Amazon link I’ve been talking about Gladwell for almost a month now, so it was high time I actually read Blink. The “thin-sliced” summary? It’s interesting, but shallow. By now, if you’ve read any of the interviews, or heard him speak on the radio, you probably know the premise of the book – that we […]
Category: books
The Making of a Philosopher, by Colin McGinn
Amazon link I picked this up in a used bookstore because it purported to be McGinn’s “Journey through Twentieth-Century Philosophy”. I have a layman’s interest in philosophy (my humanities concentration at MIT was in the field), and was curious as to what some of the developments in the twentieth century were. Plus, it was cheap. […]
Experimentation Matters, by Stefan Thomke
Amazon link I’m not sure where I originally heard about this book, but given my preference for rapid prototyping in my work, I thought it would be interesting. Thomke is a Harvard Business School professor who’s spent the last ten years studying how experimentation is integrated into and leveraged by organizations. This book is his […]
Gonzo Marketing, by Christopher Locke
Amazon link Subtitled “Winning through Worst Practices”, this book caught my eye when poking around the clearance section of a bookstore. Plus it referred to “gonzo” marketing, and since I’m a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism, I picked it up. Christopher Locke was one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which […]
In Search of Stupidity, by Merrill R. Chapman
Amazon link I picked this book up after reading the interesting foreword that Joel Spolsky wrote for it. Chapman’s insight was that several of the companies lauded for having a great corporate culture in the famous business book In Search of Excellence had fallen off the face of the planet within a few years. From […]
Global Brain, by Howard Bloom
Amazon link This book was recommended to me by Dav after he read my post on social networks and rejection. So I tossed it in my Amazon shopping cart, but didn’t end up ordering from Amazon until December, and didn’t read it until last week. Howard Bloom takes on the entire sweep of history (it’s […]
Managers Not MBAs, by Henry Mintzberg
Amazon link I read about this book in the Economist, and the concept intrigued me. I’ve been in the business world long enough to develop the typical technologists’ disdain for MBAs and their lack of domain knowledge and emphasis on numbers that are probably meaningless. I was looking forward to reading this book to gain […]
Sources of Power, by Gary Klein
Amazon link Subtitled “How People Make Decisions”, this book attempts to explore the process of decision-making from a perspective far outside the normal business-world-oriented theories. In business school, people are taught that the right way to make a decision is to define the problem, generate a list of possible solutions, evaluate all of the possible […]
Sync, by Steven Strogatz
Amazon link I’ve been wanting to read this since first hearing about it. I took a class from Strogatz when I was at MIT, and he was a great lecturer that was way too smart so I figured his book would be interesting and well written. I was reminded of Strogatz’s book recently when I […]
Down Here, by Andrew Vachss
Amazon link In my last Amazon order, I picked up the latest Andrew Vachss, an author whom I adore, and own all of his books. Well, maybe not all, but certainly all the Burke novels, and most of his fiction. I’m missing a couple of his graphic novel creations, things like that. Anyway. I think […]
