We Are All The Same

We Are All The Same by Jim Wooten

This books was passed into my hands by my lovely-mom-in-law (a fellow bookworm). It only took me a few hours to devour the pages and it was time well spent. Like the fable about one person saving starfish washed up on the shore one by one, it's a great tale of how one person's actions can make a big difference to the world. It also illuminated for me the AIDS denialism of former South African President Thabo Mbeki. So sad...

My Books To Read List Hath Grown

I just counted 'em up and holy cow there are 22 of them - have a peek and let me know if I should axe any of them or add different ones. I'm thinking this will be my reading list for 2010, resurrecting my one-book-a-week goal.

recommendations - books to read one day

• A Theory of Fun
• BAM!: Delivering Customer Service in a Self-Service World - from @chrisbrogan
• Believe Me: Why Your Vision, Brand, and Leadership Need a Bigger Story
• Change by Design - Tim Brown
• Chips and Pop by R. Barnard
• Engaging Learning
• Happiness Hypothesis - from @zappos
• Made To Stick
• Orbiting The Giant Hairball
• Predictably Irrational
• Reality Check
• Seeing David in the Stone
• Superfreakonomics and Freakonomics
• Talent Is Overrated
• The 100 Best Business Books
• The Adventures of Johnny Bunko
• The Brain Rules
• The Design of Everyday Things
• The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
• The New Gold Standard
• Working Minds (Cognitive Task Analysis) - from Anecdote

100 Best Business Books of All Time

From the awesome people at 800-CEO-Read, who published....

BOOKS IN THE 100 BEST Business Books of All Time:

All the books in the 100 best, separated by chapter.

You
Improving your life, your person and your strengths.

Flow by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi
Getting Things Done by David Allen (also available in CD and audio)
The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
How to Be a Star at Work by Robert E. Kelley
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (also available in audio)
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie (also available in audio)
Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey B. Mackay
The Power of Intuition by Gary Klein
What Should I Do with My Life? by Po Bronson (also available in audio)
Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss/Theodore Geisel (also available inaudio)
Chasing Daylight by Eugene O'Kelly

- - - - - - - - -

Leadership
Inspiration. Challenge. Courage. Change.

On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis
The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem
The Leadership Challenge by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner (also available in CD)
Leadership Is an Art by Max De Pree (also available in CD and audio)
The Radical Leap by Steve Farber
Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will by Tichy and Sherman (also available in CD)
Leading Change by John P. Kotter (also available in CD and audio)
Questions of Character by Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.
The Story Factor by Annette Simmons
Never Give In! Speeches by Winston Churchill (also available in audio)

- - - - - - - - -

Strategy
Eight organizational blueprints from which to draft your own.

In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
Good to Great by Jim Collins
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen (also available inaudio)
Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew S. Grove
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. (also available in audio)
Discovering the Soul of Service by Leonard Berry
Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan (also available in CD andaudio)
Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad

- - - - - - - - -

Sales and Marketing
Approaches and pitfalls in the ongoing process of creating customers.

Influence by Robert B. Cialdini, PhD
Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout
A New Brand World by Scott Bedbury with Stephen Fenichell
Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith (also available in CD and audio)
Zag by Marty Neumeier
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar (also available in CD and audio)
How to Become a Rainmaker by Jeffrey J. Fox (also available in CD andaudio)
Why We Buy by Paco Underhill (also available in audio)
The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore (also available in audio)
Purple Cow by Seth Godin (also available in audio)
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (also available in CD and audio)

- - - - - - - - -

Rules and Scorekeeping
The all-important numbers behind the game.

Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan
Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and Joe Knight
The Balanced Scorecard by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton

- - - - - - - - -

Management
Guiding and directing the people around you.

The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker
Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming
Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno (also available in CD)
Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy
The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox (also available in CD andaudio)
The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack with Bo Burlingham
First, Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (also available in CD)
Now, Discover Your Strengths by Buckingham and Clifton (also available in CD)
The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni (also available inaudio)
Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono

- - - - - - - - -

Biographies
Seven lives. Unlimited lessons.

Titan by Ron Chernow
My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
The HP Way by David Packard
Personal History by Katharine Graham
Moments of Truth by Jan Carlzon
Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton with John Huey
Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson

- - - - - - - - -

Entrepreneurship
Seven guides to the passion and practicality necessary for any new venture.

