Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Cant Stop Talking By Susan Cain

Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so. Taking the reader on a journey from Dale Carnegie’s birthplace to Harvard Business School, from a Tony Robbins seminar to an evangelical megachurch, Susan Cain charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal in the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects. She talks to Asian-American students who feel alienated from the brash, backslapping atmosphere of American schools. She questions the dominant values of American business culture, where forced collaboration can stand in the way of innovation, and where the leadership potential of introverts is often overlooked. And she draws on cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to reveal the surprising differences between extroverts and introverts. (Amazon)

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Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth By Navi Radjou,Jaideep Prabhu,Simone Ahuja

Jugaad Innovation throws cold water in the faces of CEOs, reminding them of the immense power of grassroots, do-it-yourself, cheap, quick, simple innovation. This is one of the most important lessons that emerging markets are teaching the West. - George F. Colony, CEO, Forrester Research

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The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves By Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely ingeniously and delightfully teases out how people balance truthfulness with cheating to create a reality out of wishful-blindness reality. You’ll develop a deeper understanding of your own personal ethics—and those of everybody you know. (Mehmet Oz, MD, Vice-Chair and Professor of Surgery at Columbia University )

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Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure By Tim Harford

Adapt is a highly readable, even entertaining, argument against top-down design. It debunks the Soviet-Harvard command-and-control style of planning and approach to economic policies and regulations and vindicates trial and error (particularly the error part) as a means to economic and general progress. Very impressive! —Nassim N. Taleb

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Civilization: The West and the Rest By Niall Ferguson

What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, was that the West developed six "killer applications" that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six things. If so, Ferguson warns, we may be living through the end of Western ascendancy. "Civilization" takes readers on their own extraordinary journey around the world - from the Grand Canal at Nanjing to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul; from Machu Picchu in the Andes to Shark Island, Namibia; and, from the proud towers of Prague to the secret churches of Wenzhou. It is the story of sailboats, missiles, land deeds, vaccines, blue jeans and Chinese Bibles. It is the defining narrative of modern world history.

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Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World By Michael Lewis

Mr. Lewis’s ability to find people who can see what is obvious to others only in retrospect or who somehow embody something larger going on in the financial world is uncanny. And in this book he weaves their stories into a sharp-edged narrative that leaves readers with a visceral understanding of the fiscal recklessness that lies behind today’s headlines about Europe’s growing debt problems and the risk of contagion they now pose to the world.” (New York Times )

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Einstein: His Life and Universe By Walter Isaacson

As a scientist, Albert Einstein is undoubtedly the most epic among 20th-century thinkers. Albert Einstein as a man, however, has been a much harder portrait to paint, and what we know of him as a husband, father, and friend is fragmentary at best. With Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson (author of the bestselling biographies Benjamin Franklin and Kissinger) brings Einstein's experience of life, love, and intellectual discovery into brilliant focus. The book is the first biography to tackle Einstein's enormous volume of personal correspondence that heretofore had been sealed from the public, and it's hard to imagine another book that could do such a richly textured and complicated life as Einstein's the same thoughtful justice. Isaacson is a master of the form and this latest opus is at once arresting and wonderfully revelatory. --Anne Bartholomew (Amazon)

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Thinking, Fast and Slow By Daniel Kahneman

In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions. (Amazon)

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Liars Poker By Michael Lewis

Lewis takes the reader through his schoolboy's progress as trainee and geek in the trading room, to high-powered swashbuckler. The author has a puckish appreciation for the comic. Yet he also has the knack of explaining precisely how complex deals really work. He provides the most readable explanation I've seen anywhere of the origin within Salomon Brothers of the mortgage-backed securities market....It is good history, and a good story. (National Review )

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Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson

A quote from Jobs that is in the book -- I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they are really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.

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Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content By Mark Levy

Interesting read on free writing which shows you can use free writing to enhance your thoughts and analyze problems from different perspectives. The premise being that your brain is much more active and articulate when you are writing than it is when you are speaking or thinking about things.

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Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah By Richard Bach

In the cloud-washed airspace between the cornfields of Illinois and blue infinity, a man puts his faith in the propeller of his biplane. For disillusioned writer and itinerant barnstormer Richard Bach, belief is as real as a full tank of gas and sparks firing in the cylinders...until he meets Donald Shimoda--former mechanic and self-described messiah who can make wrenches fly and Richard's imagination soar.... In Illusions, the unforgettable follow-up to his phenomenal bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach takes to the air to discover the ageless truths that give our souls wings: that people don't need airplanes to soar...that even the darkest clouds have meaning once we lift ourselves above them... and that messiahs can be found in the unlikeliest places--like hay fields, one-traffic-light midwestern towns, and most of all, deep within ourselves. (Found inside book flap).

