“Why We Sleep”: IT Leaders’ Book Picks for Buditeli Day

For many years I thought of sleep as something you sacrifice for the sake of work—I’m sure I’m not the only one in our industry. This book explained to me why that is the worst deal a person can make. It reads like a thriller, and since reading it I look at my alarm clock with different eyes.

The story of how Jennifer Doudna and her team arrived at CRISPR—a technology that is changing biology the way software changed everything else. Isaacson tells the story of science as if it were a startup: with competition, intrigue, failures and breakthroughs. If you’re curious how truly big ideas are born, this book is a must.

The founder of Patagonia proves that you can build a successful company without betraying your principles and without turning your people into machines. Many of the things I believe about SiteGround I found formulated here—only better. A book for anyone who wants to do business and still be able to look at themselves in the mirror.

Why: well, in the age of AI, to stay relevant you need at least some idea of how things work. This is literally the bible when it comes to algorithms and data structures.

Why: well, because you always work with people. This book is very old, but its advice will stay relevant for many years to come—hard skills alone stopped being enough a long time ago.

Why: Asimov is Asimov. It weaves together a great deal of politics with science fiction and the fall of empires in a fascinating way. I think it can be very relevant to how small companies that move smartly and quickly can compete with the big ones—and beat them.

This book reveals the recurring and often unconscious patterns that shape our social interactions, and it stresses how important it is to recognize our own patterns of behavior so that we can get out of destructive relationships and situations.

It gives us a language for recognizing recurring patterns in communication—why we slip into certain roles, why some conflicts keep repeating, and how we ourselves contribute to them. It’s useful for greater awareness in relationships, at work and in the way we communicate.

By understanding the “games” we play, the roles we step into and the emotional needs behind our behavior, we can begin to communicate more authentically, build healthier relationships and live more consciously.

A novel about love, freedom, truth and the price we sometimes pay when we refuse to bow to society’s expectations. By interweaving reality, satire and fantasy, Bulgakov questions the boundaries between good and evil and shows that they are not always as clear as they seem.

The story is a reminder of the power of love and creativity, of the courage to stay true to yourself, and of the fact that truth can be suppressed but never entirely destroyed.

It offers no ready-made answers; instead it provokes questions about good and evil, truth and fear, freedom and conformity, love and personal choice. It makes us look beyond the obvious and accept that people and moral situations are rarely simply “black” or “white.”

What has been… shall not endure. The ten-thousand-year Galactic Empire is falling apart! The book spans a full 1,000 years and lays out the accumulated consequences of decisions made over time. Hari Seldon charts the path events must follow to keep the damage under maximum control and shorten the chaos of the government’s collapse. Somehow it reminds me of decomposing a 15-year-old monolith some ten years ago :)

Now this here ain’t no reading… But for those who try—it has two main parts: Software Design and Project Design. Planning the project, the resources, the time, the cost, and assessing whether it even makes sense to start it at all—these are the topics the book covers.

It demands attention, notes and sometimes going back. It’s not something you read in passing. A different look at the work of the software architect and his place in the organization.

We’ve calculated everything down to the millimeter, and BAM—a tiger ate the banitsa?! It’s a collection of stories like that: how nobody believed black swans existed, how the casino accounted for every variable except the effect of the floor show, 99 heads out of 100 tosses, and so on. These stories made me wonder how confident I can really be in my plans, especially since after every surprise there’s always someone to explain how you could have seen it coming. In my profession I often work with assumptions that over time start being treated as facts, and this book motivated me to revisit them deliberately and periodically.

Warning: may cause analysis paralysis!

As a teenager I got hooked on science fiction from the second half of the 20th century. Authors like Isaac Asimov, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and Stanisław Lem, with their deeply philosophical works, broadened the horizons of my thinking enormously. Out of all my favorites I chose to recommend “Solaris,” because it challenged me to rethink my understanding of “intelligence”—a topic especially relevant today.

For many years I avoided poetry. I found it boring, hard to understand and up in the clouds. I discovered Maria Doneva through her wonderful rhymed translations of children’s books, and later I got to know her work for adults. Her collection “A Book About Us” sits on the shelf above the couch at home, and I often open it in the evening after an exhausting day. Human, light and yet deep—that’s what her poems are like. I recommend three a day, before bed.

There are books that suck you in, chew you up, spit you out, leave you speechless and turn your idea of the world upside down. Terry Pratchett’s are not among them. Discworld makes you laugh out loud, forget your problems and remember that sometimes reading can be pure and simple fun. “The Colour of Magic” is the first book in the series, but you won’t go wrong if you pick any other Discworld book.

