Good & Must Reads

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I always planned to create a blog entry compiling a few great reads and must reads. After a really great discussion with my students at Umea University in Sweden – I could motivate myself to compile this entry. However, don’t think it’s a complete list – I am going to update it on a continuous basis. Thus it’s worthwhile to get back to this blog entry in once a while. Let’s start with a few great books:

My Own Books…

• First of all – of course – don’t forget to take a look at my publications and books [here] – definitely good & must reads 😀

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries: a must-read for someone who is dealing with flexible organisational structures and start-ups! Why having an organisational overhead, if you can do it lean with a minimal

Improving Yourself & Understanding us Humans

• The Leadership’s Guide to Storytelling, Stephen Denning: great resource if you want to sell & market projects to your boss or third parties. Why not encapsulating the key-arguments and facts into a story to make project goals more clear to stakeholders? This book will explain how…
• The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene: if you want to understand how some think, and how they exercise power – it’s a good and interesting read to understand the patterns.
• The biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger: not motivated to do something? Read this book, and you will kickstart your activities! Great motivator…
• Speaking as a Leader, Judith Humphrey: great book to bring structure into discussions, talking, and setting goals. However, it’s not about mass communication, it’s focusing on inter-personal communication.

Popular Science

• Emergence, Steven Johnson: it’s all about the connectivity between entities, and how they form to create patterns. It’s a really great read (can be done in one afternoon) to get a few ideas of those phenomenon in nature, and how they can be adopted in technical systems.
• Beyond Calculation, Denning Metcalfe: want to know how the future of computing looks like? Then you have the right book in your hands.

Designing and Creating

• The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda: simplicity and how to design simple systems are key to create successful product designs. Find the laws to replicate the process in this really great book!
• Toothpicks & Logos – Design in Everyday Life, John Heskett: how to design great products used in everyday’ s life!

Great Scholars

• Norbert Wiener: one of the key-persons in systems theory, and cybernetics Norbert Wiener – Wikipedia