I’ve been reading business books again in an effort to better understand the roles of my colleagues. A product manager at work recommended Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love. It’s the kind of overview I was looking for, one that doesn’t get too far into the weeds but isn’t so superficial that you don’t learn anything.

Another colleague recommended Blue Ocean Strategy. Like most business books it has a lot of filler and redundancy, but I appreciated the concrete parts. I’m not reading solely for information, but also to learn some of the vocabulary for describing problems I don’t deal with every day.

Michael Stonebraker mentions The Innovator’s Dilemma in his Turing award lecture. That had been on my list for a while, so I borrowed a copy from the library. I can see why Christensen’s book is so highly regarded, despite being a bit dated and having the redundancy you find in “journal paper sandwiches” from business school presses.

Business books being what they are, I had to sample two or three for every one I liked. I tried to read The Lean Startup, for example. It’s a book that could have been a blog post, or simply quoted a few passages from The Innovator’s Dilemma, which was published 14 years earlier.