Here are 100 books that Only the Paranoid Survive fans have personally recommended if you like
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Rupert Scofield is the President & CEO of a global financial services empire spanning 20 countries of Latin America, Africa, Eurasia and the Middle East, serving millions of the world’s poorest families, especially women. Scofield has spent the better part of his life dodging revolutions, earthquakes and assassins in the Third World, and once ran for his life from a mob in Mogadishu, Somalia.
In Changing the World, Alex tells his own story, and it’s a compelling one, chocked full of useful lessons for anyone hoping to find a way to make a difference and take on any of the world’s seemingly intractable problems. It’s all here, from how to break in, to recognizing an opportunity when it presents itself and knowing how to take full advantage of it, to building an organization and populating it with the right people, and how to raise the dough to finance your dream. As to how to break-in, while he doesn’t say as much, I know Alex shares my view that the fastest and best way to break into international development work is to go and live where the problems of poverty live – which in Alex’s case was Bangladesh. There he apprenticed himself to a 100-karat visionary, authentic social entrepreneur, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.…
Some people are dreamers. They choose careers shaped by dreams of making the world a better place. When your dreams are that powerful, it’s easy to neglect yourself. Both lives and dreams can suffer the consequences.
If you’re one of the dreamers, this is the book for you. Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind is a down-to-earth guide to mission-driven leadership. Drawing on his decades as an acclaimed nonprofit leader, Alex Counts offers practical advice on such vital activities as fundraising, team-building, communications, and management. He shows you how to run an organization—and your own life—both effectively and sustainably,…
Rupert Scofield is the President & CEO of a global financial services empire spanning 20 countries of Latin America, Africa, Eurasia and the Middle East, serving millions of the world’s poorest families, especially women. Scofield has spent the better part of his life dodging revolutions, earthquakes and assassins in the Third World, and once ran for his life from a mob in Mogadishu, Somalia.
This is a great guide for people considering embarking on a social enterprise journey, a kind of pump primer that canvasses many people in the field for their advice and imparts a lot from the author himself who is in as good a position as anyone to offer it, having "walked the walk "from acolyte/novitiate to investor, to professor and to convener of the like-minded in one of the most enjoyable conferences I have ever attended, chocked full of social entrepreneurs and other interesting people, and happily keynote-free. I think the most valuable advice Jonathan imparts, and it plays like a lite motif throughout this breezily-paced book is that the best way to be effective in this multi-variegated field is to learn the language of your beneficiaries, not so much to be able to speak to them, but rather to listen to them and understand their plight and what they…
The Unfinished Social Entrepreneur is about powering up your social justice career.The world feels so screwed up, so unfair, so unnecessarily mean, so Trumpian. More than ever, the world needs you. This book is a book of conviction about the unfinished work of social justice. According to Lewis: "The crusty work of social entrepreneurship is as much fun as I’m permitted to have in public. It’s joyous, fulfilling and happy-making. Tackling big challenges is heady stuff. Fighting the good fight is utterly gratifying."The Unfinished Social Entrepreneur is a compendium of 21 original essays and insights - part memoir, part handbook…
Rupert Scofield is the President & CEO of a global financial services empire spanning 20 countries of Latin America, Africa, Eurasia and the Middle East, serving millions of the world’s poorest families, especially women. Scofield has spent the better part of his life dodging revolutions, earthquakes and assassins in the Third World, and once ran for his life from a mob in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Alex Lazarow is one of those rare people who can observe things taking place around the world and package them for us in a way we can comprehend that an important change in the way things used to be done is taking place, and if we want to keep up we need to pay attention. The change Alex sees is in the way start-ups are happening and companies are being structured. Whereas investors and entrepreneurs alike used to try to create “unicorns” – i.e., companies that “disrupted” an existing sector with little capital investment and could scale from thousands to millions in sales in less than a year, and IPO the next year to achieve a market cap of billions – Alex thinks the future is with “Camels”, which do not try to scale recklessly to achieve a gigantic short term payday but rather try to build something that is…
The new playbook for innovation and startup success is emerging from beyond Silicon Valley--at the "frontier."
