A year of Books - 2022

I recently moved back to my house office. I stopped renting a desk in a co-working space. The benefit is that I have my library of inspiration next to me every day. I'm happy that I have planned the move and very happy with the benefits. It was a good time to have a good back at all the books I read in 2022. read or listened, because I'm often listening to them on Audible. The heading image is the list of the books I read. Some of them are duplicated internationally. All the square images of books are audible versions. There are 2 of them that I liked so much that I read and listened to their audible version.

The book Robert Cialdini "Influence et Manipulation", translated in French from English, is full of scientific evidence on how our brain works and how it is used in marketing to target us. It contains many funny examples that I quote to my daughters from time to time to illustrate how the world around us works.

"Sapiens" was a revelation for me, full of scientific information on where we, as humans, come from. It reflects the power of Myths as the cornerstone of our human civilisation. It is potentially one of the big differentiators between humans and other human beings.

I wanted to understand in which way "Heroe's Journey" and "Heroes with 1000 faces " by Joseph Campbell is rooted in the analysis of the Myth of Jung. That was the trigger for me to discover more about Jung in the biography written in French by Frédéric Lenoir, "Jung, un voyage vers soi". It opened a new world in understanding the subconscious and how the ego works. It allowed me a deeper dive into the "Heroes' journey", and the practice of intuition as Lisa Kretschmann and Filip Roeckens present it.

This year I also discovered several books thanks to my friend Eric Decossaux . When we designed the workshop about "Captain Sonar", we started by getting inspired by "Turn the ship around". It was a real shock to read (actually to "listen") that participative management brought huge benefits even in a typical top-down management environment like the Army. It gave me a totally different vision of the potential colour transition from Red to Green on the dynamic spiral (also used in the cooler schemes of "Reinventing organisations"). I loved this book so much that I also purchased the paper version!

Eric also made me discover "La théorie du parapluie", a French book about Mathematics. It explains clever models Mathematicians use to transform an abstraction to propose an understanding of our reality. I also read another French mathematics book: "Insoluble Mais Vrai", which for instance, explains how mathematics help to predict as trivial things as finding the biggest sofa, you can take in a corridor of 1 meter large with a turn of 90 degrees.

Two years ago, I started to organise inspirational talks with bright minds in the field for the LA FABRIC(A)PPRENEURS . On this occasion I met Olivier Wathelet and his little black book about prospective: "Making tomorrow". Discovering the way to welcome the traces of the future in our present is potentially going to be a game changer for me in the future. I'm happy I discovered this ethnography field, even if it will take me some time to absorb it.

One of my friends has put several years of observation about systemic motivation in a book he wrote in French: "La Motivation au Coeur de l'Entreprise". It was an important event for him to publish it, but also he wanted to communicate its content in a playful way. He asked me to support him in creating a serious game, and it was an adventure that took both of us further than we expected. You can meet us in Paris, on 26th January in the next Agile Playground to test it!

Related to the creation of books, 2022 was also an important year for me. In September 2022, Dr. Stefan Schaper and I published our first book. I created the illustration and helped Stefan proofread and editing. The book presents to non-specialists, several innovation tools of the TRIZ method. We wanted to provide rich illustrations in the book to facilitate the understanding by non-experts in the filed of innovation.

Related to Art, I also enjoyed discovering the work of David Heckney. In the very last days of the year I also discover the book about mindful art of Marjan Abadie 💚🤍❤️ "Méditer avec l'art". This very original book offers to travel into classic paintings and use this occasion to meditate.

To conclude, I would like to thank Noel Warnell for making me discover #inspectional #reading. It allowed me to enjoy even more books and be ready to accept that I have rights as a reader. Rights like the one of dropping a book that I really disliked "Servant Leadership" for instance. It's a book written in 1970, and you can feel it in its form and way of writing. I've read enough about it to know that I would like next year to discover more about "Host Leadership" that I discovered during a workshop at the Agile Tour Lausanne.

I would also like to thank Lorant Dankahazi who published is booklist of 2022 and called me to present my personal one. Laurant, I hope you will have fun reading the