Here are 100 books that Iconoclast fans have personally recommended if you like
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Following several years of working for the Ohio State University and Marathon Oil, I co-founded and became CEO of Solomon Software, originally named TLB, Inc. (The Lord’s Business) headquartered in Findlay, Ohio. We grew to more than 400 employees and $60 million in revenue, servicing over 40,000 clients worldwide, and then sold our company to Great Plains Software and that combined business was sold to Microsoft six months later. I later established Solomon Cloud Solutions, a technology consulting service firm for Microsoft Independent Software Vendors and Microsoft Business Solutions Channel Partners. Now, I assist businesses and organizations with implementing leadership development systems that will help them grow with a company called LeadFirst.ai.
Os Guiness is my favorite author when it comes to thinking about the call of God and our most fundamental purpose in life.
He tears down the false dichotomy of the sacred versus the secular with regard to living in fullness. Whether baking bread, plowing the soil, or preaching a sermon, a life lived in and for Christ is holy.
We are all on a lifelong adventure to grow in the knowledge and relationship with our Creator. With this perspective, we can live through the difficult and the good times with equal joy.
The Call continues to stand as a classic, reflective work on life's purpose. Best-selling author Os Guinness goes beyond our surface understanding of God's call and addresses the fact that God has a specific calling for our individual lives.
Why am I here? What is God's call in my life? How do I fit God's call with my own individuality? How should God's calling affect my career, my plans for the future, my concepts of success? Guinness now helps the reader discover answers to these questions, and more, through a corresponding workbook - perfect for individual or group study.
Following several years of working for the Ohio State University and Marathon Oil, I co-founded and became CEO of Solomon Software, originally named TLB, Inc. (The Lord’s Business) headquartered in Findlay, Ohio. We grew to more than 400 employees and $60 million in revenue, servicing over 40,000 clients worldwide, and then sold our company to Great Plains Software and that combined business was sold to Microsoft six months later. I later established Solomon Cloud Solutions, a technology consulting service firm for Microsoft Independent Software Vendors and Microsoft Business Solutions Channel Partners. Now, I assist businesses and organizations with implementing leadership development systems that will help them grow with a company called LeadFirst.ai.
This book provides powerful illustrations of the challenges of society to sustain purpose over a long period of time – especially from generation to generation.
The book is written about organizations that have drifted from their original purpose and, in some cases, come full circle back to their origins as intended by the founder. It encourages you to think deeply about what purpose means to an organization and how to sustain it. Although we are fighting against human nature, practical guidance is provided to counter this tendency.
This book shows the flaws in human nature and the deeper needs people have that can only be remedied with the gospel.
Without careful attention, faith-based organizations drift from their founding mission. It's that simple. It will happen.
Why do so many organizations wander from their mission, while others remain Mission True? Can drift be prevented? In Mission Drift, HOPE International executives Peter Greer and Chris Horst show how to determine whether your organization is in danger of drift, and they share the results of their research into Mission True and Mission Untrue organizations. Even if your organization is on course, it's wise to look for ways to inoculate yourself against drift. You'll discover what…
Following several years of working for the Ohio State University and Marathon Oil, I co-founded and became CEO of Solomon Software, originally named TLB, Inc. (The Lord’s Business) headquartered in Findlay, Ohio. We grew to more than 400 employees and $60 million in revenue, servicing over 40,000 clients worldwide, and then sold our company to Great Plains Software and that combined business was sold to Microsoft six months later. I later established Solomon Cloud Solutions, a technology consulting service firm for Microsoft Independent Software Vendors and Microsoft Business Solutions Channel Partners. Now, I assist businesses and organizations with implementing leadership development systems that will help them grow with a company called LeadFirst.ai.
This book shows us an example of a generational change of leadership and details a spiritual epiphany which leads to the transformation of an organization, now employing over 17,000 people.
And it all started with a young CEO who sensed that he did not have the same kind of attention and accountability to his purpose in Jesus Christ as he did to his stockholders from a return-on-investment point of view.
I love how this story illustrates the power we have to impact the lives of people around us when we lead our businesses in a way that aligns with God’s purposes.
