Current Reading List

I highly recommend the following books: 

(1) Business Adventures – It's a collection of the late John Brooks' New Yorker articles from the 1960s, chronicling events like the catastrophic launch of the Ford Edsel and Xerox's explosive growth in its early years.

(2) Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success – Journalist and entrepreneur Shane Snow breaks down how some people use "lateral thinking" to ignore convention and grow their companies or personal brands at an incredibly fast rate.

(3) Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) - Author Christian Rudder uses the massive amount of personal information we share about ourselves online to analyze the modern world based on everything from Google search terms to Facebook likes.

(4) Crazy Is a Compliment: The Power of Zigging When Everyone Else Zags - Written by Linda Rottenberg. It's an of her learnings over 20 years of working with business owners. It explains why she thinks everyone needs to take lessons from entrepreneurs to not only keep their jobs in a volatile work environment but also to rise up the hierarchy or rapidly grow their companies.

(5) The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution - Written by Walter Isaacson. This book is a chronicle of disruptive technology from Lord Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace in the 1840s to today's leaders like Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Current Reading List

I highly recommend the following books: 

(1) Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future – Written by technology entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. In 1998, Thiel foresaw a world where people could seamlessly transfer money online, and by co-founding PayPal he helped to make e-commerce as we know it possible. Hailed as one of the most successful investors in the world, Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook, and he has funded hundreds of other early stage companies including LinkedIn, Yelp, Spotify, and SpaceX. 

Zero to One is at once an optimistic view of what the future of progress looks like in America and an intellectual meditation on the nature of innovation and other challenges of today’s business world of which Thiel writes: “If American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles. We call these miracles technology.

(2) Brandwashed – by Martin Lindstrom. I’m always interested in learning about branding and how companies utilize psychology to consciously and subconsciously influence one’s purchase decision. As Martin Lindstrom reminds us in "Brandwashed," marketers make sneaky appeals to our fears and desires, leverage our social connections to maximize peer pressure, dazzle us with tinfoil celebrity and lure us with sexual come-ons that would embarrass a bawd.

(3) How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World – by Steven Johnson. One of my favorite authors is James Burkes who wrote and starred in the BBC Series “Connections”. Steven Johnson explores similar territory as he traces the history of six innovations and their influence on human progress.

(4) The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us – by James W. Pennebaker. I’m interested in reading Pennebaker’s research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence.

(5)  Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China – by Evan Osnos. Age of Ambition is an extended cultural and political trawl through modern China, reflecting Osnos's eight years reporting on the country. It's a story, essentially, about people: the people swept up in the cult-like enthusiasm for learning English; the Chinese journalists trying to expose corruption but careful not to push their investigations too far for fear of being shut down; the self-confident young nationalists determined to defend China against Western intellectual subversion.

(6)  Shantarum – by Gregory David Roberts. Shantaram is a 2003 novel by Gregory David Roberts, in which a convicted Australian bank robber and heroin addict who escaped from Pentridge Prison flees to India. The novel is commended by many for its vivid portrayal of tumultuous life in Mumbai. 

Current Reading List

I highly recommend the following books: 

(1) The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses - by Eric Ries. Eric outlines his lean startup methodology for new companies.

(2) The Thank You Economy - by Gary Vaynerchuk.  Gary reveals how companies big and small can scale that kind of personal, one-on-one attention to their entire customer base, no matter how large, using the same social media platforms that carry consumer word of mouth.

(3) The Startup Game: Inside the Partnership between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs – by William H. Draper. William provides an up-close look at how the relationship between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs is critical to enhancing the success of any economy.

(4) The Third Screen: Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile – by Chuck Martin.  Chuck takes readers on a journey from the creation of the first screen to the revolutionary third. Martin describes the cultural and social changes incurred by the first screen (the television) and the second screen (the personal computer), opening up his discussion of how the third screen—the mobile device—is redefining the role of the consumer.

(5) How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly--and the Stark Choices Ahead  – by Dambisa Moyo. Dambisa offers a bold account of the decline of the West’s economic supremacy. She examines how the West’s flawed financial decisions have resulted in an economic and geopolitical seesaw that is now poised to tip in favor of the emerging world, especially China.