I’m starting with this book because for me it was never just about money, despite its title. I read it early in my journey, and it gave me something fundamental—discipline of the mind and an understanding of the power of focused intention. In my career it taught me to see obstacles not as the end of the road but as an engineering problem to be solved. It gave me the psychological resilience to set ambitious goals, structure the steps to reach them and not give up at the first failures.

This book completely changed the way I look at leadership and working with people. In the IT sector we often try to solve problems with external incentives (the carrot and the stick), but Pink shows scientifically why that doesn’t work for complex and creative tasks. When I started applying the principles of autonomy, mastery and purpose in my teams, the results were tangible. The book helped me stop micromanaging and focus on building an environment in which people themselves want to give their best, because they see meaning in it.

This is the book I return to in my mind every time I feel I’m losing my balance or overloading myself with trivial issues. Written by a computer science professor with a terminal diagnosis, it gave me a brutally honest perspective on the time we have. Professionally, it helps me separate the truly important from the merely “urgent.” Personally, it reminds me that our most precious resource is the attention we give to the people around us, and that the walls in front of us exist only to show us how badly we want something.

The book describes the concept of the “Theory of Constraints.” It is a fundamental theory that applies to every management activity. It helps us understand where the slow spots (the bottlenecks) are in our process and how to address them. This book has helped me enormously in my professional work as a manager. It has also helped me a lot in everyday life, even with small tasks. Its only drawback is that once you’ve read it, you start seeing a lot of things that could be improved—lines in stores, dealing with the state administration, construction work, public transport and traffic jams in the streets…

Another fundamental book on management and on building learning organizations. It has many practical examples that explain why we can or can’t change an organization. One of the fundamental concepts is “the system.” Many people think they work in isolation, but in fact they are part of a system, and that system is what has a huge influence on the end result. Addressing a local problem usually won’t produce results unless it is solved at the level of the system. The book is extremely useful for people who build teams and entire companies.

One of the fundamental books in marketing. It describes very well the techniques with which we can influence the decisions we make—or others can influence them. The book offers many practical examples that examine human psychology and explain why we react in a certain way in specific situations. It has an extremely wide range of applications—besides marketing, also in sales, management and communicating with people (even small children)…

A book about leading people. Written by a military man, it later became hugely popular as a management book. The book is a guide to building stable, self-correcting organizations by pushing decisions down to the lowest levels of the organization, where people know the nature of the problems best. Turning the people in an organization from mere executors who report and wait for orders into active, responsible leaders in their own areas is the central idea of the book.

A book about how we think and the differences between fast, intuitive decisions and slow, well-considered ones. It will be useful both for analyzing your own thinking and for improving your decision-making. Besides your own, you’ll understand much better the thinking and decisions of the people around you, which will help you understand them… and manipulate them effectively.

Mainly a history book covering the last 13,000 years. Its focus is tracing how Eurasian civilization colonized and subjugated practically the entire rest of the world, and how this had nothing to do with intelligence or genetic superiority. What the reasons were, if not those—read it and you’ll find out.

A book for those who want to understand how the sausage is made, even at the risk of never enjoying it again. But the sausage is the movies. If it seems to you that “all movies are the same,” after reading it you’ll say, “well, I was right.”

I chose Chip War because it’s a book about technology, but seen from far beyond the technology itself. I like how it shows the links between semiconductors, geopolitics, economics and the global race for technological leadership. At a time when AI is developing at enormous speed, it is increasingly important to understand not only the models and the software but also the physical infrastructure behind them—the chips and the complex global ecosystem that produces them.

I chose this book because it’s one of the few on management that don’t try to present leadership as a series of ready-made recipes. In real work, the hardest decisions are often precisely those with no obviously right answer—especially when it comes to people, teams and organization. I like Horowitz’s pragmatic take on these situations and the idea that part of leadership is being able to make hard decisions under uncertainty and then take responsibility for them.

I like it above all as a way of thinking. The idea that a system can not merely withstand change and chaos but get better because of them has many applications—from life and business to the way we build technology systems and organizations. I especially like the idea of not trying to predict every possible change, but instead creating systems that can experiment, make mistakes on a small scale, adapt and grow stronger.

Lukyanenko’s “The Boy and the Darkness” is a bit like projective intrapsychic work + an operationalized theory of the inner child. Something between depth therapy and a Rorschach test, only instead of inkblots you get some people flying back and forth, and one sunny Kitten. It’s supposedly a children’s book, but it’s a children’s book the way Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” is. Or Ende’s “The Neverending Story”...

