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The two management books that jump started my tenure as an executive

Kaitlyn Hova
4 min readSep 7, 2023

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When I was offered an executive position at JP Morgan I was equal parts excited and terrified. I was joining a group of my former Fast colleagues, a company whose innovative engineering culture I’ve been chasing ever since it went under. This new position felt like a second chance to work with the best engineers I’ve ever worked with in my career and I felt immense responsibility to not let that opportunity slip through my hands again. The only thing that gave me pause was that this was a management position, not an individual contributor (“IC”) one. I was a solo engineer at the time with very little experience of knowing what a good manager looked like, so before my start date I panicked and read 9 books on management. As of this month I have survived (and possibly thrived?) for a full year and I can confidently say that two of the books I read have heavily defined the start of my tenure. I think about them daily and recommend them to my team any chance I get.

Let’s get into them:

The two must read books (in no particular order) are:

  • “Turn the Ship Around” by David Marquet
  • “Creativity inc” by Ed Catmull

“Turn the Ship Around” by David Marquet

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Kaitlyn Hova
Kaitlyn Hova

Written by Kaitlyn Hova

Executive Director of UI Experience at JP Morgan and co-founder of Hova Labs. Excited about AI + Software + Life. All thoughts are my own. kaitlynhova.com.

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