Startups have changed the world. In the United States, many startups, such as Tesla, Apple, and Amazon, have become household names. The economic value of startups has doubled since 1992 and is projected to double again in the next fifteen years.
For decades, the hot center of this phenomenon has been Silicon Valley. This is changing fast. Thanks to technology, startups are now taking root everywhere, from Delhi to Detroit to Nairobi to Sao Paulo. Yet despite this globalization of startup activity, our knowledge…
Rupert Scofield is the President & CEO of a global financial services empire spanning 20 countries of Latin America, Africa, Eurasia and the Middle East, serving millions of the world’s poorest families, especially women. Scofield has spent the better part of his life dodging revolutions, earthquakes and assassins in the Third World, and once ran for his life from a mob in Mogadishu, Somalia.
This is the follow up to The Art of Innovation which describes the strategies of the world-famous design firm, IDEO, which has dissected the process of innovation and, in this book, identified the types of “personas” a CEO should attract in order to tackle big, difficult problems with novel, creative approaches. I could definitely relate to the first persona described, The Anthropologist, who spends an inordinate amount of time with the clients, listening and observing, in order to understand what they really desire and what has prevented them thus far from achieving or obtaining it. I also found The Cross-Pollinator interesting, which argued that you should sometimes involve people from other sectors or countries which may at first glance seem irrelevant to the job at hand but, if given the chance to be “heard”, could lead to a solution. The author makes the case for another eight personas, who may…
A brilliant guide to fostering creativity and business innovation, The Ten Faces of Innovation shows how any individual can become an experienced architect, storyteller, caregiver or cross-pollinator...just four of the ten characters that can be adopted in different situations to create a broader range of solutions to business problems. At the start of the creative process you might be the 'anthropologist', going into the field to see how customers use and respond to products; later you might be the 'hurdler', who overcomes obstacles on the way to the finished product. The book explains with examples from business how adopting these…
I’m a journalist and a tinkerer. I’m fascinated not only by how things work but by how small levers can move mountains. Growing up in the workshop of my grandfather, an old Boston boatwright, I was mesmerized by the idea that a small rudder could maneuver a huge vessel. In college, I fell in love with how a small idea or expression could redirect a course of research or a country. As a self-taught maker of things, I appreciate how technologies empower us. I’ve chosen these books because they’re examples of how small ideas become things, lines of research, or patterns of thinking that shift human progress in unknowable ways.
I recommend The Inversion Factorbecause it’s a deep dive into the Internet of Things from some of the people who made the IoT possible: the geniuses at MIT.
The book’s take on commerce alone is fascinating, the idea that in the future, demand will be driven not by companies deciding what to make and sell but by a flow of consumer data coming from connected devices telling companies, “Here’s what you need to make next.”
Plus, the descriptions of the IoT home and services, tempered though they are by realities like the fact that self-driving cars aren’t very good yet at not running people over, are gripping. Great book.
Why companies need to move away from a “product first” orientation to pursuing innovation based on customer need.
In the past, companies found success with a product-first orientation; they made a thing that did a thing. The Inversion Factor explains why the companies of today and tomorrow will have to abandon the product-first orientation. Rather than asking “How do the products we make meet customer needs?” companies should ask “How can technology help us reimagine and fill a need?” Zipcar, for example, instead of developing another vehicle for moving people from point A to point B, reimagined how people interacted…
I am a leader in analytics and AI strategy, and have a broad range of experience in aviation, energy, financial services, and the public sector. I have worked with several major organizations to help them establish a leadership position in data science and to unlock real business value using advanced analytics.
Not everybody needs to be a data scientist, but everybody does need to be data literate. Without an intentional focus on evangelism and building a strong data culture in your organization it will be an uphill battle to make meaningful change. This book helps individuals and leaders to understand what data literacy is, and how we can build it like any other skill.
In the fast moving world of the fourth industrial revolution not everyone needs to be a data scientist but everyone should be data literate, with the ability to read, analyze and communicate with data.
It is not enough for a business to have the best data if those using it don't understand the right questions to ask or how to use the information generated to make decisions. Be Data Literate is the essential guide to developing the curiosity, creativity and critical thinking necessary to make anyone data literate, without retraining as a data scientist or statistician.
