Books that made an impact in 2021

As a leader of a fast-growing startup, my 2020 year-in-review post focused on the books that gave me inspiration across business strategy, culture-building and leadership. That post was written with (what seemed to be) the cloud of COVID behind us and massive excitement for the year ahead.

As a company, Supercede’s 2021 was incredible and showcases just how much can be done in a year: We started the year as Riskbook before rebranding (and expanding) as Supercede; we added new products, won significant awards and enormous clients. We nearly doubled our team size, and were featured time and again in industry publications and podcasts. Our team announced engagements and pregnancies; we got the chance to come together in person for an off-site in Turkey, and a few of us even ran a marathon!

But for many, 2021 was also challenging. Our hope that the year would welcome a return to normal (or some semblance of normal) wasn’t fully realised. Colleagues faced difficulty getting to see loved ones and dealt with losses made more painful with isolation. As a leader, managing the juxtaposition of these highs and lows can be jarring, especially with a team as close as ours.

For most situations, both personal and professional, there isn’t an obvious or correct solution. For me, reading serves to provide a reference library upon which to draw inspiration and guidance in a constantly changing landscape.

Looking back on the year, I decided to break my reading recommendations out into a few categories: behind the scenes of a start-up, company building, and general interests. I read 25 books this year so narrowing down the list was a bit more difficult (see the honourable mentions!).

Behind the Scenes of a Start-up: Running a start-up is incredibly rewarding but it is also full of challenges. Most business books suffer terribly from survivorship bias, hawking their way of solving problems as the singular best way to do so, clearly oblivious of the myriad other books also pushing the ‘right way’.

What I loved about these two books was the raw, behind the scenes insight that doesn’t easily lend itself to a tweet but rather fully recognises the nuance and complexity of the challenges faced and the lessons learned. They also do an excellent job highlighting that even the most successful start-up stories are filled with ups and downs, and the lessons gleaned from them are framed in the context of their specific experiences.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. This book is a must-read for any aspiring founder or anyone looking to empathise with us and was my third time through this book; I find new takeaways each time.

The journey Horowitz went through with LoudCloud (as it became Opsware, and eventually being acquired by HP) might be more harrowing than most; however, very few start-ups live to see a $1bn exit, and I suspect that many of the war stories he endured on this journey would have sunk other firms.

Horowitz uses these first-account stories to provide core principles and fundamental truths but is also quick to recognise the role of luck and highlight the pain behind making incredibly tough decisions.

No Filter by Sarah Frier. If you follow the headlines, the story of Instagram goes something like this: founded in 2010, 1 million users in 2 months, 10 million in one year. Acquired by Facebook for $1bn while there were still less than 20 employees in 2012 before continuing their meteoric rise to more than 1 billion users today. (As an additional note, some speculate that as a standalone app, Instagram would be worth more than $100bn today and is widely seen as one of the best acquisitions in start-up history.)

No Filter delivers a behind-the-scenes account into the most challenging moments of one of history’s fastest-growing companies and showcases the complexity behind headline-grabbing mega-mergers. For most start-up founders, an acquisition by Meta, Google, Microsoft or Apple would be the dream scenario, but from unrealised wealth to power struggles, No Filter paints a different image of what many would see as a start-up dream and the true cost of enormous success.

Company Building: The dominant section on my bookshelf continues to be books that help me refine my thinking around building a strong company, capable of enduring rapid change and preparing itself for longevity. I’m fortunate that this is also the area that I’m most interested in!

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. The impact of software has made companies increasingly global. Whether it’s improved access to clients, suppliers outside your local geography, or adding remote colleagues to your team, we no longer work in homogeneous cultures. At Supercede, our team of 25 (and growing) already spans a dozen countries. In The Culture Map Meyer sets out a framework for how to work with people from a variety of backgrounds by recognising the subtle differences in how they communicate, manage time, present feedback and more. 

For us, this provided powerful insight. In fact, we ran a session on this topic during our off-site and now build it into our onboarding and training for all new joiners. 

