Book recommendations for business leaders: 9/14/20

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Stephen King says that if you want to be a writer, there are two things you must do: read a lot and write a lot. This is about the “read a lot” part. I include reading lists and book reviews that will help you do business more effectively and write better for business.

In this post, I point you to reviews of The Genesis of Rebellion: Governance, Grievance, and Mutiny in the Age of Sail, Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely. We’re All in This Together: Creating a Team Culture of High Performance, Trust, and Belonging, Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny, Full-Spectrum Thinking: How to Escape Boxes in a Post-Categorical Future, How to Lead: Wisdom from the World’s Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

From Daniel Akst: Mutiny amid the bounty

“Think of mutiny, and you might imagine events akin to those that occurred aboard the Royal Navy frigate Hermione on September 21, 1797, when seething crew members erupted to murder their tyrannical captain and his fellow officers. Then they defected to the enemy by sailing to Spanish Venezuela. In fact, though, the Hermione episode was unusual, and not just for its violence.”

From Wharton: Too Much of a Good Thing? The Perils of Overconfidence

“Confidence is Don Moore’s self-professed ‘singular obsession.’ To be more specific, Moore, a management professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in the psychology of decision-making, is preoccupied with overconfidence. Why do people sometimes think they’re more talented, smarter or more successful than they actually are? Why do they think they’re better than other people? Why are they so adamantly sure they’re right?”

From Skip Prichard: Creating a Team Culture of High Performance

“I am always studying what makes a team great, and I enjoyed reading Mike Robbins’ book, We’re All In This Together. Mike has worked with a number of top companies and enjoyed a baseball career with the Kansas City Royals. After reading his book, I reached out, and he shared more about his philosophy of teamwork with me.”

From Dina Gerdeman: From the Plow to the Pill: How Technology Shapes Our Lives

“Many technologies have upended long-held beliefs about love, sex, marriage, and reproduction, says Debora Spar in a new book, Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny.”

From Michael McKinney: Full-Spectrum Thinking

“FULL-SPECTRUM THINKING is not common, and never has it been. And as the world becomes more complex, confused, and scrambled, it has never been more critical. Bob Johansen describes full-spectrum thinking as ‘the ability to seek patterns and clarity across gradients of possibility—outside, across, beyond, or maybe even without any boxes or categories—while resisting false certainty.'”

From Dan Bigman: Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein On ‘How to Lead’

“For a new book, the co-founder of one of the most influential private equity shops in the world asked some of the most successful leaders of our time how they do what they do. ‘You lead by wanting to lead.'”

From Robert J. Shiller: Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral

“In his book Narrative Economics, the Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist Robert Shiller examines how the stories we tell about our lives and our society can spread from person to person, changing shared perceptions of events and shaping economic behavior. In a video recorded in November 2019, he explains the role of such narratives in the events like the Great Depression and the global financial crisis of 2007–2009.”

Reading recommendations are a regular feature of this blog. Want more recommendations about what to read? Check out my Three Star Leadership blog, Michael McKinney’s LeadingBlog, and Skip Prichard’s Leadership Insights.

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