I love reading. As a fellow innovator, I’ll bet you do too. I’ve found that the right book can fundamentally change your understanding of things. Shape your mind in new ways. Every week, I feature a book I found interesting in my weekly newsletter. The topics ranged from innovation to creativity, to design thinking, to customer experience, to business modeling, to brainstorming, as well as recommendations on envisioning the future: predicting, embracing, and surviving change.
The Ideation Equation establishes the core habits for becoming a highly creative thinker, similar to how other books focused on habits have helped millions of people to become better leaders, improve their general efficiency, enjoy superior health, have better relationships, and countless other great things.
Richard Turner delivers a practical, step-by-step approach to starting and growing a thriving enterprise. If you’re ready to take your fledgling business to the next level—and finally follow that brilliant big idea—this guide covers everything you’ll need to navigate the challenges ahead.
Complaints provide a feedback mechanism to help organizations rapidly and inexpensively strengthen products, service styles, and market focus. Most importantly, complaints that are well-received create customer loyalty.
Both successful entrepreneurs and chess grandmasters have the vision to look at the pieces in front of them and anticipate their next five moves. In this book, Patrick Bet-David translates this skill into a valuable methodology that applies to high performers at all levels of business. Whether you feel like you’ve hit a wall, lost your fire, or are looking for innovative strategies to take your business to the next level, Your Next Five Moves has the answers.
We all want great ideas, but few actually understand how they’re born. Innovation doesn’t come from a sprint or a hackathon–it’s a result of maximizing ideaflow.
We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood.
This is a book about self-sabotage. Why we do it when we do it, and how to stop doing it—for good. Coexisting but conflicting needs create self-sabotaging behaviors. This is why we resist efforts to change, often until they feel completely futile. But by extracting crucial insight from our most damaging habits, building emotional intelligence by better understanding our brains and bodies, releasing past experiences at a cellular level, and learning to act as our highest potential future selves, we can step out of our way and into our potential
In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the most significant moral challenges in modern American history.
How do today’s most successful tech companies―Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla―design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of billions of people worldwide? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class on how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love―and that will work for your business.
What if, instead of trying to predict the future, we could just pick the one we want – and then invent it? Well, we can. This book describes seven stunning technological advances that will occur by 2050 and shows how to combine them, starting now, to build a future that will let billions thrive.
We are at the dawn of the Autonomous Revolution, a turning point in human history as decisive as the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. More and more, AI-based machines are replacing human beings, and online environments are gathering and using our data to manipulate us. This loss of human autonomy amounts to nothing less than a societal phase change, a fundamental paradigm shift. The same institutions will remain–schools, banks, churches, and corporations–but they will radically change form, obey new rules, and use new tools.
From the linear to the intuitive, this comprehensive handbook details ingenious creative-thinking techniques for approaching problems in unconventional ways. Through fun and thought-provoking exercises, you’ll learn how to create original ideas that will improve your personal life and your business life.
Makes the case to owners, advisors, executives, and leaders―as well as those in the trenches―of the value of innovation: why it’s worthy of investment and what it can do for the health and longevity of a company
Positioning ideas as the fuel of business success and personal fulfillment, this indispensable resource helps readers find creative fuel by helping them discover insights and develop habits that lead to more and better ideas. Written in a punchy style with easily digestible single-page messages, the book inspires creativity simply through the way it looks and feels, but it is also packed with stories, interviews, quotes, tips, exercises, and real-world examples that show readers how to think outside the box—and then throw away the box.
We experience change in four phases. The first is panic. Then we adapt. Then we find a new normal. And then, finally, we reach the phase we could not have imagined in the beginning, the moment when we realize that we wouldn’t go back.
Good luck isn’t just chance—it can be learned and leveraged—and The Serendipity Mindset explains how you can use serendipity to make life better at work, at home—everywhere.
The intricacy of modern life has created a false dichotomy between things that are ‘hard and important’ and those that are ‘easy and trivial.’ Everything has become so much harder than it ought to be.
From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness
Customer experience futurist Blake Morgan outlines ten easy-to-follow customer experience guidelines that integrate emerging technologies with practical strategies to combat disconnected processes, silo mentalities, and a lack of buyer perspective.
For generations, we’ve been stuck with a cookie-cutter mold for success that requires us to be the same as everyone else, only better. This “standard formula” works for some people but leaves most of us feeling disengaged and frustrated. As much as we might dislike the standard formula, it seems like there’s no other practical path to financial security and fulfilling life. But what if there is?
Overwork is the new normal. Rest is something to do when the important things are done but they are never done. Looking at different forms of rest, from sleep to vacation, Silicon Valley futurist and business consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang dispels the myth that the harder we work, the better the outcome.
Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less productive, and more likely to divorce. In one study, time stress produced a stronger negative effect on happiness than unemployment.
Price reveals the surprising mental, physical, and cognitive benefits of fun and offers a practical, personalized plan for how we can achieve better screen/life balance and attract more True Fun into our daily lives—without feeling overwhelmed.
Discomfort can be high-octane fuel for performance or the most direct path to your goals. Learn how to turn rock bottom into one of life’s greatest gifts
Most new enterprise software products fail to generate a profit. They fail not because of technical challenges, lack of funding, or market conditions. Instead, new products fail because most companies build products that don’t solve a market need, and therefore, customers don’t buy them.
Delivers a startlingly insightful discussion about how the world as we know it will fundamentally change as the physical and the digital worlds merge into the metaverse, impacting the everyday experiences of people, companies, and societies.
Rutger Bregman provides a new perspective on the past 200,000 years of human history, setting out to prove that we are hardwired for kindness, geared toward cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another
A highly provocative, mindbending, beautifully designed, and visionary look at the landscape of our rapidly evolving digital era. 50 years after Marshall McLuhan’s groundbreaking book on the influence of technology on culture in The Medium is the Massage, Basar, Coupland, and Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that’s redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the ‘extreme present’.
The Human Element is for anyone who wants to introduce a new idea or innovation into the world. Most marketers, innovators, executives, activists, or anyone else in the business of creating change, operate on a deep assumption.
When we look into the future, we imagine economic collapse, environmental disaster, and the zombie apocalypse. But what if we are wrong? John Higgs takes us on a journey past the technological hype and headlines to discover why we shouldn’t trust science fiction predictions, why nature is not as helpless as we assume, and why purpose can never be automated. In the process, we will come to a better understanding of what lies ahead and how despite everything we can build a better future.
An essential read for podcasters, salespeople, startup founders, and anyone who wants to lead deeper conversations with people they admire. Andrew Warner’s book not only teaches you how to interview, but it also teaches you how to learn.
Design Thinking has the power to transform nearly everything. It is a human-centered approach to finding innovative real solutions to tough problems.
The basis of competition is changing. Are you prepared? Rivalry is shifting from well-defined industries to broader ecosystems: automobiles to mobility platforms; banking to fintech; television broadcasting to video streaming.
hat tip to Tammy Madsen
Using the latest advances in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, Dutton shows how we can optimize our tendency to categorize and fine-tune our minds to avoid the pitfalls of too little, and too much, complexity.
hat tip to Neil Botten
To frame is to make a mental model that enables us to make sense of new situations. Frames guide the decisions we make and the results we attain. People have long focused on traits like memory and reasoning, leaving framing all but ignored.
hat tip to Neil Botten
This timeless guide promises to make the creative process of billion-dollar entrepreneurs and successful seven-figure artists accessible and actionable for you.
We all have something we’d love to do, but often our fear of failure outweighs the potential of our destiny. But what if we found out that failure could actually help us succeed?
Explores the psychological underpinnings of the “laziness lie,” including its origins from the Puritans and how it has continued to proliferate as digital work tools have blurred the boundaries between work and life. Using in-depth research, Price explains that people today do far more work than nearly any other humans in history yet most of us often still feel we are not doing enough.
While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology Ph.D. Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges.
After describing 10 common pitfalls, the authors share great tools and techniques that work in practice.
Innovation used to be seen as a game best left to entrepreneurs, but now a new breed of corporate managers is flipping this logic on its head. These Corporate Explorers have the insight, resilience, and discipline to overcome the obstacles and build new ventures from inside even the largest organizations.
Conventional business wisdom tells us that entrepreneurs are society’s main source of innovation. However, many of the modern world’s most impactful creations were invented by passionate employee innovators
Thanks to technology, we live in a world that’s much more comfortable than ever before. But here’s the paradox: our tolerance for discomfort is at an all-time low. And as we wrestle with a sinking “discomfort threshold,” we increasingly find ourselves at the mercy of our primitive instincts and reactions that can perpetuate disease, dysfunction, and impair performance and decision making.
In this startling and provocative look at how the human mind deals with change, Leonard Mlodinow shows us to unleash the natural abilities we all possess so we can thrive in dynamic and troubled times.
This eye-opening narrative journey into the rapidly changing world of artificial intelligence reveals the dangerous ways AI is exploiting the unconscious habits of our minds—and the real threat it poses to humanity.
How do today’s most successful tech companies―Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla―design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies.
Building a great product that customers love requires a variety of skills, mindsets, and techniques. Starting from the three pillars of customer focus, the culture of Agility, and team empowerment, this book explains how to go from theory to practice.
Clear and informed coverage of the management processes of new product development, coupled with practical orientation of taking you through real-life challenges and dilemmas.
