Here are 100 books that Disrupt Yourself fans have personally recommended if you like
Disrupt Yourself.
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The reason I’m so fascinated by stand-up and books on writing is because I have done both. For a brief time I was a comedian, and the lessons in creativity and writing I learned along the way helped me find the career of copywriting. I’m passionate about learning how great writers write, and more importantly, keep writing, even when they don’t feel like it. I like to be inspired with lessons I can bring with me to every Word doc I open up.
Ryan Holiday, like Steven Pressfield, is a no-nonsense writer whose words inspire you to start that project you’ve been putting off.
Already started it but running into some, well, obstacles? Holiday describes in his book how obstacles are a good thing and inspires us to look for creative solutions. This book made me reframe how I look at challenges, both personally and professionally.
We give up too easily. With a simple change of attitude, what seem like insurmountable obstacles become once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Ryan Holiday, who dropped out of college at nineteen to serve as an apprentice to bestselling 'modern Machiavelli' Robert Greene and is now a media consultant for billion-dollar brands, draws on the philosophy of the Stoics to guide you in every situation, showing that what blocks our path actually opens one that is new and better.
If the competition threatens you, it's time to be fearless, to display your courage. An impossible deadline becomes a chance to show how dedicated you…
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 can't recommend this book highly enough, and here's why: it completely shattered my misconceptions about originality in the creative process. Kleon's candid and approachable narrative made me realize that all art is, in some form, a reinterpretation or recombination of what already exists.
This book came into my life at a pivotal moment, just when I was grappling with the dreaded "impostor syndrome" and the paralyzing belief that everything I created needed to be unprecedented. Kleon's perspective is liberating. He argues that embracing influences and integrating them into your work is not only acceptable but essential for creativity.
When asked to talk to students at Broome Community College in upstate New York in the spring of 2011, Austin Kleon wrote a simple list often things he wished he'd heard when he was their age: 'Steal like an artist; Don't wait until you know who you are to start making things; Write the book you want to read; Use your hands; Side projects are important; Do good work and put it where people can see it; Geography is no longer our master; Be nice (the world is a small town.); Be boring (it's the only way to get work…
As an artist, photographer, author, and workshop leader, my goal is to help others become more skilled with photographic techniques and more creative with their photographic and artistic practice. I like to tell workshop participants that to take better photographs, one should stand in front of more interesting things. But to become a really better photographer one needs to become a more interesting person. The books in the list have helped me grow as a person and photographer, and I hope they also enhance your technique and your passion as a photographer.
This book has been extremely influential and helpful to my journey as a creative photographer. This is a short book and covers material that is often not easy because it gets at some of the deep-seated reasons that many of us find it hard to consistently create art.
The underlying issue is “resistance”: a force that is the antithesis of creativity and serves to stymie us all to a greater or lesser degree. I have found the succinct discussion of resistance in the book, along with tools and techniques for overcoming resistance, one of the most valuable discussions I have encountered in my journey as a photographer and artist.
A succinct, engaging, and practical guide forsucceeding in any creative sphere, The War ofArt is nothing less than Sun-Tzu for the soul.
What keeps so many of us from doing what we long to do?
Why is there a naysayer within? How can we avoid theroadblocks of any creative endeavor—be it starting up a dreambusiness venture, writing a novel, or painting a masterpiece?
Bestselling novelist Steven Pressfield identifies the enemy thatevery one of us must face, outlines a battle plan to conquer thisinternal foe, then pinpoints just how to achieve the greatest success.
The reason I’m so fascinated by stand-up and books on writing is because I have done both. For a brief time I was a comedian, and the lessons in creativity and writing I learned along the way helped me find the career of copywriting. I’m passionate about learning how great writers write, and more importantly, keep writing, even when they don’t feel like it. I like to be inspired with lessons I can bring with me to every Word doc I open up.
Steve Martin talks about perfecting his craft and really gives comedians and fans of stand-up a front row seat to what goes into being a comedian. The grind on the way up, and performing in near-empty places, will make you empathize with Martin and all the comics who started just like him.
