In this influential business book, Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can lose market leadership when they fail to adapt to disruptive innovations. Christensen explains why companies often miss new waves of innovation and provides a set of rules for capitalizing on disruptive technologies. The book uses examples from various industries, including the disk drive, mechanical excavator, steel, and computer industries, to illustrate trends that lead to success or failure in the face of disruptive technologies.
The book explores the pitfalls and challenges that leaders, particularly CEOs, face through a narrative centered around Andrew O’Brien, the CEO of a fictional company. Andrew meets Charlie, a wise former CEO, who introduces him to five temptations: prioritizing personal status over organizational results, valuing popularity over accountability, choosing certainty over clarity in decision-making, preferring harmony over productive conflict, and avoiding vulnerability to maintain an aura of invulnerability. Lencioni emphasizes the importance of humility, accountability, decisiveness, healthy conflict, and trust in leadership.
This book explores the fundamental causes of team failure and organizational politics through a narrative about a fictional company, DecisionTech, Inc. It outlines five dysfunctions: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. The book provides practical advice and real-world examples to help teams overcome these dysfunctions and become high-performing teams.
In this episode of Inside the Network, we sit down with Joe Levy, CEO of Sophos, a 40-year-old cybersecurity company that has quietly become one of the most important global players, serving over 600,000 organizations and generating over $1 billion in revenue.
Throughout his career, Joe has operated with a founder's mindset: thinking in bets, building great teams, spotting technical and market inflection points, and executing with long-term discipline. A great example is Sophos’ recent $800+ million acquisition of Dell Secureworks, adding over 1,000 new team members and significantly expanding Sophos’ managed detection and response and extended detection and response (MDR/XDR) capabilities.
Today’s session is an exciting masterclass on how a technically astute CEO navigates demanding customers, engages positively with Private Equity giants like Thoma Bravo, and partners with MSPs globally, while building a culture of "vulnerability-based trust”. One of the most insightful statistics Joe and his team at Sophos have highlighted is that while there are over 350 million businesses worldwide, fewer than 1 in 10,000 have a CISO.
This episode is packed with practical lessons on founder transitions, managing through personal health crises, and building resilient security organizations. For any cybersecurity founder thinking about the long game, Joe’s story is one you’ll want to hear.
As mentioned in the episode, Joe shared a curated list of books he’s been collecting over the years for his daughter, a shelf he calls “my daughter’s bookshelf.” These aren’t just bedtime stories; they’re books that have shaped Joe’s thinking about the world, passed along with personal inscriptions to provide context and reflection. Some were even introduced by his wife, Tracie, and read together as a family, like the James Herriot series, which took nearly a year to complete and left a lasting impression. This isn’t meant to be a definitive reading list - many classics, business books, and philosophical staples are intentionally left out. But it offers a deeply personal window into the stories that have mattered most to Joe as a parent, leader, and lifelong learner. He also shared a second resource: a living document of quotes, mental models, and hard-won career lessons, many of which have shaped his leadership journey and are referenced throughout the episode. You can explore both below.
Inside the Network 
