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.
In the fast-paced world we inhabit, there is a pressing need to cultivate essential skills that are indispensable for success. In an era riddled with fake news, social media, and information overload, the abilities of critical thinking, logic, and problem-solving stand out as the most crucial skills to master.
AI is much more than a sexy marketing gimmick. At its core, it’s a powerful business tool that can make operations and decision-making more efficient, employees more productive, and customers delighted.
Every investment plan under the sun is, at best, an informed speculation of what may happen in the future, based on a systematic extrapolation from the known past. Same as Ever reverses the process, inviting us to identify the many things that never, ever change.
Success through Failure shows us that making something better―by carefully anticipating and thus averting failure―is what invention and design are all about. Petroski explores the nature of invention and the character of the inventor through an unprecedented range of both everyday and extraordinary examples
Today’s innovation challenges are complex. Solving them requires diverse teams and a common understanding of thinking frameworks, processes, and tools. In Fire Up Innovation, you’ll discover a proven game plan to ignite your team’s innovation engine. You learn how to collaborate successfully by embracing all diversity and building support to sustain a team through the innovation process.
Tony Fadell led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone, and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in 30+ years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure, and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia.
Clear Thinking gives you the tools to recognize the moments that have the potential to transform your trajectory, and reshape how you navigate the critical space between stimulus and response. As Parrish shows, we may imagine we are the protagonists in the story of our lives. But the sad truth is, most of us run on autopilot.
Do you ever think you’re the only one making any sense? Or tried to reason with your partner with disastrous results? Do long, rambling answers drive you crazy? Or does your colleague’s abrasive manner rub you the wrong way?
From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
More and more traditional professional services firms are turning to “productization” to grow, improve valuations, and fend off new digital-first competitors. However, many will fail and waste a lot of money.For companies that deliver highly customized services, new product development and commercialization are often outside of their core skills, processes, and mindsets. Productizing services typically requires organizations to think differently about how they work and how they create value for their customers. This change does not come easily.
Ximena Vengoechea can show you how. In Listen Like You Mean It, she offers an essential listening guide for our times, revealing tried-and-true strategies honed in her research sessions and drawn from interviews with marriage counselors, podcast hosts, life coaches, journalists, filmmakers, and other listening experts.
Startups, even those started by mature founders, require a lot of monetary and intellectual investment in their entrepreneurial journey in terms of the development and collaboration of the ecosystem. There are a million stories out there of successes and failures, big and small startups, one-of-a-kind, and every kind of startup. However, one thing is common: the entrepreneurial journey is checkered with highs and lows, difficult decisions, roadblocks, perseverance, and lots of advice. Kites in a Hurricane is a book that describes how several startups innovatively used technology and entrepreneurial systems to solve the problems they faced daily when aspiring to build successful companies.
Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.
A captivating look at how companies can foster office culture that fuels creativity, productivity, and a sense of belonging and community among employees. A must-read for the future of work.
This book is a practical manual written in lucid western terms, that explains the method, the path, of realizing who you really are, what obstacles, will you find on that path and how to avoid or solve them.
Nail It Then Scale It is the first lean startup book to help entrepreneurs through the process of launching a high-growth company. The book includes not just high-level principles, but a distilled, step-by-step guide of key actions successful entrepreneurs take to reduce risk and increase success.
How to succeed in an era of ecosystem-based disruption: strategies and tools for offense, defense, timing, and leadership in a changing competitive landscape.
From the meatpacking plants that inspired Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line to the domino theory that led America into Vietnam to the “bicycle for the mind” that Steve Jobs envisioned as the Macintosh computer, analogies have played a dynamic role in shaping the world around us—and still do today.
Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving—how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork.
David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters, and scientists. He discovered that generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable.
The Daily Laws offer a page of refined and concise wisdom for each day of the year in an easy-to-digest lesson that will only take a few minutes to absorb. Each day also features a Daily Law—a prescription that readers cannot afford to ignore in the battle of life. Each month centers around a central theme: power, seduction, persuasion, strategy, human nature, toxic people, self-control, mastery, psychology, leadership, adversity, or creativity.
