Despite not enjoying it as a child, I’ve become a voracious reader over the last decade. I find that a good book (even if it doesn’t directly teach me a lesson) has a way of inspiring new thoughts and catalyzing new ideas. Since my friends are constantly recommending me books, I felt it would only be fair to pay it forward and share the few that have shaped my life with you:
The Happiness Hypothesis: In his widely praised book, award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt examines the world’s philosophical wisdom through the lens of psychological science, showing how a deeper understanding of enduring maxims-like Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, or What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger-can enrich and even transform our lives.
Mob Rules: The Mob is notorious for its cruel and immoral practices, but its most successful members have always been extremely smart businessmen. Now, former mobster Louis Ferrante reveals its surprisingly effective management techniques and explains how to apply them-legally-to any legitimate business.
40 Chances: Finding Hope In A Hungry World: If someone granted you $3 billion to accomplish something great in the world, what would you do? In 2006, legendary investor Warren Buffett posed this challenge to his son Howard G. Buffett. Howard set out to help the most vulnerable people on earth—nearly a billion individuals who lack basic food security. And Howard gave himself a deadline: forty years to put the resources to work on this challenge.
Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help not Hype: Drawing from real examples of companies who are practicing Youtility as well as his experience helping more than seven hundred brands improve their marketing strategy, Baer provides a groundbreaking plan for using information and helpfulness to transform the relationship between companies and customers.
Digital Body Language: Marketing is undergoing a major shift that has been brought on by the change in the way people find and consume information. Whether it is Google s ability to make the information resources of the Internet searchable or social media s ability to connect people with peers for credible opinions on products and services, the way in which we access information and search for products has fundamentally changed.
The 5th Discipline: The Fifth Discipline, is based on fifteen years of experience in putting the book’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories in the book demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas in The Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published in 1990, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices.
The 48 Laws Of Power: Drawn from 3,000 years of the history of power, this book is intended as a guide to help readers achieve for themselves what Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, Louis XIV and Machiavelli learned the hard way.’