I'm convinced that all useful books are actually two books.
The first book contains the actionable tactics. These are easy to pick up: you just read.
The second book contains the principles that make the tactics work. This requires work to unearth.
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Examples: Never Split The Difference, by Chris Voss.
Book 1: A bag of negotiation techniques you may use in lots of situations. Primarily in English.
Book 2: The underlying principles behind those techniques. Important if you want to apply his techniques in another language.
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Example 2: Shape Up by .
Book 1: Methods for making software, that sit somewhere between agile sprints and the hardcore waterfall approach.
Book 2: A set of principles they've discovered by accident, that when applied to Basecamp look like the techniques in Book 1.
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Some authors write about pure principles first, but those are harder to apply. Hence my qualifier 'useful books'.
Perhaps I should have used 'actionable books' instead.
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But in other cases this is a recipe for disaster. Applying Shape Up to your org without critical analysis for why the techniques work would likely backfire. (Basecamp is B2B SaaS, hugely profitable, has a brand and a large audience + stable recurring revenue).
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Another example: let's say you want to adopt agile. You pick up a book on agile, and one of the practices that the book prescribes is conducting morning scrum meetings.
"WE HAVE TO HAVE SCRUM MEETINGS" you say.
Problem: you are a fully distributed team across many timezones.
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Really stupid reaction: "Well, I guess agile can't work for remote."
Slightly stupid reaction: "We MUST have morning scrum meetings, so Joe has to wake up at 6am."
Better reaction: "What purpose do morning scrum meetings serve and can we evolve something equivalent?
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This is a really stupid example, but I've *actually* seen it.
Also for marketing practices (let's apply funnel analysis TO EVERYTHING). And software dev practices. And writing techniques.
I really don't know why it happens.
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