This is the time of year when thoughts turn to lobster rolls, straw hats, and sun burns. But, during summer, my mind also turns to reading, which can facilitate said sun worship; it’s too hard to just sit there.
As usual, the business press produced a bumper crop this year and I’m hoping that the following five books will prompt some reflection and encourage everyone to share their favorite reads as well. Last year, we got some great suggestions from readers and we are hoping for the same this year.
This is a fairly idiosyncratic mix of books covering a variety of themes (and a couple of them might not be the easiest thing to read on the beach), but here are my top five suggestions for summer reading:
1) First, and this one is perfect beach fodder, Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein is about the lost art of memorization. If you’ve ever struggled to remember a customer’s name or find that you can’t leave home without your product catalog, then this might be the book for you.
In the book, Foer narrates how he went from a novice to win the U.S. Memory Championships. While becoming a champion might take a lot of dedication, many of the techniques are fairly easily applied and it’s a lot of fun to try and remember things by the expedient of placing them into a vivid imaginary landscapes; and as Foer points out, there’s nothing like a feat of memory to make people think that you must be an absolute genius. Read this and you will, at the very least, have plenty of fodder for your next cocktail party.
2) Getting More by Stuart Diamond is a little less obviously entertaining but is likely a lot more profitable. Diamond promises that this book will change your life and it might just do that. He’s thought long and hard about the mechanics of the kind of informal negotiations that inform life and he has distilled his lessons into a short list.
In essence, Stuart teaches that you need to be clear about your goals, that you need to consider everybody else’s goals, that you should share your goals, identify the values people stand for, and then be creative about the next small step that might get you both what you want. This is a more practical take on negotiation than is usually the case and the stories lend depth to the principles.
3) If you’ve struggled with quantifying the value of a corporate program or have wanted to quantify the risk of something remote yet alone forecast next quarter’s sales, then Douglas W. Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything is the right book for you. In a sense, this is a book on practical statistics and the value of estimation. The subject matter can appear rather daunting and the examples are mostly from IT but Hubbard has lots of examples and worksheets to help people measure intangibles in their own business which should make it easy enough to apply to the world of sales and marketing.
The next two books are a little more general and they are more about the stimulation of thought than anything more specific. They are both loosely based on recent advances in how the mind operates and might be useful for anybody who needs a mental break or just wants to find a different way of thinking about a problem.
4) Youngme Moon’s Different is an attempt to grapple with the fact that the human mind turns out to be so very much more complicated than anything that Freud or Jung ever conceived. Moon has latched on to the fact that we tend to interpret the world and define ourselves by focusing on differences.
Marketers, Moon reasons, have much to gain by thinking laterally about competition: don’t just try to do everything better than the competition but think how you might also want to do things differently. Like many books in the genre, Moon doesn’t really have a recipe for success but this is a fun read and useful for anybody who has been tasked to think hard about what positively differentiates their company in the minds of their customers. In some ways this is similar to Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing but has the great virtue of being much shorter.
5) Finally, David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives has nothing to do with the world of commerce but is about imagining possibilities. Specifically, Eagleman – a neuroscientist – imagines 40 fates that might await us in the afterlife. Frankly, I was a tad skeptical but this was the book that demonstrated to me what it might mean to truly brainstorm; not to stop with the first few obvious possibilities but to try again and again until the solution seems almost magical. At the very least, this is the one book in the mix that should make you smile.
This leaves out a number of books that I enjoyed (such as Jeffrey Pfeffer’s hard-headed look at how individuals can acquire Power or Sherry Turkle’s collected essays on how Evocative Objects acquire personal meaning), but I’m hoping this is a start and that it will serve to initiate some dialogue. Please leave your recommendations in the comments section below.