A reading list for new engineering directors.

Every year a handful of engineers I have worked with become directors for the first time, and every year I send the same list. It is deliberately short. A director who has time to read sixty books is a director who is not yet doing the job.

The twelve books are, in order of when to pick them up: **The Effective Executive** (Drucker), **High Output Management** (Grove), **The Manager's Path** (Fournier), **Turn the Ship Around** (Marquet), **The Score Takes Care of Itself** (Walsh), **Working Backwards** (Bryar & Carr), **Radical Candor** (Scott), **Staff Engineer** (Larson, because you need to understand the other path), **An Elegant Puzzle** (Larson), **The Goal** (Goldratt), **Poor Charlie's Almanack** (Munger), and **Letters to a Young Contrarian** (Hitchens).

The four essays are **You and Your Research** (Hamming), **Do Things That Don't Scale** (Graham), **The Manager's Handbook** (O'Brien), and Bezos' 2016 shareholder letter, which I treat as an essay. The annual letter — singular — is Berkshire Hathaway's, from 1977 to the present, read in order. It takes a long weekend. You will not be the same director when you are done.

I tell new directors to stop at the end of this list. Not because there is nothing else worth reading, but because the habit of reading exhaustively is often a way of avoiding the harder habit of deciding.