From time to time, I’m asked what books would be helpful for someone in an IT leadership role. And while I’d never stoop to naked self-promotion, clothed self-promotion is another matter entirely. To that end:

IS Survivor Publishing is putting the finishing touches on Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World. It’s a practical guide to the discipline of getting others to go where you’d like them to go under their own power, providing guidance on the eight tasks of leadership: Envisioning the future, delegating, making decisions, staffing, motivating, building and maintaining teams, establishing culture, and communicating.

We’re trying to get some sense of how many copies to print in the initial run (early April) so if you’re interested in buying a copy, please send a brief e-mail to [email protected] to let us know.

Thanks.

This isn’t, of course, the only book I’d recommend. It is, however, the only one that turns a profit for me, which is why I mention it first.

Another that’s well worth your time is really a series. Anita Cassidy is another Minneapolis-based IT consultant who (it pains me to report since she and I compete) does excellent work and is held in uniformly high esteem by her clients. Anita has written several books about various aspects of running an IT organization, starting with A Practical Guide to Information Systems Strategic Planning. And it is practical: It gives you the table of contents for an IS strategic plan, along with a realistic process to follow for creating the contents. Anita and I share a core principle, embedded in her books: If it doesn’t lead to action, there’s no point to it. Her strategic plans are designed to be implemented, not just admired. Highly recommended.

My friend George Colombo has recently published Killer Customer Care. It wasn’t written for CIOs, and no, I’m not recommending it to help you improve service to your internal customers. If you haven’t been paying attention: The whole notion of internal customers is a very bad idea.

If your company’s strategy depends on customer retention, Killer Customer Care is worth your time and attention. It’s one of those books companies can use tactically, one idea at a time, or strategically to guide a complete customer relationship management program. Either way, this book can help you re-frame a CRM implementation from installing software to redefining how the business runs. For a lot of CIOs, that’s critical.

Then there’s Business is Combat, written by the president of Afterburners Seminars, James D. Murphy. Former fighter pilots, Murphy and crew have translated the disciplines used for successful air combat into business terms. Particularly valuable:

• A better way of thinking about mission: In air combat, pilots have missions — each has a start and a finish; for each, the criteria by which success is gauged is entirely clear. In IT, defining work this way would seem to have an advantage over the traditional IT mission statement, which usually lack clarity and rarely include any notion of completion.

• Plan, brief, execute, debrief: Combat pilots perform this loop with every mission. Many IT organizations have a process focus. If you make the plan/brief/execute/debrief loop the centerpiece of how work gets done, you’ll be instituting a process-centered culture — the critical step, usually ignored, required for making excellent process natural to the IT staff instead of an imposition.

• Task overload: When people have too many things coming at them, they cope by filtering out most of them, focusing narrowly on one or two items they can deal with successfully. In air combat, this is usually fatal. In IT, it usually means staff hunker down and deal with whatever tasks they’re most comfortable with while the important and urgent are lost. Checklists are the cure — if you’re going to focus on just one thing, make it a checklist and the right things will get done in the right order.

Want one more? Read Good to Great. It isn’t great, but it’s pretty good. Two excellent insights stand out: (1) Great organizations are led by individuals who focus on building great organizations rather than personal aggrandizement (once stated this shouldn’t be much of a surprise); and (2) those who lead great organizations are willing to confront the “brutal realities of their existence” rather than telling each other comforting stories.

While I can’t testify that these are the five most important books you can read this year, I can testify they’re worth your time to read.

And since in the business press the wheat-to-chaff ratio is asymptotically close to zilch, that’s a pretty decent accomplishment.