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Jonathan Livingston Seagull By Richard Bach

An epic story of Gull who seeks meaning in flight; where Richard Bach uses flight as a metaphor to touch your heart and move you in ways that change you forever.

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Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization By Dave Logan,John King,Halee Fischer-Wright

The book explains the four stages of culture and how it moves from one stage to another. From the way culture works in street gangs to the way it works in organizations that change the world and build world class products, the book is an attempt to observe some of the best organizational examples of rich cultures around the globe and learn from the leaders who were instrumental in shaping these cultures.

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Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose By Tony Hsieh

Zappo’s CEO Tony Hsieh talks about his life as an entrepreneur and the life of Zappos, a company with a culture that is all about delivering happiness to its customers and employees. From a company struggling to survive to a hugely profitable company that was acquired by Amazon and still manages to retain its individual touch, the story will touch you in more ways than you can think. Running in parallel are Tony’s own realizations and lessons which will move you and act as validations for your own thoughts if you’ve ever thought about your work having a higher purpose and a cause than just making a buck.

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Quirk: Brain Science Makes Sense of Your Peculiar Personality By Hannah Holmes

This book is an absolutely interesting insight into the human being through researches done using mice. If nervousness is bad for you why does evolution allow nervous mice to exist? Is loyalty all about morality or is it just good biology? This book raises interesting question and then peeks into one of the most divine designs ever, the brain of humans and animal, for some very intriguing answers to understand how evolution works.

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How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer By Sarah Bakewell

“This charming biography shuffles incidents from Montaigne’s life and essays into twenty thematic chapters…Bakewell clearly relishes the anthropological anecdotes that enliven Montaigne’s work, but she handles equally well both his philosophical influences and the readers and interpreters who have guided the reception of the essays.” —The New Yorker

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Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ By Prof. Daniel Goleman Ph.D.

In this book Daniel Goleman challenges the premise that IQ is a good measure of intelligence and introduces the readers to the premise that our emotions form a huge part of our intelligence and how we navigate the universe. From how the functions of Amygdala to the functions of Prefrontal cortex the book explains how our emotional brain works. The book also explains emotions using simple scientific explanations, for example Goleman talks about how mirror neurons tend to make a person more empathetic. A must read for anyone who wants to understand how our emotional brain works and utilize this information to try becomming a better individual.

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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution By Francis Fukuyama

The evolving tension between private and public animates this magisterial history of the state. In his hominids-to-guillotines chronicle of humanity's attempts to build strong, accountable governments that adhere to the rule of law, international relations scholar Fukuyama advances two themes: the effort to create an impersonal state free from family and tribal allegiances, and the struggle—often violent—against wealthy elites who capture the state and block critical reforms.

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The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations By Ori Brafman,Rod A. Beckstrom

The title metaphor conveys the core concept: though a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different—a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg. In the same way, decentralized organizations, like the Internet, the Apache Indian tribe and Alcoholics Anonymous, are made up of many smaller units capable of operating, growing and multiplying independently of each other, making it very difficult for a rival force to control or defeat them. Despite familiar examples—eBay, Napster and the Toyota assembly line, for example—there are fresh insights, such as the authors' three techniques for combating a decentralized competitor (drive change in your competitors' ideology, force them to become centralized or decentralize yourself). (Amazon)

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The Happiness Advantage By Shawn Achor

Happiness at your workplace is not just a soft advantage. Shawn Achor has done his extensive research of happiness at workplace and the serious hard advantages it brings to the table. From changes in performance of employees whose managers prime them for success to how the rates of the students change over time when teachers have been falsely primed to believe these students are amazing when they are just borderline average this book has surveys and experiments which may not tell you things you do not already know but will definitely tell you how wrong you were about the magnitude of the advantages happiness brings to your organization and your life.

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Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11 By Syed Saleem Shahzad

A myriad of authors, journalists, academics and analysts have attempted to analyze what drives Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders and fighters. Syed Saleem Shahzad is the only one to have gone to their strongholds and asked them. Shahzad, a Pakistani investigative reporter, has a level of access to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban that Western journalists can only dream of. He has interviewed many top-level strategists and fighters in both movements on multiple occasions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Jordan. In Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban he uses first-hand accounts and his own local knowledge to build up a convincing picture of the aims and motivation of the leaders and fighters in radical Islamic movements. This is a version of the "war on terror" that has never been told. It will fascinate anyone concerned with the strategy and tactics of the most controversial Islamic movements.

