Book 21. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

Peter Sims

What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, the story developers at Pixar films, and the Army Chief of Strategic Plans all have in common? Bestselling author Peter Sims found that all of them have achieved breakthrough results by methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas. Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan a whole project out in advance, trying to foresee the final outcome, they make a series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning from lots of little failures and from small but highly significant wins that allow them to happen upon unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.           Based on deep and extensive research, including more than 200 interviews with leading innovators, Sims discovered that productive, creative thinkers and doers—from Ludwig van Beethoven to Thomas Edison and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—practice a key set of simple but ingenious experimental methods—such as failing quickly to learn fast, tapping into the genius of play, and engaging in highly immersed observation—that free their minds, opening them up to making unexpected connections and perceiving invaluable insights. These methods also unshackle them from the constraints of overly analytical thinking and linear problem solving that our education places so much emphasis on, as well as from the fear of failure, all of which thwart so many of us in trying to be more innovative.               Reporting on a fascinating range of research, from the psychology of creative blocks to the influential Silicon Valley–based field of design thinking, Sims offers engaging and wonderfully illuminating accounts of breakthrough innovators at work, including how Hewlett-Packard stumbled onto the breakaway success of the first hand-held calculator; the remarkable storyboarding process at Pixar films that has been the key to their unbroken streak of box office successes; the playful discovery process by which Frank Gehry arrived at his critically acclaimed design for Disney Hall; the aha revelation that led Amazon to pursue its wildly successful affiliates program; and the U.S. Army’s ingenious approach to counterinsurgency operations that led to the dramatic turnaround in Iraq.               Fast paced and as entertaining as it is illuminating, Little Bets offers a whole new way of thinking about how to break away from the narrow strictures of the methods of analyzing and problem solving we were all taught in school and unleash our untapped creative powers. 

Book 20. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Charles Duhigg

A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.
 
Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.
 
An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.
 
What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.
 
They succeeded by transforming habits.
 
In The Power of Habit, *award-winning *New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.
 
Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.
 
At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.
 
Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

Book 19. The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life

Rosamund Stone Zander

Book 18. The On-Purpose Person: Making Your Life Make Sense

Kevin W. McCarthy

Is Your Life Filled, Yet Unfulfilled? Do you feel pulled in a thousand different directions?
Are your days so busy you hardly have time to think?
Are you living up to other people’s expectations while your own plans and dreams go unmet?
In The On-Purpose Person you’ll learn how to discover who you are, where you are headed, what you should do, and what’s most important to you! That’s being on-purpose! Tap Into Your Highest Potential With The On-Purpose Person Nothing adds more fullness and meaning to your life than discovering your purpose and living it out every moment of your life. With The On-Purpose Person, you’ll be on your way to greater order and clarity within 30 minutes of picking up the book. This entertaining story format provides clear principles that are easy to apply to everyday life. You’ll put them into practice immediately. Regardless of whether you’re in your teens or well into retirement, being on-purpose will inspire and guide you to live true to yourself. “Goals are consumable. Purpose is permanent,” states Kevin W. McCarthy. The On-Purpose Person moves you beyond the surface of life to what matters most so you can make a difference. You’ll have a simple, yet powerful system to:
Invest your time, talent, and treasure in what is most important
Exchange burnout for being integrated
Learn why a balanced life is a myth
Feel satisfied rather than stressed out at the end of the day
Find meaningful time for yourself
Align your innate passion and gifting in the right direction
Trade discontent and frustration for a growing and enduring joy
Make confident, more improved decisions more consistently
Manage hurdles and setbacks positively
Face opposition from an unassailable position of strength
Define your standards for success that are just right for you
Gain a vivid understanding of yourself
Explore your possibilities equipped to succeed

Book 17. Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Societies, Art, Power, and Technology

John Brockman

Why do civilizations rise and fall?
What are the origins and purpose of art?
How does technology shape society?
Did culture direct human evolution?
Is the Internet an agent of democracy or dictatorships?

An immensely powerful but little-understood force that impacts society, art, politics, and even human biological development, culture is the very stage on which human experience plays out. But what is it, exactly? What are its rules and origins? In this fascinating volume, John Brockman, editor and publisher of Edge, presents short, accessible explorations of culture’s essential aspects, by today’s most influential scientists and thinkers.

