Books like Call Sign Chaos — picked by fans

I liked that this book highlighted how supposedly tried-and-true approaches to innovation fail to deliver results.

The book’s insights about how to drive radical innovation informed the advice I now give executives about how to approach organizational transformation, starting with an ambitious vision, communicating the “why,” and enlisting great people to go on the journey with them.

It helped me to understand that building organizations to develop disruptive technologies requires leaders to envision things that may sound crazy until they are realized. 

I absolutely loved this book because it celebrates the power of unconventional ideas—the kind that often comes from neurodivergent thinkers. Bahcall’s concept of “phase transitions” between innovation and execution was fascinating and gave me new ways to think about fostering creativity in teams.

This book reminded me that some of the most groundbreaking ideas come from people who dare to think differently—and that nurturing those ideas requires patience, courage, and collaboration.

I absolutely loved the simplicity and clarity of this approach.

It’s almost the opposite end of the spectrum to my first selection and a method that I found more and more common over the years of my career: checklists and flowcharts for the serious and frequent presentations in the Emergency Department, in the operating theatre, and at Triage. And Gawande was right: they did and do save lives.

More generally, I used this process all the time when I was training other staff in my posts with Doctors Without Borders. Preventing and avoiding problems with fail-safe systems is so much better than trying to solve them after they occur!

Tips on leadership and decision-making from the greatest college sports coach of all time.

He’s distilled decades of experience and wisdom into a short book that can be read in a day or two. Some of the concepts are obvious, but I’m willing to bet that a few of them are new to you.

You’ll walk away a better person.

Ricks unpacks the educational origins of the "Founding Generation’s" ideological orientation in this highly readable volume.

The classical underpinnings of American representative democracy and its notions of public virtue in ancient Greece and Rome are examined very carefully. He makes a compelling case for classical rather than English or Enlightenment political influence as the determining factor in our political development. He also implies an unfavorable comparison with the present and the lack of virtue he sees as evident in our public life. The book is a tonic for our political times.

One irritating element, however, is Ricks’s insistence on including the college class of each of the Founding Generation’s members beside their name, which, of course, excludes George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Not to mention Abraham Lincoln in the following century. This gives the book an elitist tint that no doubt would have alienated Zinn.

I like that this book takes a detailed look at 2020 from the view of the Trump presidency, based on interviews between Woodward and Trump.

One of the key themes here is that many decisions during that time were rooted in lessons learned earlier during Trump’s presidency, which helps us understand how we get stuck in doing things the way they’ve always been done. It also provides fascinating insights into how the generational crisis of COVID-19 was managed and mismanaged by the White House.

Vice Admiral Stosz’s extraordinary career as a US Coast Guard leader culminated in her being the first (and so far only) woman to head a major service academy. I came away from her memoir hugely inspired by her honesty and courage. I also loved her vivid descriptions of long stints on the icebreakers that ply Arctic and Antarctic waters in order to prepare the way for scientific teams, often as the only woman. Her grace and goodwill in those adventure-filled situations come shining through– and sea narratives by women are very rare.

This book is not McNamara’s most famous nor original–it essentially weaves together his speeches to provide reflections about war and nuclear weapons–but is arguably his most compelling.

The shadow of Ellsberg and his colleagues who wrote many of these speeches is present and shows a distinct subculture that existed around McNamara, who was far more refined than the warmonger stereotype suggests and also dedicated to educating the American people about national security. It shows a man sitting atop the world’s most powerful defense establishment, grappling with important moral dilemmas, including its enormous capacity for human destruction and institutional pressures toward war.

Translated into English by Peter Theroux, this gorgeously written and emotionally stunning novel is told from the perspective of the Bedouin inhabitants during a time when Americans were arriving by the shipload to develop the oilfields they had discovered. The story is both epic and intimate (and, at points, wittily ironic) and opened my eyes to the vast destruction not only of the land and its people but the very core of their culture. Banned in several Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, this is the first volume of a trilogy (and I recommend them all). 

The atlas introduces the reader to Near Eastern geography, history, and culture, and it complements the other books included here. Roaf maps (literally and figuratively) the various cultures of the Near East during ancient times. His commentary is interesting and the maps beautifully produced, easy to interpret, and accurate. They cover a wide range of data including climate and environment, natural resources, linguistic and cultural information, trade routes, and the territories of different polities. Take some time to explore the atlas; you will not regret it.