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The China Study By T. Colin Campbell,Thomas M. Campbell II

Quote from the book - What protein consistently and strongly promoted cancer? Casein, which makes up 87% of cow's milk.... This book is written by someone raised on a dairy farm and someone who spent his life trying to prove that the american diet is the way to go...Amazing findings, has the potential to change what your breakfast, lunch and dinner...

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The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression By Bruce Barnbaum

the most readable, understandable, and complete textbook on photography. With well over 100 beautiful photographic illustrations in both black-and-white and color, as well as numerous charts, graphs, and tables, this book presents the world of photography to beginner, intermediate, and advanced photographers seeking to make a personal statement through the medium of photography. Without talking down to anyone, or talking over anyone's head, Barnbaum presents "how to" techniques for both traditional and digital approaches. Yet he goes well beyond the technical, as he delves deeply into the philosophical, expressive, and creative aspects of photography so often avoided in other books. (Amazon)

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Small Is the New Big and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas By Seth Godin

Random rifts on marketing and everything else seen the Classic Seth Godin style. The book is a classic collection of things organizations do wrong, things they do right and marketing nuggets collected over a period of years. From JetBlue’s funny in flight announcements to anecdotes on decision making, the book if full of small incidents and ideas that you may or may not agree with but you will find yourself thinking about these ideas.

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The Google Story: For Googles 10th Birthday By David A. Vise

The story of Google’s founders and the formation of Google, the success story behind the company and the hiccups Google faced along the way.

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More Joel on Software By Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky started his web log in March 2000 in order to offer his insights, based on years of experience, on how to improve the world of programming. This web log has become infamous among the programming world, and is linked to more than 600 other web sites and translated into 30+ languages! Spolsky’s extraordinary writing skills, technical knowledge, and caustic wit have made him a programming guru. With the success of Joel on Software, there has been a strong demand for additional gems and advice, and this book is the answer to those requests. Containing a collection of all–new articles from the original, More Joel on Software has even more of an edge than the original, and the tips for running a business or managing people have far broader application than the software industry. We feel it is safe to say that this is the most useful book you will buy this year.

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The Great American Stickup By Robert Scheer

Following Ronald Reagan' s obsession with the radical deregulation of financial markets through its apotheosis under the Clinton administration to Obama' s reform efforts--which rely, oddly enough, on Clinton cronies to clean up (and profit from) the mess they made--Scheer (The Pornography of Power) proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Washington make very agreeable bedfellows. Scheer names names (Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Alan Greenspan), while praising those who sounded the alarm and underscoring the foreseeable results of putting Wall Street in the driver' s seat. What grew in this regulatory vacuum, Scheer shows, was a global casino, a mind-bendingly enormous and arcane system of gambling on new financial products worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. By 2007, when the house of cards collapsed, Wall Street alone understood what it had wrought while its government partners remained clueless.

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Rework: Change The Way You Work Forever By Jason Fried,David Heinemeier Hansson

Guys at 37Signals asked enterprises and software developers to get real in their First book (Getting real). In this one they “Rework” work. Meetings are toxic, Policies are itches people scratch, Underdo your competition, plans are just guesses (and many more bold ideas in small easy to read chapters). This book explains the classic 37Signal success story and more than anything provides inspiration coming from someone an organization that has been fairly successful at what they do.

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The Negative (The New Ansel Adams Photography Series, Book 2) By Ansel Adams,Robert Baker

The Negative is the second volume in the acclaimed and highly influential The Ansel Adams Photography Series. This second volume is anchored by a detailed discussion of Adams' Zone System and his seminal concept of visualization. It presents detailed discussion of artificial and natural light, film and exposure, and darkroom equipment and techniques. Numerous examples of Adams' work clarify the principles discussed. Handsomely illustrated with photographs by Adams as well as instructive line drawings, this classic manual can dramatically improve your photography (Amazon)

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The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation By Jay Elliot,William L. Simon

Written by Jay Elliot, who is a former Senior Vice President of Apple the book is a first person account of apple and how it survived and continues to thrive. While at places Jay comes across as a Steve Jobs fan boy and glorifies everything Jobs did, there are some really useful lessons of leadership and how products that change the world are built, in this book. A good read for all apple fan boys and also for people who want to make awesome products, although the book could have been way better if the “fan boy” tone would have been kept out of it and facts, innovation that jobs brought to the table along with the jobs innovative side was highlighted much more objectively.

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Who Says Elephants Cant Dance (text only) by L. V. Gerstner By L. V. Gerstner

CEO Louis V. Gerstner Jr.'s memoir about the extraordinary turnaround of IBM and his transformation of the company into the industry leader of the computer age.

