Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hello, everyone, welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast, the first podcast of 2022, and I want to do this week in a different way, a different style. Usually I don't recommend specifically a book or a course, but today, just to make a light version of the podcast and also to answer several messages I received on social media about what book do you suggest me to take a look this month? What kind of course? There are plenty. So what is your advice on that? I know that advice. It's something hard for people to say, but I want just to share based on my own experience. I want to suggest to four books, and none of them are project management books. Ok. Why? Because they are books to help us to open our awareness of the uncertainty and the complexity we are living in. The first one was written by my friend Rita McGrath, and it's a brilliant book. It's called Seen Around Corners, and she has a quote on her initial paragraph that it's absolutely perfect the iceberg melts from the borders. And what do I mean by that? Is that many disruptions, they don't happen as a Big Bang. There are some indications of melting pieces really on the borders that if you understand them before and you get yourself prepared, you can take a massive advantage of this kind of disruption.
This is why the name is very provocative, seen around corners, how you can anticipate, how you can use proper triggers to identify a disruption before it becomes a massive disruption. So how you can have these early signs that things may not be as you expect and so you can prepare and get ready for this kind of environment? And I did this while doing my gym and using an audiobook, and it was really very insightful, and it's packed with examples and cases from the present and cases from the past. So very and extremely well written book. The second one is not a brand new book, it's a book that was released in 2015. And maybe, I think up to 2018 it was updated in 2018 or 2019. It's called Disrupt Yourself from Whitney Johnson, and this book contains one of the most powerful examples for us. If we go back to the podcast I recorded last week, I said many times about incumbent companies are bleeding, and I use this metaphor to highlight that we can consider ourselves also as incumbents because if we don't disrupt ourselves, at some point we will be disrupted. And the concept, the central piece that Whitney speaks and wrote on this book is about there are times that you really need to jump and you need to start a new cycle and you need to disrupt yourself.
You need to provoke a disruption in yourself before someone else does that for us. And this is an absolutely brilliant concept, and I use this all the time. Every time I'm facing, I would say a hard decision. I'd say maybe it's the time to disrupt myself. The third one is a book from Chris Zook and James Allen called The Founder's Mentality. And I really like it because it's the concept of the mentality that was brought into life by the founders. Why companies that were run by the founders, they create a cultural aspect that is so unique to them and then that over time, maybe this mentality is start to, I would say, to change and to lose that special. I would say spice, that special ingredient that makes them so successful. And this is a fantastic book. And it's published by HBR, Harvard Business Review Press. And last but not least, and I already spoke about it, it's the book No Rules Rules from Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. This book was incredible for me because it's so disruptive the way Reed Hastings is leading Netflix. It's a completely cultural shift from what traditional companies do and from what most of us learn in management classes, and it's very connected with this founder mentality. And this was a book. I created a full podcast just about it. These are the four books for me that I would really take a look.
And the three courses I want to suggest to you because many people asked me. The first one is the Google Certificate of in Project Management, and this is a course that was created by Google. And it's not one model, but. Several models, I didn't do it completely, OK, I did some lectures, but my daughter did, and she's starting her career. And it was really nice. It really powerful, mostly for those who want to get in to the project management arena and not, say, predictive or waterfall or iterative or agile. It's all the methods they cover all the methods. So it's a fantastic and very hands-on and very, I would say, job oriented. So it's a very nice end. If you don't need the certificate, it's absolutely free. If you need a certificate, it costs. I would say something like thirty nine dollars. The second one, I'm doing it. It sounds a little bit crazy, but it's the code academy and the course of Python and why I'm doing this, because of course, I'm trying to disrupt myself and I'm trying to learn how to code because I truly believe that technology and our understanding of coding. Of course, I did this twenty five years ago, so it doesn't make sense what I learn to the current environment. So I'm trying to understand a little bit more to use machine learning to use A.I., and this is something very nice.
And I think this is something that will help a lot in your Swiss Army knife for professional life. And the third one is the MIT Open Courseware MIT published several. When I say several, I'm saying probably more than a hundred courses and lectures they give to their students in their undergrad and grad programs, and they publish for free. So you go and look for MIT open courseware and you will find courses from astronomy to management, from quantum physics to some aspects of mechanical engineering. They are, of course, very, I would say, deep courses. So they are courses that students of masters or students of engineering degrees they study. But if you have a specific interest, it's fantastic and it's absolutely free. I'm not talking about the IDEX platform of MIT that looks like Coursera or the executive education of MIT. It's just the library of open courses that anyone can benefit from. So these three courses, I would say, are fantastic resources. Nobody can say, Oh, look, I cannot afford a course at MIT. I cannot afford a Google certificate because they don't cost you anything just time and, you know, willingness to learn. Ok, I hope you enjoy this podcast and see you next week with another Five Minutes Podcast.
