“Big Little Breakthroughs” offers a simple system for everyday innovation. By focusing on small creative acts, individuals and organizations can unlock massive rewards and tackle tough challenges.
2024 Book Recommendations
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.
Creative Acts for Curious People is filled with ways to build those skills with resilience, care, and confidence. At Stanford University’s world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka “the d.school,” students and faculty, experts and seekers bring together diverse perspectives to tackle ambitious projects; this book contains the experiences designed to help them do it. A provocative and highly visual companion, it’s a definitive resource for people who aim to draw on their curiosity and creativity in the face of uncertainty. Teeming with ideas about discovery, learning, and leading the way through unknown creative territory, Creative Acts for Curious People includes memorable stories and more than eighty innovative exercises.
Adaptability is key in a fast-changing world. April Rinne’s ‘flux mindset’ and eight ‘flux superpowers’ redefine leadership, success, and well-being amid chaos.
Organizations are outdated, with widespread employee disengagement. Enlightened management and new organizational structures can foster soulful, purposeful workplaces and a cultural shift.
It’s no secret that continuous innovation is the key to seizing and maintaining the competitive edge in today’s increasingly challenging business environment. Unfortunately, the process for achieving this holy grail of business has been a mystery―until now.
Radical Product Thinking (RPT) gives organizations a repeatable model for building world-changing products. The key? Being vision-driven instead of iteration-led. R. Dutt guides readers through the five elements of the methodology (vision, strategy, prioritization, execution and measurement, and culture) to develop a clear process for translating vision into reality, and turning RPT skills into muscle memory.
Nearly all innovation is done by teams. And while there are many books about the innovation process, and also many about managing teams, the management of innovation teams has gone unaddressed.
This matters, because innovation teams are not like other teams. Most teams and their managers know where they are headed. They’ve probably been there and done it previously, more than once. Innovation is different. The problem objective has been outlined, but the journey and the destination are full of unknowns and untrieds. The team is tasked with going where none have gone before—with scaling a mountain whose height, form, and hidden passes are unknown, and doing so before a rival team from the other side of the mountain finds the summit.
You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, to follow the rules, to wait your turn, to not make waves. Award-winning Yale professor Zoe Chance will show you how to rediscover the superpower that brings great ideas to life.
Best-selling author, Diana Wu David, former Financial Times executive and globally recognized Top 50 future of work thought leader, presents the secrets to thriving in the new world of work. Based on research and hundreds of interviews with leading experts from LinkedIn, Netflix and JP Morgan to Fast Company’s top ranked most creative guru, she answers the question – how can I be invincibly successful in this world of perpetual change?
The key ingredient to successful innovation is the everyday practice of Human-Centered Design: the discipline of developing solutions in the service of people. Every story of a good innovation — whether it’s a new product, a new service, a new business model, or a new form of governance — begins and ends with people. It starts with careful discernment of human needs, and concludes with solutions that meet or exceed personal expectations.
The vast majority of writing advice focuses on “writing well” as if it were the same as telling a great story. This is exactly where many aspiring writers fail—they strive for beautiful metaphors, authentic dialogue, and interesting characters, losing sight of the one thing that every engaging story must do: ignite the brain’s hardwired desire to learn what happens next. When writers tap into the evolutionary purpose of story and electrify our curiosity, it triggers a delicious dopamine rush that tells us to pay attention. Without it, even the most perfect prose won’t hold anyone’s interest.
Kelly’s timeless advice covers an astonishing range, from right living to setting ambitious goals, optimizing generosity, and cultivating compassion. He has wisdom for career, relationships, parenting, and finances, and gives guidance for practical matters ranging from travel to troubleshooting.
Throughout history, two perspectives on the world have dueled in our minds: the extrinsic—that of mechanism and physics—and the intrinsic—that of feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The intrinsic perspective allows us to tell stories about our lives, to chart our anger and our lust, to understand our psychologies. The extrinsic allows us to chart the physical world, to build upon it, and to travel across it. These perspectives have never been reconciled; they almost seem to exist on different planes of thought. Only recently, due to the pioneering work of DNA-discoverer Francis Crick, have these two perspectives been conjoined.
Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works—the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching the ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody’s “fault”; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession.
The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime’s work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments—and lifetimes—of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.
From London and Mexico City to Jakarta and Detroit, people are working and living like never before – quitting corporate jobs to start health food companies, building streetwear labels, and launching ethical jewelry brands. This book – from Courier magazine, the media brand for modern business – profiles twenty-five entrepreneurs around the world, exploring how they live and work on their terms and featuring practical advice, insight, and inspiration on how to follow in their footsteps.
At some point, every early-stage startup needs to stop being a secret and start telling people. As your company begins to take shape, building fast attention and strong demand become essential – and just buying ads won’t be enough.