Culture Is Everything. A good leader builds and establishes a company culture people want to be a part of. A transformational leader elevates that, cultivating a culture in which everyone-from the top down-is empowered to use their talents to live and work at their best. As the chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola Consolidated, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, J. Frank Harrison III knows firsthand the importance of not only prioritizing culture but also living out and modeling the values that drive it. He believes every person in an organization matters and how they are led matters just…
Following several years of working for the Ohio State University and Marathon Oil, I co-founded and became CEO of Solomon Software, originally named TLB, Inc. (The Lord’s Business) headquartered in Findlay, Ohio. We grew to more than 400 employees and $60 million in revenue, servicing over 40,000 clients worldwide, and then sold our company to Great Plains Software and that combined business was sold to Microsoft six months later. I later established Solomon Cloud Solutions, a technology consulting service firm for Microsoft Independent Software Vendors and Microsoft Business Solutions Channel Partners. Now, I assist businesses and organizations with implementing leadership development systems that will help them grow with a company called LeadFirst.ai.
The author explains what can happen when we get our thinking straight from the inside out.
Understanding who God is and who we are – our individual identity in Christ— is the bedrock upon which meaningful lives are built.
With an extensive background in applying faith to the fast-moving business and investment world, Henry Kaestner challenges the default mindset of ownership versus stewardship, urging leaders to think through what God-alignment to faith, family, and work looks like in practice.
“I’m excited about Faith Driven Entrepreneur. Anyone who is following the example of their creator God can find echoes of their work in this book.” ―Lecrae
Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey. But it doesn’t need to be. God has a purpose and a plan for all those entrepreneurial dreams and creative gifts he gave you.
The work you do today―the company you’ve built, the employees you work with, the customers you serve, the shareholders you report to, all of it―serves as an active part of what God wants to accomplish on earth.
I’ve been exploring the natural world most of my life as a gardener, naturalist, student, and researcher. I’ve come to appreciate the essentiality of our dependence on plant and other animal life. But I always want to know more. So I try to read across diverse areas of science as well as history, anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology. I want to know the mind of the thinker, the discoverer of ideas, the developer of technology. I want to understand the process of creativity from the view of the artist or inventor. Thus, I seek first-person accounts of scientists, doctors, inventors, as they struggle to understand the world that fascinates them.
The meaning of evolution, the foundation of creativity, the nature of consciousness—nobody can write so clearly and evocatively about these things as Oliver Sacks did over his long and productive career. This book offers a fresh look into the mind of a big thinker. Sacks explores issues and ideas across a remarkable breadth of disciplines. Here, he delved into questions most people probably have never thought to ask about evolution, botany, medicine, as well as the arts. He explores the science and humanity in everything, including his own growing awareness of memory loss. Having read most of his other books, I found this one as new and novel and enlightening as the first I came across decades ago.
From the best-selling author of Gratitude, On the Move, and Musicophilia, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience.
Oliver Sacks, a scientist and a storyteller, is beloved by readers for the extraordinary neurological case histories (Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars) in which he introduced and explored many now familiar disorders--autism, Tourette's syndrome, face blindness, savant syndrome. He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable and strange encounters and experiences that shaped him (Uncle Tungsten,…
I've always been fascinated with the idea that humans have so many layers of consciousness, and reality is multi-faceted. I've studied Zen Buddhism, yoga, and for the past 43 years, Sufism. My experience of life has developed into a journey of changing difficult situations into exhilarating discoveries, finding hidden patterns in nature that delight me and tell me I’m not alone in the universe, and helping many people transform into beings of joy and gratitude. I’m beginning to see that our transformation delights and changes the Divine; we are not a passing phenomenon but contributors to new creation on a major scale.
This book, for serious students of mysticism, dances between the worlds of Persia a thousand years ago and the present. For me, it took the topic of creative imagination out of the realm of fantasy and established it as a cornerstone of the way we perceive and give meaning to reality, and the way we connect to God and inner worlds.
"Henry Corbin's works are the best guide to the visionary tradition...Corbin, like Scholem and Jonas, is remembered as a scholar of genius. He was uniquely equipped not only to recover Iranian Sufism for the West, but also to defend the principal Western traditions of esoteric spirituality."--From the introduction by Harold Bloom Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) was one of the great mystics of all time. Through the richness of his personal experience and the constructive power of his intellect, he made a unique contribution to Shi'ite Sufism. In this book, which features a powerful new preface by Harold Bloom, Henry Corbin brings…
I am a sociologist with a longstanding interest in the social aspects of medicine and public health. I started with research on HIV/AIDS. Since then, I have written many books and conducted a multitude of studies on how people understand and experience health and illness and how they seek help when they are sick or feel at risk from disease. When COVID-19 hit the world in early 2020, it was not long before I started to think about what my research training and expertise could offer to understanding the social impacts of this new pandemic. I started to write about COVID and research on people’s everyday experiences.
