Happy New Year to all my readers!
Along with a bunch of others, I made it to 52+ books in 52 weeks this year with a combination of business, fun and a few children's books thrown into the mix. Here is my list on Goodreads. We'll see if this habit can continue into 2011. I certainly have a good list to start from.
I've been tracking my reading (and hope-to-read) habits on Goodreads since April (with lots of old data from previous attempts), and that seems to work okay for me. But then, maybe I shouldn't be adding every book I come across as "to be read" as that list grows faster than the "read" list. It would be nice if there were a Goodreads widget to list a specific subset of books - like my list from 2010.
Looking through the list, there are a few that stand out that I either refer to again and again, or that fit what I might call "favorite."
- Daniel Suarez' Freedom, his follow-up to Daemon that completes his not-so-odd alternate reality where everyone is wired to a giant, global computer network game that is sentient.
- Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air history of Joseph Priestly, an impressive polymath who is credited with the discovery of oxygen around the time of the American revolution.
- The Heath brothers' Switch on how to help motivate and embed changes, based on the metaphor of the Elephant, Rider and Path. My review.
- Tribe books: Great Boss, Dead Boss by Ray Immelman (my review) and Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan (my review). This conception of how people and organizations work in tribes strikes a chord for me. I've often referred back to these.
- William Gibson's classic Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer - the best of the bunch, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive)
- Neil Rackham's Spin Selling, the classic on selling by helping your customer describe the value, rather than telling her. My review.
- John Kotter's books on change management: Leading Change (my review), The Heart of Change (my review) and Buy-In (my review). Kotter has been writing on these topics for a long time, and I've finally gotten to them. Still, they make lots of sense.
Interesting that none of these are TOC books directly, even though that is ostensibly what we do at P3 Consulting Group. But then, one of the things that sets us apart is that we focus on much more than strictly process. All of those reviews linked here have something to do with what we do in our practice.
As always, I will continue writing reviews of books that seem to fit in this blog, on topics related to knowledge management, Theory of Constraints, personal effectiveness, change management and others that make sense to me.
[Photo: "Happy 2011 !" by Marc Wathieu]