Book website, with excerpts Amazon link A coworker recommended this to me, and was even kind enough to lend it to me for the weekend. Coyle asks the question: where does talent come from? Is it nature (genetics) or nurture (environment/opportunity)? He started by visiting several talent hotbeds – the Russian tennis academy that spawned […]
Category: reviews
Drive, by Daniel Pink
Drive book website Amazon link I really liked Pink’s TED talk on the “surprising science of motivation” where he says “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does”. In particular, the compensation and motivation strategies currently used by businesses have been shown to undermine motivation rather than enhance it. So I’ve been […]
The Design of Business, by Roger Martin
Amazon link I’m not sure where I heard about this book, but the subtitle, “Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage”, pretty much sold me on at least checking it out, since I’m interested in both design and management. So I got it from the library and read it. Martin frames business as operating […]
Super Bowl Sunday
Yikes, it has been a long time since I blogged. I’ve been buried at work, although things seem to be slowing down a bit (knock on wood). For those of you that want more regular updates, I recommend Twitter and/or del.icio.us as those get updated more regularly. This past weekend, though, I made time to […]
Nonfiction Roundup August 2008
I’m finishing up packing my books, and came across the pile of books that I read this summer but haven’t reviewed yet. So this is going to be a quickie placeholder post with short reviews of each book, and hopefully I’ll have time to come back and do a longer review later on a couple […]
Fiction Roundup August 2008
Wow. I haven’t posted any fiction reviews in the past year. Then again, I haven’t been reading much new fiction in the past year – mostly I’ve been re-reading comfort books or watching TV instead of fiction reading. Anyway, I was going through my bookshelves, and figured I should do at least a capsule review […]
True Enough, by Farhad Manjoo
Amazon link Based on my previous thoughts about the decline of Absolute Truth , it’s not surprising that I wanted to read a book that is subtitled “Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society”. Manjoo observes that we, the body politic, used to agree on what was happening and the problems we were facing, but […]
Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian
Amazon link Google books link, which appears to have most of the book’s content available (not surprising as Hal Varian is Google’s Chief Economist). According to the preface, this book arose because these two economics professors were perplexed by complaints that “economics was not much use in today’s economy” even as they were getting hired […]
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Sounds crazy, no? Almost like…a fiddler on the roof. No, wait, that’s something else. I’d heard about this project a few months ago, but Xemu linked to the trailer a couple weeks ago, which got me fanboy-ing again. Dude, a musical written by Joss Whedon, following in the tradition of the […]
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink
Amazon link Official book site My friend Wes recommended this book to me after my social capitalist post where I claimed that we were moving from a world defined by technology to one defined by social connections. Daniel Pink’s book describes a similar transition from an emphasis on left-brain thinking towards right-brain thinking. Pink starts […]
