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Reading List

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Our desks and nightstands are overflowing with books we’re skimming, reviewing, and reading to keep up with where business thought is going. Here’s what’s on the stack.

2007

Keith Yamashita & Sandra Spataro: Unstuck

A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World

You and your team are stuck. It happens as you pursue and tackle ambitious, challenging, and world changing ideas and projects. This book is a practical and fearless way to regain the momentum…and the fun!

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Chip Ingram: Effective Parenting in a Defective World

How to raise kids who stand out from the crowd

How do you raise effective kids who become effective adults? Ingram presents principles and exercises to develop your child’s potential, values, and character while drawing closer to your child.

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Coach Don Nava: Fit After 40

Keys to Looking Good & Feeling Great

Achieving fitness after age 40 is tough. Nava outlines a total program — physical, directional, nutritional, emotional, mental, and spiritual. His success? People who follow his program stay with it 10 times longer than traditional programs.

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Fred Kofman, MIT Teacher of the Year: Conscious Business

How to Build Value Through Values

Five breakthrough techniques: unconditional responsibility, unflinching integrity, authentic communication, impeccable commitments, right leadership

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Howard Gardner: Five Minds for the Future

Gardner outlines five premium thinking abilities: the disciplinary mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind.

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W. Steven Brown: 13 Fatal Errors Managers Make

And How You Can Avoid Them

This is a book that has been in my personal library for twenty years. And though the advice given seems so basic in a universe of over-hyped business books, I am amazed that the same errors are still being made. I guess Coach John Wooden was right when he said that “excellence is the superlative […]

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2006

David Warsh: Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations

A Story of Economic Discovery

David Warsh has given us a non-technical survey of the theories of developmental economics from Adam Smith’s great work by a similar name down to the present day.

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David Batstone: Saving the Corporate Soul — and (Who Knows?) Maybe Your Own

Eight Principles for Creating and Preserving Wealth and Well-Being for You and Your Company Without Selling Out

Batstone, the executive editor of Sojourners magazine, among other endeavors, outlines eight principles for building corporate integrity and profitability without compromising your own values.

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Pip Coburn: The Change Function

Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn

People will only change when the pain of their current situation outweighs the perceived pain of trying something new. Coburn uses this logic to explain the successes and failures of new technologies.

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Barbara Stanny: Prince Charming Isn’t Coming

How Women Get Smart About Money

Barbara Stany grew up never worrying about money. As daughter to one of the founders of H&R Block, first her father, and then later her husband managed her money and cared for her…

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Jeffrey D. Sachs: The End of Poverty

Economic Possibilities for Our Time

A challenging vision for how world poverty can be ended in the next twenty years.

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Andy Kessler: The End Of Medicine

How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor

“Your doctor can’t be certain what’s going on inside your body, but technology will. Embedding the knowledge of doctors in silicon will bring a breakout technology to healthcare, and we will soon see an end of medicine as we know it.”

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Tom Rath: Vital Friends

The People You Can't Afford to Live Without

Contrary to common wisdom, people who have a best friend at work are seven times more engaged in their jobs. Different friends contribute different things to a friendship. The research reveals eight different but vital friendship roles each of us needs.

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Karl Albrecht: Social Intelligence

The New Science of Success

Building on multiple intelligence theory, social intelligence is shown to be the key to success at work and life.

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John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity

Design, Technology, Business, Life

Simplicity = Sanity. This is the premise of the book for an overly complicated and increasingly complex world. Ten laws to help us move toward simplicity in design, technology, business and life.

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The Worldwatch Institute: Vital Signs 2006-2007

The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future

A sourcebook on the hard facts shaping our future. 44 concise analyses.

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Chris Murray: The Marketing Gurus

Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time

Summaries of seventeen marketing classics.

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Pat Fallon, Fred Senn: Juicing the Orange

How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage

How do you create profit-driving creativity? By using creative leverage. Learn to stimulate it and channel it properly in order to solve your marketing and branding problems.

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Alvin and Heidi Toffler: Revolutionary Wealth

How it will be created and how it will change our lives

The authors of the acclaimed Future Shock describe how tomorrow’s wealth will be created and by whom. They describe how the deep fundamentals such as time, space, and knowledge are different in First, Second, and Third Wave economies.

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Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense

Profiting From Evidence-Based Management

Pfeffer and Sutton point out that executives often make decisions based on gut feel, what’s worked in the past, recommendations from others, and conventional wisdom.

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Miles & Snow: Collaborative Entrepreneurship

Cost cutting and process improvement are not sufficient paths to profit. Wealth is created through innovation, but innovation can be impeded by barriers within a company and in the market.

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David Fromkin: A Peace to End All Peace

The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

Following WWI, the decisions and arrangements by the Allies imposed upon the region laid the foundation for the modern Middle East. Drawing lines on a blank map, the nations of Iraq, Israel, Jordon, and Lebanon were formed.

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Barry C. Lynn: End of the Line

The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation

We’ve moved from trade between nations to a finely-tuned, interconnected, and highly specialized global economic system. America is so outsourced that an earthquake in Taiwan can bring computer assembly lines to a halt in Texas.

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Gordon MacKenzie: Orbiting the Giant Hairball

A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace

Gordon MacKenzie worked at Hallmark for exactly 30 years — to the day. His role was to create for the giant greeting card company.

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