Discover the books that keep CIOs going, and provide the necessary reprieve and inspiration.
CIO South Africa recently connected with Jimmie Mwangi, chief information and digital officer (CIDO) at Diamond Trust Bank (Kenya), Martin Jansen, head of IT at ZZ2, and Siphamandla Masuku, chief digital officer (CDO) at Discovery, to learn what literature keeps them motivated and inspired.
Jimmie constantly explores a variety of topics to stay informed about leadership, technology and innovation. Apart from these, he also has a deep interest in history.
“I am reading The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, which provides me with valuable insights into managing disruptive technologies, while 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by Professor Yuval Noah Harari, offers fascinating perspectives on the current global challenges, with a deep focus on the impact of technology, impact of fake news, challenges around immigration, climate change, religion, and terrorism,” Jimmie explains.
“Professor Harari’s essays not only provide details about these challenges, but also provide insights on how we can navigate these complexities, insisting that humans must understand the history to grasp the future,” he adds.
Jimmie’s favourite authors are Malcom Gladwell, Robin Sharma, and Professor Harari. “I greatly admire a few, especially those who drive us to challenge conventional wisdom!
“The authors’ ability to encourage critical thinking, and seamlessly mesh this with exciting storytelling inspires me. They all drive us to look at the world from different perspectives and challenge the status quo, which is incredibly valuable for any leader.”
A love for non-fiction
Martin is also a non-fiction book lover, saying The Goal by Eli Goldratt changed his life. “It opened my eyes to system-wide optimisation. Most people would think that if you take all these processes, and you have each process running at 100 percent, everything is perfect.
“But the problem is that they must be in balance with each other. So one has to look at things in the context of the entire system. You need to run the first process at 20 percent because its output is much more than the second process can consume, which needs to run at 30 percent, and so on and so forth.
“So, sometimes being slow and efficient is better than being just 100 percent of everything all the time. And it’s such a subtle difference that I think a lot of people don’t understand that. But that to me was mind-bogglingly awesome to read that and to intrinsically understand that,” he adds.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and Good to Great by Jim Collins also feature on Martin’s bookshelf.
The unconventional approach
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore has played a big role in Discovery’s chief digital officer Siphamandla Masuku’s approach to his day-to-day work and understanding people’s behaviour – much of what innovation at Discovery is based on.
However, Siphamandla also has three other favourite books and two are tied for the second spot: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and The Road Less Travelled by Scott Peck. “The Road Less Travelled was a book I first read at a young age, and what I loved about that book was its focus on the unconventional part and getting to have identification with yourself – understanding the things that drive value for you as an individual, and your true north, and how you use it to make decisions” Siphamandla explains.
“With Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl’s account of his experience as a refugee during the Nazi period and how he navigated that experience in a way that he could still retain peace, joy and something to look forward to, makes both books particularly appealing to me because they both emphasis that joy, direction and purpose all start from within, leveraging different perspectives, and using your energy to create opportunities instead of focusing on the scarcity of things. Not existing in the world as it is, you can design desirable futures as you wish, and even when I think about my own career, it has been quite unconventional,” he adds.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen takes the third spot for Siphamandla, a book he has in common with Jimmie.