The story begins with a boy lying in his panelka—one of those Soviet-style prefab apartment blocks—sniffling because he’s caught some cold, and his Slavic mother is treating him with vodka compresses. A few state borders further southwest the situation would be exactly the same, except the compress would be made with rakia. I related hard, from the very first sentence.

I had the feeling someone had put a mirror in front of me—one of those murky ones hanging in the bathrooms of those very same panelkas, which nobody has replaced since the day they were put up—as if it was smudged up to about the middle of the book and then, with every page, began to clear. In the end an image started to crystallize in it that looked suspiciously like me—and just as I was about to see it properly, somebody went and took my mirror away, because the book ended. Books, the filthy rascals, do that sometimes. Especially this one.

This book first greeted me with so many made-up words that I felt I had to learn a foreign language before I could even work out where I was. The guy hasn’t bothered one bit to explain his world, he just drops you in and lets you fend for yourself. I asked ChatGPT to make me a glossary... Then I read the book in one night, because I couldn’t put it down.

At first glance it’s a perfectly ordinary Hero’s Journey, à la Campbell, the old guy with the monomyth and comparative mythology—a man with a mission, a mortal enemy many times stronger than him, trials, loves and the whole lot. And you expect the trials to be the big deal, the thing that tempers the character and makes the man grow, but here they aren’t.

The hero literally creates a world—island after island. The first time it’s a miracle, the second time too, by the hundredth you call it work, by the thousandth you just roll your eyes, splash a handful of water on your face in the morning and go off to your shift. Day after day, year after year. Like some automaton. And the strangest thing is that for me the power of the novel wasn’t in the big dramatic moments (there were some—not wars, not torture cells...), but in the weary routine between them. Because to keep going after the heroic has long since stopped feeling heroic to you is probably a greater heroism than the feat itself.

And here Loginov pulls a really nasty trick—from the world’s side the hero is a miracle worker, but from the side of the man himself he has gradually turned into a function of his miracle-working. And if he has saved everyone except himself, does that make him any less of a hero? I don’t think so. But then what’s left of the man once the mission has eaten everything else in him?

The book doesn’t answer that; it only asks the question (near the end) in a particularly devastating way.

Campbell, may the earth rest lightly on him, should be taking notes.

I really like how Ray Dalio talks about the years in which he built his company and about the people he built it with. He speaks openly about how important it is to attract the right people and create an environment in which they feel good. I also relate to the idea that clear principles give people confidence and the freedom to make decisions. For me this is an important part of leadership: having a team in which people think independently, take responsibility and can rely on one another.

I like the idea that change in a company takes much more than new technology. The way we work also has to change, along with how we choose what matters and how we tell whether we’ve achieved something useful. In my work I often see how easily the conversation starts from a specific system before we’ve clarified what problem we want to solve. This book brings me back to that question. For me, the value of technology lies in what people and the business can do better thanks to it.

I started this book out of curiosity: what do the Danes do so differently that we so often associate them with happiness? I liked how consciously they create coziness and set aside time for their loved ones. I think that after reading it I too started paying more attention to this—spending more time with the family, going out together on weekends and making our home cozier. The book reminded me how much these ordinary moments give us when we truly make time for them.

This is perhaps my No. 1 of all time. I’ve read it twice, about five years apart, and was equally impressed both times, but by different things in it. Its main focus is the courage to be vulnerable, to be an authentic version of ourselves. It’s often labeled a self-help book, but I’d say it is far from a manual of ready-made solutions. Instead it helped me see myself in the situations, behaviors and outcomes it describes, and ask myself what kind of person I want to be and how close I am to that version today.

A novel that blends a crime story, supernatural elements and a generous helping of black humor. It is set in Manchester, at a newspaper that writes about the inexplicable and the strange, run by an editor who is difficult, to put it mildly. Although I value the classics, sometimes I want to read something contemporary, and this book was a breath of fresh air. The characters are nuanced, with more than a pinch of flaws, sarcasm gushes from the pages, and the story is gripping and original. It holds the record for my fastest-read book after “Shōgun.”

Agatha Christie is perhaps my favorite author. Partly because I genuinely love her mysteries, partly because I admire the career she had as a woman back in the first half of the 20th century. Today her genre is called “cozy mystery,” and it seems especially fitting for the season. Beyond a gripping mystery, for me Agatha Christie’s work is a window onto a bygone period in England, and I find it fascinating to note the differences with Bulgarian culture and society, or with the present day. As the cherry on top, she often allows herself a subtle humor at her compatriots’ expense and offers her own unobtrusive commentary on society.