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Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable By Seth Godin

The world is changing ever more rapidly, and the rules of marketing are no different, writes Godin, the field's reigning guru. The old ways-run-of-the-mill TV commercials, ads in the Wall Street Journal and so on-don't work like they used to, because such messages are so plentiful that consumers have tuned them out. This means you have to toss out everything you know and do something "remarkable" (the way a purple cow in a field of Guernseys would be remarkable) to have any effect at all, writes Godin (Permission Marketing; Unleashing the Ideavirus). He cites companies like HBO, Starbucks and JetBlue, all of which created new ways of doing old businesses and saw their brands sizzle as a result. Godin's style is punchy and irreverent, using short, sharp messages to drive his points home. (Amazon)

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Linchpin By Seth Godin

This is by far Seth’s most passionate book. He’s pulling fewer punches. He’s out for blood. He’s out to make a difference. And that glorious, heartfelt passion is obvious on every page, even if it is in Seth’s usual quiet, lucid, understated manner. A linchpin, as Seth describes it, is somebody in an organization who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced - her role is just far too unique and valuable. And then he goes on to say, well, seriously folks, you need to be one of these people, you really do. To not be one is economic and career suicide. No surprises there - that’s exactly what one would expect Seth to say. But here’s where it gets interesting. In his best-known book, Purple Cow, Seth’s message was, “Everyone’s a marketer now.” In All Marketers Are Liars, his message was, “Everyone’s a storyteller now.” In Tribes, his message was, “Everyone’s a leader now.” And from Linchpin? "Everyone’s an artist now." - (by Hugh MacLeod on Amazon.com)

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Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Best Practices (Microsoft)) By Steve McConnell

Often referred to as the "black art" because of its complexity and uncertainty, software estimation is not as hard or mysterious as people think. However, the art of how to create effective cost and schedule estimates has not been very well publicized. While the average software organization can struggle with project costs that run double their original estimates, some of the more sophisticated organizations achieve results with estimation errors as low as 5-10%. These best-in-class organizations use scientific techniques that are not cost-effective, however, making them of limited use to most software development organizations. To address these issues, Software Estimation focuses on the art of software estimation and provides a proven set of procedures and heuristics that software developers, technical leads, and project managers can apply to their projects. (Amazon).

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The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us By Christopher Chabris,Daniel Simons

Christopher Chabri and Daniel Simons surprise the world with their classic experiment where people are asked to count the number of passes people in white dress make during a basketball drill video. Halfway through the video a Gorilla appears in the video, beats his chest and walks out of the frame. When asked if people noticed anything strange during the video 50% of people fail to notice the gorilla completely. The book builds on the theory that while our brains are powerful they are nowhere nearly as attentive as we think they are. The book focuses on ways in which illusions deceive our brains and how each one of us have our own versions of what we see.

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First, Break All the Rules: What the Worlds Greatest Managers Do Differently By Marcus Buckingham,Curt Coffman

There are many suggested rules for managers. This books tells you why you shouldn't follow them. Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman study the best of the managers around the globe to observe what makes them the best. How the react to situations, how they manage human beings, what they do and what they do not. The one thing common that they find is that most effective managers often break all conventional rules of management. The book is a classic example of research explained in a compelling and engrossing way.

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Leading Change By John P. Kotter

Harvard Business School professor Kotter (A Force for Change) breaks from the mold of M.B.A. jargon-filled texts to produce a truly accessible, clear and visionary guide to the business world's buzzword for the late '90s?change. In this excellent business manual, Kotter emphasizes a comprehensive eight-step framework that can be followed by executives at all levels. Kotter advises those who would implement change to foster a sense of urgency within the organization. "A higher rate of urgency does not imply everpresent panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent." Twenty-first century business change must overcome overmanaged and underled cultures (Amazon).

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Poke the Box By Seth Godin

If you're stuck at the starting line, you don't need more time or permission. You don’t need to wait for a boss’s okay or to be told to push the button; you just need to poke. Poke the Box is a manifesto by bestselling author Seth Godin that just might make you uncomfortable. It’s a call to action about the initiative you’re taking-– in your job or in your life. Godin knows that one of our scarcest resources is the spark of initiative in most organizations (and most careers)-– the person with the guts to say, “I want to start stuff.” Poke the Box just may be the kick in the pants you need to shake up your life (Amazon).

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The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series, No. 17) By Joseph Campbell

Best compilation of commonalities of the mythical heroes and their journey from all corners of the world

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