The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki (also available in CD and audio)
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber (also available in CD andaudio)
The Republic of Tea ** by Mel Ziegler, Patricia Ziegler, and Bill Rosenzweig
The Partnership Charter by David Gage
Growing a Business by Paul Hawken
Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson (also available audio)
The Monk and the Riddle Randy Komisar with Kent Lineback

- - - - - - - - -

Narratives
Six industry tales of both fortune and failure.

McDonald’s: Behind the Arches by John F. Love
American Steel ** by Richard Preston
The Force by David Dorsey
The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
Moneyball by Michael Lewis (also available in audio)

- - - - - - - - -

Innovation & Creativity
Insight into the process of developing new ideas.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie
The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman (also available in audio)
Jump Start Your Business Brain by Doug Hall
A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger Von Oech
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

- - - - - - - - -

Big Ideas
The future of business books lies here.

The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy
Out of Control by Kevin Kelly
The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida
Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (also available in CD andaudio)
Driven by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria
To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (also available in audio)
Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (also available in CD andaudio)

- - - - - - - - -

Takeaways
What everyone is looking for.

The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins (also available in CD and audio)
Up the Organization by Robert Townsend
Beyond the Core by Chris Zook
Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer (also available in CD andaudio)
What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan
The Team Handbook by Peter Scholtes, Brian Joiner, and Barbara Streibel
A Business and Its Belief by Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
Lucky or Smart? by Bo Peabody (also available in audio)
The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman (also available inCD and audio)
Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko
More Than You Know by Michael J. Mauboussin

- - - - - - - - -
** To buy The Republic of Tea, visit their site.
** American Steel is presently out-of-print. Your best bet is to head to your local library.

Books Ordered!

Terrible... my brother gave me an Amazon gc in January and I finally got around to using it. Here are the treats en route to me:

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Talent Is Overrated Small Giants Orbiting The Giant Hairball Change By Design

Placeholder for books to be blogged

I can't believe almost the whole year has gone by and I haven't been blogging the books I've read. Some observations:

1. Last year's goal of reading a book a week proved the old adage about the power of goals. This year's book reading has suffered a significant decline!
2. However, my online reading has skyrocketed. At one point I was scanning up to 1500 blog posts a month.
3. Instead of blogging about many of those online gems, as I used to, I started using Delicious (which is awesome, minus the fact I can't access it at work). You can find me here: http://delicious.com/AmandaFenton.
4. I also started using Twitter which consumed some time that was previously dedicated to old-fashioned book reading. You can find me on Twitter @AmandaFenton.

The above hasn't meant I stopped reading books completely, only fewer. Here are the ones I have read that I will blog before the end of the year (yes - I'm saying that out loud!), in no particular order:

1. The Heroin Diaries (my sweetie is a rock-and-roll drummer; this book scared the pants off me!)
2. Group Genius
3. Getting To Maybe
4. The Living Company
5. Informal Learning
6. The Invention of Air
7. Ignore Everybody
8. Eat, Pray, Love

9. Brain Fuel
10. Squawk!
11. Here Comes Everybody (technically I still have 72 pages left - but I'm writing it here!)

12. Man's Search for Meaning

So as of the end of October, that brings my 2009 book total to 15. Not bad!

Water For Elephants

Water For Elephants

by Sara Gruen

My favourite read of my holiday break. Why? Great story, brilliant writing (nifty trick at the beginning and end - loved it), with a twist that you knew-but-didn't-know. Read it and you'll find out what I mean.

I would nominate this for my 'books to re-read every year or so' list.

More from Amazon.

Funny tidbit: I bought this book for my mom in law for Christmas. It was a total whim buy; surfing on Amazon and the title jumped out at me. Turns out my sister and colleague both had read it and adored it, and it ended up in my hands on my holiday road trip. It's a small world on the literary journey.

Those Who Save Us

Those Who Save Us

by Jenna Blum

My sister is my fiction broker and this made the 'must read' for the road trip. I'm glad I read it, but whew it was a heavy one. I found myself wanting a bit more closure in the end, but I guess that is the reality of the tale.

Check out more from Amazon.

The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

My vacation fiction treat... the part that I loved:

pg 170 If the heat goes over 104 degrees in South Carolina, you have to go to bed. It is practically the law. Some people might see it as shiftless behaviour, but really, when we're lying down from the heat, we're giving our minds time to browse around for new ideas, wondering at the true aim of life, and generally letting things pop into our heads that need to. In the sixth grade there was a boy in my class who had a steel plate in his skull and was always complaining how test answers could never get through to him. Our teacher would say, "Give me a break."

In a way though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that's just my opinion.

The review from Amazon.com:

In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their South Carolina peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic. --Regina Marler