In the mid-seventies, Steve Martin exploded on to the comedy scene. By 1978, he was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up. In 1981 he quit forever. This book is, in his own words, the story of "why I did stand-up and why I walked away." Emmy and Grammy Award winner, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Martin has always been a writer. His memoir of his years in stand-up is candid, spectacularly amusing, and beautifully written. At age ten, Martin…
When I first started in the field of strategy, all the cool kids were doing industry-level analysis. Order of entry, strategic groups, R&D intensity…anything you could get sufficient data about to run complex models was the order of the day. Those of us studying the ‘insides’ of corporations, particularly the process of innovation, were kind of huddled together for warmth! Today, strategy and innovation have come together in a remarkable way, but I find that most people still don’t understand the processes. One of my goals is to de-mystify the innovation process – these books will give you a great start in understanding the practices that are too bewildering for too many people.
Just as no man is an island, today no company is, either. An ecosystem approach to strategy leads one to make entirely different choices about how to engage, when to compete, and which capabilities to build than you would make without such a perspective. The book engagingly opens with a retelling of the well-worn Kodak story, with a twist – it wasn’t that Kodak didn’t “get” digital, it's that they doubled down on printing when screens were getting good enough to make printing irrelevant. In its chapters, you’ll learn about how a mapping company survived when its competitors gave away its product for free; how Amazon got its Echo technology to be adopted as a standard by other organizations and how a clearly promising new ecosystem can be stillborn when its champions don’t play nicely together.
How to succeed in an era of ecosystem-based disruption: strategies and tools for offense, defense, timing, and leadership in a changing competitive landscape.
The basis of competition is changing. Are you prepared? Rivalry is shifting from well-defined industries to broader ecosystems: automobiles to mobility platforms; banking to fintech; television broadcasting to video streaming. Your competitors are coming from new directions and pursuing different goals from those of your familiar rivals. In this world, succeeding with the old rules can mean losing the new game. Winning the Right Game introduces the concepts, tools, and frameworks necessary to confront the threat of…
I am a writer, teacher, and partner at IDEO, the global design and innovation firm. Before IDEO, I spent more than a decade teaching university undergrads and MBAs to create better choices, in their work and their lives. Now, I work with business leaders to help them do the same thing, at the intersection of design and strategy. I believe that one key to getting to those better choices is the ability to understand, reflect on and, yes, even improve our own way of thinking and engaging with the world. The books on this list have shifted my own understanding of the world and how I think. I hope they inspire and challenge you as well.
My own early experiences with strategy were pretty uninspiring – slow, incremental, and almost entirely analytical. But the framework that Roger and AG lay out in Playing to Win changed it all for me. It’s practical. It’s understandable. And it is aimed at not just understanding the world as it is, but at imaging a world that might be different… and forging a real strategy to bring that new world to life. The book is based on the approach to strategy Roger honed in his career as a management disclosure and that AG practiced as CEO at Procter & Gamble. Full disclosure, I helped them as they were writing the book – and honestly think it is the best book on strategy of the past 30 years.
Are you just playing--or playing to win? Strategy is not complex. But it is hard. It's hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future--something that doesn't happen in most companies. Now two of today's best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy--explaining what it's for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point. A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership…
After receiving my doctorate in Economics at Cambridge University, I embarked on a 35-year sabbatical as a venture capitalist focused on information technology. I learned about the critical role that the American state had played by sponsoring the computer industry. When the "Dotcom Bubble" of the late 1990s grossly overpriced my companies, because I had written my PhD thesis on 1929-1931 when the Bubble of the Roaring Twenties exploded, I had seen the movie before and knew how it ended. I returned to Cambridge determined to tell this saga of innovation at the frontier and the strategic roles played by financial speculation and the state in funding economic transformation."
Philippe Aghion has been one of the pioneers in the development of “Schumpeterian Growth Theory” to model the process of Creative Destruction” that drives technological innovation and economic growth. This is an accessible presentation of the dynamics of the model and the observable consequences in the real world.
I have found it essential for teaching my course on Venture Capital and the Economics of Innovation.
