Our Compelled Tribe task is to share our favorite books that have impacted us professionally. The 3 or 4 of you who regularly read my stuff realize that my career has been a bit eclectic, unorthodox, and rather long, however effective. Not surprisingly, so is this list. Put another way, when I started my professional journey, the US Department of Education existed only as part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Law 94-142 had just become law, my first district was working under a court order requiring bussing for desegregation.

Jon Wennstrom echoed my graduate school advisor when he wrote that the more you read the more you learn. Read a lot, learned a lot.

Here goes, some you may have heard of, hopefully some you have also read, and I’m sure there will be a few you have never heard of. But they certainly mattered to me.

First on the list was my History of American Education class textbook from graduate school. It helped me understand what we do, why we do it, and how we got here. Introduced me to Frederick Taylor, the Committee of Ten, Andrew Carnegie and his units. Savage Inequalities by Jonathon Kozol was also a foundation read. In the words of Daisaku Ikeda, “A healthy vision of the future is not possible without an accurate knowledge of the past.”

By category, here is my list:

LEADERSHIP

• In Search of Excellence – Tom Peters
• Thriving on Chaos – Tom Peters
• Leadership and the New Science – Margaret Wheatley
• Only the Paranoid Survive – Andrew Grove
• Enlighten Leadership – Ed Oakley and Doug Krug
• Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
• The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
• The Visionaries Handbook: 9 Paradoxes That Will Shape the Future of Your Business – Watts Wacker, Jim Taylor, Howard Means
• Digital Disruptioin – James McQuivey
• From Master Teacher to Master Learner – Will Richardson
• Why School – Will Richardson
• The New Culture of Learning – Douglas Thomas, John Seeley Brown
• The Element – Ken Robinson
• Leaders Guide to 21st Century Education – Ken Kay, Valerie Greenhill
• Who Owns the Learning – Alan November
• Understanding the Digital Generation: Teaching and Learning in the new Digital Landscape – Ian Jukes
• Reinventing Learning for the Always On Generation – Ian Jukes
• The End of Average – Todd Rose
• One Size Does Not Fit All – Nikhil Goyal
• The Hack Learning Series – various authors
• Disrupting Class – Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, Curtis Johnson
• Change Forces – Michael Fullan
• The Monster Under the Bed – Stan Davis, Jim Boykin
• The World is Flat – Thomas Friedman
• Launch – John Spencer, AJ Juliana
• The Weaving Influence Series – Mark Miller Pretty sure not many of you have heard of any of these, but they are fantastic. Leadership stories through parables. Check out Leaders Made Here, Chess, Not Checkers, and Talent Magnet. More are being published as we speak, keep an eye out for them through the High-Performance Series

INNOVATION / CHANGE

• The Macintosh Way – Guy Kawasaki
• Rules for Revolutionaries – Guy Kawasaki
• The Eden Conspiracy – Dr. Joe Harless
• A Whack on the Side of the Head – Roger von Oech
• Expect the Unexpected or You Won’t Find It – Roger von Oech
• If It Ain’t Broke, Break It – Robert J. Kriegel, Louis Parker
• Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers – Robert J. Kriegel, David Brandt
• First, Break All the Rules – Marcus Buckinham, Curt Coffman
• Paradigms – Joel Barker
• The Innovator’s Mindset – George Couros
• The Question Behind the Question – John Miller
• Flipping the Switch – John Miller

NOT TRENDY ANYMORE, BUT SHOULD BE IF WE ARE TRULY IN A DATA DRIVEN ENVIRONMENT

• Implementing Total Quality Management in the Classroom – Margaret Byrnes, Robert Conesky, Lawrence Byrnes

Yeah, you didn’t find much of anything by the traditional authors of educational literature. Not many of my titles are offered through ASCD. But I’ve had a great run for about 40 years, changed the rules of how schools work based on what I’ve internalized about how kids learn differently today than we learned when we were their age. I’ve been fortunate to work with, and learn from, some amazing colleagues both within the profession and outside of it. I have no complaints, and I make no apologies, for my resume.

And so it goes…