we should be distributing ownership and decision-making.
An important no-nonsense book about the business of design.
Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams
A decent first-step on building internal design teams.
Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution
The book makes the case for why need to transition away from an extractive economic model to a generative one that is more humane, ecologically sustainable, and better for our communities through the lens of distributed ownership and democratic worker-owned cooperatives.
One of the best cases for, and how to approach value-based pricing in our industry.
This book offers a simple system that can help you save for your expenses, taxes, and profit before you spend the rest on growing. Awful title. Solid advice.
Thinking of building a start-up? Read this first. It’s a reality check and a motivator all in one. Spring for the package to get the full meal deal.
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
Critical to understanding why you’re often set up to fail at your organization and what you need to know to change that.
Workplace Democracy: An Inquiry into Employee Participation in Canadian Work Organizations
A historical dissection of the dynamics of power, authority, decision-making, and ownership at work. It’s centred in Canada, but the concepts are universal. Invaluable if you’re serious about making a democratic workplace.
Design
Butterick’s Practical Typography
Read this book and make all your documents look like they were designed by a pro.
Learn how to design with compassion and create experiences that support your users. This book translates more than a dozen sites and services into a set of design principles you can start applying right now.
Designing News: Changing the World of Editorial Design and Information Graphics
Editorial design is being thrust into exciting territory. This book explores the growing role of the designer in the next generation news room.
Discussing Design: Improving Communication and Collaboration through Critique
This book presents techniques, tools, and frameworks for helping members of your design team give and receive critique so you can actually strengthen your designs, products, and services, rather than use “feedback” mechanisms to simply assert authority or push agendas.
A classic book about the intersection of writing, editing and design. It’s print-focused but explores so many important design concepts that have been ignored or forgotten on the web.
Not just for advertising. This entertaining book examines the cross-section of design and copy and their roles in creating concepts that turn heads and get results.
Great typography on the web is still difficult to come by. I have a good feeling this book will help change that. Jason walks us through the traditions to hold on to and the ones to ditch in this unpredictable digital world.
It’s the best overview of a website workflow that’s been published so far. Read this.
Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works
Learn the basics of typography from the best. A must read for any new designer.
This book will change the way you think about every object in your environment.
The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication
One of the best high-level overviews of the function and impact of design on society, culture, politics, and media that we’ve ever read. Must read for any person interested in design.
Edward Tufte gets all the love when it comes to data visualization books, but we find this one far better and more modern. A great intro to data visualization for anyone having to display data to mere mortals.
Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
This book is the one that made typography ‘click’ for me. Every designer should read this.
Technology
A great chance for project managers and team leads to buff up on their technical knowledge so they can ask the right questions and not get in trouble.
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
It’s increasingly important to understand how technology works as it becomes more difficult to understand what technology is doing – and doing to us.
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
Capitalism is morphing into something new and different. As information technology slowly dismantles the past economy of markets, wages, and private ownership, the ways we behave, work, and live are changing. Paul Mason navigates this shift and plots a course to a more socially just and sustainable economy.
Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
A well-researched critical analysis of the major technologies that are shaping, and about-to-shape our world. While most books predicting the future of technology paint it with a narrow rosy picture, Greenfield dives deep into the social consequences and hidden externalities that have begun to take hold and moves us toward their logical conclusions… which may not always be so rosy.
Technology isn’t neutral. It’s loaded with bias seeded from its creators and often ends with products that are sexist, racist, classist, or ablelist. This is a great breakdown of where things went wrong, and how we might do better.
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
Douglas Rushkoff investigates the systemic issues that set the rich against the poor and the technologists against everybody else and offers ways to optimize our economy for the human beings it’s supposed to be serving.
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