The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

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A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.

They succeeded by transforming habits.

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation. 




I love stuff like this!

The Power of Habit created so many "aha!" moments and the desire to challenge myself.  Thanks to this book and the stories therein, I purchased a FitBit -- with which I am already completely head-over-heels in love -- to get in the habit of exercising more.  I'm more aware of my own patterns and those of my children, which I hope will make me a better parent.  And it helps to know why I crave certain things, even when I tell myself that I don't really want them.

Highly recommended.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim

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Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO.

The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and 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 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.


I know what you're thinking.

Wow.  A fictionalized account of ITIL and Agile methodologies.  That sounds so...exciting.

Tommy Lee Jones is skeptical

But it is!

Imagine my surprise when I was completely sucked into Bill's world.

IT Operations isn't always a fun place to work: servers crash; applications freeze; vulnerabilities are everywhere; and customers--both internal and external--scream for support.

So how do you manage all of the Work in Progress (WIP), emergencies, and planned work?  It's enough to give any professional geek a panic attack.

Enter our heroes: ITIL and Kanban. 

These Best Practice methodologies will help Bill and his team revolutionize how IT functions and contributes to the business at large.

The Phoenix Project takes a dry subject and turns it into an understandable narrative.  Certain concepts that I didn't quite grasp when I studied for my ITIL certification became crystal clear during the course of this book.

I'm really looking forward to implementing a Kanban board with my team at work.