Books Recommended by Boban Dedovic

When I was starting my career I wasn’t very even tempered, especially when dealing with people who I believed wronged me. This demeanor wasn’t helpful when I started running my own company because things go wrong every day—it’s just the way of things.

I found myself spending lots of time chasing down contractors who didn’t finish work properly, domain squatters...etc. We were planning to initiate legal action against a party who was misusing our copyright when I recalled Sun Tzu’s famous The Art of War, a short read on dealing with military conflict. The book outlined how any conflict should be avoided because it’s costly and a real leader achieves victory by their ability to avoid such entanglements in the first place.

Comparing the teachings I remembered in the book with my own actions at the time was a big step towards humility for me. I was making a huge mistake by spending time on such inconsequential matters. I immediately changed my approach to how I deal with such folks and have never looked back.

The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin had the biggest impact on my thinking and viewpoint towards decision making.

Among many other themes, the book stressed the idea that successful leaders (the top 10%) had one distinguishing characteristic: they took traditional two-option decisions (both with pros and cons) and found a winning alternative, we’ll call it C. The winning alternative (C) comes from creative thought and generally minimizes the cons while maximizing the pros of any option. This kind of thinking had a profound impact on my decision making outcomes.