Full disclosure. I consider Bob Sutton a friend. I also consider him my favorite business book writer. That judgment is based on the following books, all of which I think are excellent and all of which I dip into from time to time, seeking wisdom, insight, and facts.
- The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeffrey Pfeffer)
- Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense (with Jeffrey Pfeffer)
- The No Asshole Rule
- Good Boss, Bad Boss
- Scaling Up Excellence (with Huggy Rao)
They’re all readable, story-strewn books about important topics and based on solid research. That’s hard to beat.
Bob has come to think of himself as a writer, based on the fact that he does so much of it and that he enjoys what I call “wrestling with the angels of meaning.” You can read all his thoughts on that in his blog post on LinkedIn: “You Are What You Do: The Writing Life and Scaling Up Excellence.” The following bit of advice is lifted from that post.
“My productivity is a direct function of how much time I spend at the keyboard MINUS the amount of time I spend poking around the web – emails, shopping, social media, reading news stories and weird articles, and all that other necessary stuff and addictive nonsense.”
Want more? Check out the complete list of Advice from the Masters posts