Contributors and topics include

Jared Diamond on why societies collapse and how we can make better decisions to protect our own future • Denis Dutton on the origins of art Daniel C. Dennett on the evolution of cultures • Jaron Lanier on the ominous impact of the Internet • Nicholas Christakis on the structure and rules of social networks, both “real” and online • Clay Shirky and Evgeny Morozov on the new political reality of the digital era • Brian Eno on what cultures value Stewart Brand on the responsibilities of human power • Douglas Rushkoff on the next Renaissance • W. Daniel Hillis on the Net as a global “knowledge web”

Book 16. The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

Shawn Achor

Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.
           
In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies from his work with thousands of Fortune 500 executives in 42 countries, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.
           
Isolating seven practical, actionable principles that have been tried and tested everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, stretching from Argentina to Zimbabwe, he shows us how we can capitalize on the Happiness Advantage to improve our performance and maximize our potential. Among the principles he outlines:
 

   • The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunities wherever we look.
   • The Zorro Circle: how to channel our efforts on small, manageable goals, to gain the leverage to gradually conquer bigger and bigger ones.
   • Social Investment: how to reap the dividends of investing in one of the greatest predictors of success and happiness—our social support network

 
A must-read for everyone trying to excel in a world of increasing workloads, stress, and negativity, *The Happiness Advantage *isn’t only about how to become happier at work. It’s about how to reap the benefits of a happier and more positive mind-set to achieve the extraordinary in our work and in our lives.

Book 15. Imagine: How Creativity Works

Jonah Lehrer

Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms? That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help you double your creative output?

From the New York Times *best-selling author of *How We Decide comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,” Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single gift possessed by the lucky few. It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively.

Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, daydreaming productively, and adopting an outsider’s perspective (travel helps). He unveils the optimal mix of old and new partners in any creative collaboration, and explains why criticism is essential to the process. Then he zooms out to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective.

You’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing habits and the drug addictions of poets. You’ll meet a Manhattan bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented an entirely new surfing move. You’ll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar’s office space is designed to spark the next big leap in animation.

Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, *Imagine *reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world.

 http://www.jonahlehrer.com/ 

Book 14. Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas

Dan Zarrella

Want to learn how to maximize social media? When to do it, what words to use, who to tweet at? Look no further than Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design and Engineering of Contagious Ideas. Social media master Dan Zarrella has amassed years of experience helping people negotiate the often mystical place of social media marketing. Now, he has condensed those well-tried ideas into this concise and conversational book. *Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness *demystifies and deconstructs how social media works, who it benefits and why we all depend upon it to help our good ideas spread.

Book 13. Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands

Douglas Holt

Market innovation has long been dominated by the worldview of engineers and economists—build a better mousetrap and the world will take notice. The most influential strategy books—such as Competing for the Future, The Innovator’s Dilemma, and Blue Ocean Strategy—argue that innovation should focus on breakthrough functionality.

Holt and Cameron challenge this conventional wisdom. They develop a cultural approach to innovation: champion a better ideology and the world will take notice. The authors use detailed historical analyses of the take-offs of Nike, vitaminwater, Marlboro, Starbucks, Jack Daniel’s, Levi’s, ESPN, and Ben & Jerry’s to build a powerful new theory. They show how brands in mature categories come to rely upon similar conventional brand expressions, leading to what the authors call a cultural orthodoxy. Historical changes in society threaten this orthodoxy by creating demand for new culture. Cultural innovations draw upon source material—novel cultural content lurking in subcultures, social movements, and the media—to develop brands that respond to this emerging demand, leapfrogging entrenched incumbents. The authors demonstrate how they have adapted this theory into a step-by-step cultural strategy model, which they successfully applied to start-ups (Fat Tire beer), consumer technologies (Clearblue pregnancy tests), under-funded challengers (Fuse Music Television), and social enterprises (Freelancers Union). Holt and Cameron conclude by explaining why top marketing companies fail at cultural innovation. Using careful organizational research, the authors demonstrate that companies are trapped in the brand bureaucracy, which systematically derails innovation. Cultural innovation requires a new organizational logic. In all of their cases, the authors find that the cultural innovators have rejected the brand bureaucracy.

Written by one of the leading authorities on brands and marketing in the world today, Cultural Strategy transforms what has always been treated as the “intuitive” side of branding into a systematic strategic discipline.

Book 12. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
 
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.
 
And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.