100 books like Learning to Use What You Already Know

To truly stay ahead of failure, one must embrace discomfort and avoid becoming stagnant. Life is a constant race, and if you stop running, you cannot win. Who Moved My Cheese? serves as a great example that is easy to read, digest, and a powerful reminder to keep pushing forward in the race of life.

The book highlights the importance of not taking good fortune for granted and avoiding getting too comfortable. It teaches that everything is constantly evolving, and it is essential to remain vigilant and open to new opportunities.

I once used this book to teach a group of high schoolers how to stay alert to opportunities and overcome the fear of discomfort.

Information overload threatens our ability to educate ourselves, leaves us more vulnerable as consumers and less cohesive as a society, and diminishes control of our own lives. As such David Shenk offers numerous “Laws of Data Smog," i.e: Information is now plentiful and taken for granted. I was immediately impressed by his pithy observations: Putting a computer in every classroom is like putting an electric power plant into every home; education cannot be fixed with a digital pipeline of data. Too many experts spoil the clarity, and lead to the paralysis of analysis.

The law of diminishing returns, says Shenk, applied to the growing speed and abundance of information, will produce an infoglut that will no longer add to our quality of life. Infoglut is already cultivating stress, confusion, and, yes, ignorance. I have found this to be too true!

In a glutted environment, he says, the most difficult task… show more.

James Burke is a genius who had his own PBS series based on his book, Connections. Right from the get-go, he convinced me that one small malfunction can cripple our entire technologically-based system. This interdependence is typical of almost every aspect of life in the modern world.

Burke made me realize that we live surrounded by objects and systems that we take for granted, but they profoundly affect the way we behave, think, work, play and run our lives and those of our children. If you doubt his assertion, he says, look around you. How many machines could you either build yourself or repair if they stopped working? In my case, practically none.

When you start a car, press the button in an elevator, or buy food in a supermarket, you give no thought to the complex devices or systems that make the car move, the elevator rise, and… show more.

Success in today’s rapidly changing business world, says Michael LeBoeuf, requires moving quickly. This doesn’t mean pushing yourself and others to work at an over-stressed, breakneck pace. No way. It does mean taking a whole new approach to working, selling, managing, and leading to speed up the business.

Much of what the author writes was new to me: For example, speed improves morale because employees are working for a more successful, responsive company. Speed also forces management to give employees more autonomy and flexibility. Perhaps most important, speed creates an innovative edge. Speeding up (shortening) the product-development cycle enables a business to bring out more new and improved products. Most important, I think, is that the business with a shorter product-development cycle gets products on the market that are way ahead of the competition.

In Fast Forward, I learned that speed pays even when things go wrong! How so? 70%… show more.

In the Era of Smart Technology, many of you will have work if you can think differently than the Technology can think. Examples are thinking creatively, innovatively, and going into the unknown and figuring things out.

This book is all about Insights - seeing new associations, new connections, new trends, patterns, and irregularities. Gary Klein gives you the tools to become an explorer: an Insightful Person who can open new avenues, new opportunities, and new ways of thinking. I learned a lot from Gary Klein, and I am sure you will, too.

Don’t be misled by the title: this book will not reassure you that other people resist what you and I know are obvious facts because they’re stupid or irrational. 

We all resist and reject knowledge of various kinds, and this book is a thoughtful investigation into the sociocultural, political, psychological, and biological influences behind that. Klintman’s multi-disciplinary inclusiveness is a refreshing antidote to conventional single-discipline writing on this topic. 

Another aspect of this book dear to my heart is his willingness to examine evidence pointing to the benefits as well as the drawbacks of knowledge resistance, including writings on “rational ignorance”. That said, he also squarely addresses the question of what to do when knowledge resistance causes harm, and why the answer is not simply “more education”. 

See, Solve, Scale provides a proven three-part framework for entrepreneurial success called the “See, Solve, Scale Entrepreneurial Process.” Author Danny Warshay has been a Professor of Entrepreneurship at Brown University for 15+ years. Previously, after earning his Harvard MBA, Warshay spent time in brand management at Procter & Gamble, followed by several years launching, growing, and exiting startups in software, advanced materials, consumer products, and media. 

See, Solve, Scale unpacks key concepts from Warshay’s Brown University course on entrepreneurship. Warshay has also taught these concepts internationally to entrepreneurship organizations, private companies, non-profits, governmental agencies, and non-governmental organizations. His teachings have broad applicability to solving all types of problems and improving the functioning and results of almost any kind of organization, not just startups. 

Key lessons in the book include the importance of bottom-up research, being anthropological and empathetic and finding and validating an unmet need or problem to solve, recognizing… show more.

I often pose a simple thought experiment: “How many renowned 20th century CEOs created something new to the world? Now, how may renowned 21st century CEOs haven’t done so?”

The answer, in both cases, is near zero. Our organizations are moving from being productivity-focused (doing more with less) to creativity-focused (giving form to something that doesn’t exist). Most managers and aspiring leaders are clueless about this profound change even though they will probably fail if they don’t make this shift.

Roberto argues that six flawed beliefs—such as in benchmarking and in focused execution—preclude creativity and provides tools to help reinvent moribund organizations.

Creativity in Business was the book that started it all for me in terms of creativity in business. I had just graduated from The Wharton School with my MBA, and I had no idea that business creativity was even a thing. Or even a possibility. I thought they were entirely different worlds, and never the twain shall meet. In this book, authors Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers made me want to go take their course at Stanford. As soon as they started talking about business as art and silencing the “voice of judgment,” I was hooked.

My favorite business school professor gave me this book on a whim that I might be interested in the work of What If? I took it home and devoured it in a matter of hours. It’s captivating in its accessibility to normal people and probably more relevant today than it was twenty years when it was published as creative catalysts and design thinkers refocus on behaviors over process and habits over tools. By adopting the six creative behaviors outlined in the book: freshness, greenhousing, realness, momentum, signalling, and courage, innovators can increase their creative capacity and even more importantly, their creative confidence.