This edited volume, by academics Irene Gammel and Jason Wang from Ryerson University, Canada, includes contributions from authors living across the world. The chapters focus on how the arts and culture can both express and document people’s thoughts, practices, and feelings about living through the COVID pandemic. There are discussions on the role of drawing, graphic fiction, cinema, diary writing, urban space, music, streaming services, film, and video conferencing platforms in helping people cope with COVID life. Reading the book provides insights into the different social, cultural, and geographical contexts in which the pandemic has been experienced and how people adjusted to the often very stressful conditions of lockdown, restrictions on movements, fear about their health and grief.
Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic.
The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and…
I experienced early success in the business world, but I found myself feeling empty. This led to a decades-long exploration of mindfulness, meditation, and yoga. Now, I combine my expertise in business and my passion for mindfulness to make a greater impact on individuals and the world at large. By making mindfulness techniques accessible and relevant to professionals and executives, I teach others to transform their affluence and success into positive influence in their organizations and communities.
This book highlights not only theory, but how Google implemented mindfulness via a program with the same name “Search Inside Yourself,” which the author instituted and ran. I was impressed with the depth of the presentation, its simplicity, and the overall theme of mindful business to act as a catalyst to save the world.
The book starts out by emphasizing a focus on breath as access to mindfulness, and that mindfulness is a practice on – and off – the cushion. Tan shows that mindfulness is in sync with running a business and making a profit and can go beyond to make a greater impact on the world. He showcases how emotions can be mastered, empathy is not a weakness, and compassion is possible for the most stoic members of our teams.
With Search Inside Yourself, Chade-Meng Tan, one of Google’s earliest engineers and personal growth pioneer, offers a proven method for enhancing mindfulness and emotional intelligence in life and work.
Meng’s job is to teach Google’s best and brightest how to apply mindfulness techniques in the office and beyond; now, readers everywhere can get insider access to one of the most sought after classes in the country, a course in health, happiness and creativity that is improving the livelihood and productivity of those responsible for one of the most successful businesses in the world.
I have been enthralled with the idea of “dreams come true” for as long as I can remember. In middle school, I discovered the field of psychology. I made weekly trips to the library and read books on personal development, spirituality, and memoirs. This commitment to learning and growth has never wavered. Those early seeds that I planted and nurtured have bloomed into my long-standing career of professional coaching, facilitation, and leading transformational retreats. My passion is empowering others to believe in their dreams and goals and bring them to life.
Here is yet another great book worthy of space on your bookshelf. Rick Rubin is one of the most sought-after musical producers globally, and he weaves his observations and insights into this brilliant book.
It goes much deeper than a “how to” book; it is more about how to tap into the higher potential within us. As Rick states (and I agree), we are all creative; it is a fundamental aspect of being human. Inspiration for our work surrounds us at every turn. If one is open and attuned to what is happening, answers will be revealed. There is a gem on every page. I loved it!
From the legendary music producer, a master at helping people connect with the wellsprings of their creativity, comes a beautifully crafted book many years in the making that offers that same deep wisdom to all of us.
"A gorgeous and inspiring work of art on creation, creativity, the work of the artist. It will gladden the hearts of writers and artists everywhere, and get them working again with a new sense of meaning and direction. A stunning accomplishment.” —Anne Lamott
“I set out to write a book about what to do to make a…
My journey into art began as a serendipitous discovery that unfolded through curiosity. As a “can’t-be-tamed” creative, I understand the tug-of-war artists feel – craving to learn skills and create “quality” pieces, while also thumbing the snooze-fest of sticking to one thing. Been there, done that, got the paint-splattered t-shirt. This has ignited a passion for encouraging others to find their own creative voice, as I've navigated the same path while building a multifaceted career in watercolor, gouache, line drawing, urban sketching, brush lettering, and calligraphy…need I go on? The thing is, I will because there is still so much to be explored.
I think this book is perfect to address creative ruts, when we feel like we’ve explored all the usual avenues of inspiration. I love that it’s interactive with a mix-and-match prompt system.
It provides a breath of fresh air and aligns with how I love to generate random drawing prompts. I love discovering a new combination of prompts, pushing me out of my comfort zone and into creative territories I hadn't dared to venture before.
It's not just a book; it's a companion for those moments when the blank page seems daunting.
A unique mix-and-match book that generates thousands of ideas for tackling a blank sketchbook page
Designed to kickstart creativity for artists and hobbyists, the pages of this book are divided into three separate sections that can be flipped, mixed, and matched to generate more than 100,000 unique sketchbook prompts! Jennifer Orkin Lewis, author of Draw Every Day, Draw Every Way and 100 Days of Drawing, has gained a dedicated following on Instagram by posting her daily sketches. The Sketchbook Idea Generator begins with an introductory section, in which Jennifer provides examples of her work as well as insight into her…