Hayek Book Prize Finalist An Economist Best Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Summer Reading Favorite
"Sweeping, authoritative and-for the times-strikingly upbeat...The overall argument is compelling and...it carries a trace of Schumpeterian subversion." -The Economist
"[An] important book...Lucid, empirically grounded, wide-ranging, and well-argued." -Martin Wolf, Financial Times
"Offers...much needed insight into the sources of economic growth and the kinds of policies that will promote it...All in Washington would do well to read this volume carefully." -Milton Ezrati, Forbes
Inequality is on the rise, growth stagnant, the environment in crisis. Covid seems…
I’m an innovator. I’ve been one since I was a kid. Since then, I’ve started a couple of non-profits and four companies, and I’ve advised hundreds of clients on innovation opportunities. I’ve also led the team that created one of the world’s first smartphones. Over the past dozen years, I’ve written four books on the strategy and capabilities of innovation. Innovation is one of the essential characteristics that make us human. It can get the world into trouble, but it does more good than harm on balance. My mission is to make us better at innovation and make the world a better place.
I read this book before a job interview with the author, and I kicked myself for not reading his works years earlier. Clay Christensen was a master of making the counter-intuitive simple and compelling and of showing why his theses really matter.
In this book, Clay laid out several of his most important theories—going well beyond the concept of Disruptive Innovation he’s most famous for. He illustrates the concepts with research and anecdotes, and his prose is always a joy to read. For anyone passionate about innovation, this book is simply a must. It’s a guidebook to success.
An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen's work continues to underpin today's most innovative leaders and organizations. A seminal work on disruption--for everyone confronting the growth paradox. For readers of the bestselling The Innovator's Dilemma--and beyond--this definitive work will help anyone trying to transform their business right now. In The Innovator's Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today's hyper-accelerated business environment. Christensen and Raynor give advice…
I'm a writer, lecturer, biologist, ecologist, and two-time Fulbright Scholar (to India and Malaysia). I'm now a fiction writer, but I’ve always been a storyteller who writes in a historical framework. While I feel an almost compulsive obligation to keep faith with the facts, my main objective is to tell a story—as dramatically, suspensefully, and entertainingly as I can. My first non-fiction book, Papyrus: the Plant that Changed the World was featured as a clue on Jeopardy. It tells the story of a plant that still evokes the mysteries of the ancient world.My most recent book, The Pharaoh's Treasure is about the origin of paper and the rise of Western civilization.
Monro draws our attention to China and Islam and provides evidence of the spread of the Kingdom of Paper later in the 10th Century to China where millions were using Chinese pulp paper for money, scrolls, and other products.
He presents a detailed history of writing in China and the use of early media, esp. silk, and bamboo strips. Paper, whatever it was made of and wherever it appeared, was a writing surface cheap, portable, and printable enough that books and pamphlets began to be mass-produced and to travel more widely through the world from the time of Cheops’ early papyrus paper.
Monro discusses how in the pre-digital age, paper aided the rise of both universal education and universal suffrage and refers to the ‘Republic of Letters’ which transcended national divisions. In modern times the multiple uses of paper, especially as wrappings, indicate that the Kingdom of Paper has…
The Paper Trail tells the story of how a simple Chinese product has for two millennia allowed knowledge, ideas and religions to spread at an unprecedented rate around the world. Alexander Monro traces this groundbreaking invention's voyage, beginning with the Buddhist translators responsible for its spread across China and Japan, and follows it westward along the Silk Road, where it eventually became the surface of the Quran. Once paper reached Europe, it became indispensable to the scholars who manufactured the Renaissance and Reformation from their desks. As Monro uncovers, paper created a world in which free thinking could flourish, and…
I’m a storyteller writing on business and technology. I specialize in clear views of complex systems. When Juliette showed me her research on tech companies and AI responsibility, I saw the power of a book – the book that ultimately became The AI Dilemma. The core dilemma is that in the right hands the technology is needed, and in the wrong hands it’s dangerous. When Juliette asked me to coauthor it, I jumped at the chance. As we worked, I realized that the topic brought into focus all the research and thinking I’d ever done about human, organizational, and machine behavior.
This is the book I suggest to people who worry that AI will take their jobs or control the world.
These U of Toronto economists make a case for AI as a disruptor of systems and power structures – not on their own, but because of the decision makers who control them. Those companies won’t necessarily be Alphabet, Amazon, or Meta. Their competitive advantage – access to data – will now be available cheaply.
It’s judgment that’s at a premium now. After reading this, I feel pretty trusting of AI. I’m just not so sure about people.
Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines can help you prepare.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted many industries around the world-banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, manufacturing, and retail. But it has only just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions that drive strategic business decisions. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform, and with such transformation comes disruption.
What is at the root of this? In their bestselling first book, Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet…