Meyer also provides some great additional resources and tools that we used to see where each Superceder lands across several communication styles to help ensure we’re collaborating as clearly and effectively as possible.

This is also the book that I most frequently recommend to other founders and people working across diverse, multi-cultural teams.

ReWork by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson. Another invaluable book that I re-read this year. It has become incredibly common for companies to reuse and regurgitate processes that they’ve picked up from previous organisations (oftentimes themselves a regurgitation from an MBA case study) that have little application to the current organisation. Over time, it results in unnecessary processes, inefficient teams, ineffective communication and more. 

In ReWork, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson set out to challenge almost all of that. ReWork provides a framework for how to build a remote organisation from scratch (the principles they’ve used to build Basecamp) and their learnings along the way. Like many business books presenting better, more effective ways of working, you should lift and adapt the pieces from ReWork that work for your organisation; however, this might be one of my books that’s most filled with notes, highlights and earmarks. I’m sure yours will be too! The pair also have another book (Remote) that addresses the, now very topical, issue of fully remote teams that is also worth a read.

General Interests: Last year the majority of my reading was work-related and there were times that after a long day or week of work, I didn’t feel I was getting sufficiently recharged and struggled to find the motivation to read. For this year I wanted to read more books on topics and stories that I’m generally curious about. 

The Cult of We by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell. There have been a couple of books and a film that have now come out on the epic demise of WeWork and I find the story fascinating. There are significant parallels to the Theranos collapse (beautifully told in Bad Blood, another book well worth reading!) as a perfect storm where hype, huge amounts of investor capital, and competitive dynamics brought out the worst in the start-up ecosystem.

This story truly reads stranger than fiction. With the benefit of hindsight, there are countless examples of glaring red flags in the behaviour of Adam and Rebekah Neumann (Adam telling Elon Musk that “getting to Mars is easy, building the community will be the hard part” literally made me laugh out loud) as they fundamentally changed the way we work.

WeWork took a well understood office-sharing concept and turned it into a revolution. They made co-working cool and their offices some of the most sought after locations in New York, London, Shanghai and Paris; but instead of being content with building an enormous real estate empire, they wanted to go further, to ‘elevate the world’s consciousness’ (this was seriously the mission statement).

WeWork’s failed IPO saw valuation collapse from north of $47bn to around $8bn today; however, the business model they popularised is going strong with dozens of co-working alternatives all over the world. As people return to offices after Covid it’s clear that the traditional model is gone and a new wave of office work will be upon us. This office revolution didn’t require a messianic sociopath, but we as readers reap the benefit of a wild story.

Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen E. Ambrose. As a child, I was fascinated by Native American history and the story of Crazy Horse and Custer always captivated me. I’m definitely late to the game on this book by Stephen E. Ambrose (writer of WWII epic: Band of Brothers) but I thoroughly enjoyed the heavily researched and historical account of the convergence of two of North America’s most famous soldiers.

Beautifully told as two parallel storylines slowly progressing towards an intersecting fate, Ambrose brings out the humanity in each character and narrates battles with a neutral position that prevents the reader from taking sides.

The expansion of the American West in the early 19th century left a lasting impact on the world. Countless movies and stories have provided a theatrical representation of the events but for those truly interested in further understanding the political environment of the time along with the personal accounts of the people who were there, I highly recommend this book. 

Honourable Mention:

Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone. I really enjoy Brad Stone’s books and this was no exception. 

Washington by James Thomas Flexner. A really great biography for those who are interested in US history, war and politics.

I think that for many, 2021 helped to build their resilience and adaptability. We endured the highs and lows that occur every year but did so in an environment of near-constant uncertainty. As we go into 2022 the world remains in a state of flux. News cycles continue to get shorter and shorter and the means by which we consume information is increasingly in blurb form.

I’d encourage everyone to try to read one more book in 2022 than you did this year. Perhaps that’s one, perhaps it’s 51; either way, I promise that you’ll benefit from it.

Final reader’s note: in 2021 I became willing to quit books that I have started. I find this to be incredibly freeing. If something is no longer grabbing your attention or holding your interest, I suggest you do the same. Pick up something new and get stuck back in.