Books

Your hard skills landed you the management position, but it’s your soft and management skills that will drive your success. Numerous books cover architecture and processes, "Amazing CTO" stands out as the essential guide for managing effectively, authored by influential CTO Coach Stephan Schmidt.

You cannot lead what you cannot see. In AI-heavy organizations, illegibility is now the default. This book gives you fracture names, diagnostic protocols, and field kits for seeing and governing systems where dashboards lie and decisions live in prompts no one saved.

How long can you keep collecting a good salary inside a company that is obviously too inefficient to survive what’s coming? This book shows you how to turn the broken workflows you already understand into income you control - before your paycheck reminds you it was never really safe.

Agile teams need to be able to handle impediments. This book explores how teams can deal effectively with the problems that will happen in their daily work, using agile thinking and practices. Foreword by Johanna Rothmann.

INTJ is one of the rarest personality types in the world. Only about 2.1% of people share it. You notice inefficiency sooner, tolerate stupidity less, and spend years building capability without building leverage.And yet somehow, people with less depth, less skill, and less actual value keep making more money than you.

Begin your sidekick leadership journey here and unleash the superpower within your team.

You've built an MVP, found product-market fit, and now the pressure is on to hire more developers and scale faster—but here's the brutal truth: adding more people often makes everything slower, not faster, and most CTOs become bottlenecks drowning in meetings while their teams struggle with chaos. Stephan Schmidt, veteran CTO and startup coach, reveals seven battle-tested principles for scaling tech teams without losing your sanity, from structuring around ownership and promoting from within to avoiding the bottleneck trap and understanding why AI changes the scaling game entirely. Whether you're managing 5 developers or 50, this practical guide will help you build sustainable organizations that scale with purpose, not just pressure—stop throwing money at problems and start building organizations that actually work.

You don’t fail from bad opportunities. You fail from saying yes to good ones.

Drawing on real stories from Toyota's transformation journey, combined with modern practices and cultural insights.

Hoshin Kanri wird seit Jahrzehnten erfolgreich von Toyota sowie zahlreichen führenden Unternehmen in Japan und den Vereinigten Staaten eingesetzt, um strategische Ziele und Lean-Initiativen nachhaltig umzusetzen.

The secret lies in two simple patterns: Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata.In this concise and practical guide, Dr. Mohamed H. Soliman breaks down Toyota’s habit-building system for daily progress and leadership development.

Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and Lean Six Sigma principles, this groundbreaking book explores how lasting transformation happens not through better tools—but through rewiring how people think, feel, and act.

Gemba Walks nach dem Toyota-PrinzipDer Ort, an dem Führung gelehrt und gelernt wirdWarum sind manche Unternehmen dauerhaft erfolgreich, während andere trotz guter Strategien scheitern?Die Antwort findet sich oft nicht im Besprechungsraum, sondern am Gemba – dem Ort, an dem die tatsächliche Arbeit stattfindet.In diesem praxisnahen Buch zeigt Dr. Mohammed Hamed Ahmed Soliman, wie Toyota Gemba Walks nutzt, um Führungskräfte zu entwickeln, Mitarbeiter zu fördern, Probleme sichtbar zu machen und eine Kultur der kontinuierlichen Verbesserung aufzubauen.

"The AI confirmed X for me" used as proof of X. Outputs that sound brilliant but don't hold up to a severe re-reading. A three-page "AI policy" that nobody reads. Sound familiar? Thinking with LLMs, the Right Way is the system of critical thinking applied to LLMs: the Thinking-With Triangle (Intent / Adversary / Editor), the four meta-decisions of governance, the Socratic and adversarial practices for investigating and verifying. Not prompt engineering: the method for not letting yourself be mirrored.

Read it once—and you’ll start seeing opportunities everywhere.