With learnings to show…
I’ve been a community leader in the arts for more than twenty-five years. In raising millions of dollars, advocating for arts in our schools and communities, and teaching arts administration at the university level, I’ve had countless opportunities to witness the energy in people’s hearts that turns into action, growth, and success. What I’ve learned is that success in this arena involves things you can’t see or measure, like kindness, gratitude, and wonder. When we harness those elements of Essence, however, we can change the world.
One of the best-known business books of our time is Good To Great by Jim Collins. The book has sold millions of copies and is quoted in classrooms and workplaces all over the world all the time. But far fewer people know about Collin’s Good To Great and the Social Sector. It’s a critical work by one of the great business minds about the profound differences between for-profit and non-profit worlds. Every board member needs a copy.
'We must reject the idea - well-intentioned, but dead wrong - that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become "more like a business".'
So begins this astonishingly blunt and timely manifesto by leading business thinker Jim Collins. Rejecting the belief, common among politicians, that all would be well in society if only the public sector operated more like the private sector, he sets out a radically new approach to creating successful hospitals, police forces, universities, charities, and other non-profit-making organisations. In the process he rejects many deep-rooted assumptions: that somehow it's possible to measure social…
I’m a journalist and a tinkerer. I’m fascinated not only by how things work but by how small levers can move mountains. Growing up in the workshop of my grandfather, an old Boston boatwright, I was mesmerized by the idea that a small rudder could maneuver a huge vessel. In college, I fell in love with how a small idea or expression could redirect a course of research or a country. As a self-taught maker of things, I appreciate how technologies empower us. I’ve chosen these books because they’re examples of how small ideas become things, lines of research, or patterns of thinking that shift human progress in unknowable ways.
I love gutsy books by outsiders, and Ms. Saxena, as a woman of color working in the Ivy League and the worlds of artificial intelligence and Big Data, is very much an outsider.
That makes her deep knowledge and insights into how AI and Big Data are changing business even that much more interesting. Plus, this is one of the only books I’ve read that explains how artificial intelligence works in a clear, direct way that doesn’t assume the reader already knows about things like machine learning and neural nets.
Have you heard about artificial intelligence (AI) and big data but felt they are technologies too big or too complicated for you or your business? Do you imagine AI as a Hollywood science fiction stereotype or something in the far and distant future?
Take heart. AI is none of those things. It's part of our everyday lives, and it has the power to transform your business.
This book will put AI, big data, the cloud, robotics, and smart devices in context. It will reveal how these technologies can dramatically multiply any businesses-including yours-by strategically using your data's latent, transformative potential.…
When I began my doctorate many years ago I was somewhat disenchanted with the static nature of much economic analysis whereas it was apparent that the world is very much dynamic and continually changing. I thus committed myself then, and in a long career that followed, to exploring the ways in which Economics could be used to clarify and address the major issues that arise from innovation generation and diffusion. I present these choices as a way that other like-minded individuals may begin the exploration of innovation and discover the breadth and depth of the contribution that has been made by economists.
This major textbook written for students with some basic knowledge of economics, written by one of the best expositors in the field, provides a comprehensive yet very accessible introduction to the economics of innovation and as such represents an excellent place to start.
I have known Peter for a number of years and he always offers in his writings (and lectures) both valuable insights into his subject and a sense of excitement.
This major textbook provides a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the economics of innovation, written for students with some basic knowledge of economics. G.M. Peter Swann contends that innovation is one of the most important economic and business phenomena of our time and a topic of great practical and policy interest, with widespread implications for our economy and society. This book engages with the reader to explore some of the key economic issues concerning innovation.
Bridging a gap in the literature, this timely textbook addresses critical questions such as: How should different aspects of innovation be described and classified? What…
Inequality and fairness are basic issues in human conflict and cooperation that have long fascinated me. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, I was confronted with the extreme racial segregation of schools and neighborhoods. My Catholic upbringing taught me to cherish the cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance, and my education in political economy taught me that markets can fairly and efficiently allocate resources, when legal power is evenly shared. My formal education culminated in a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton University, which led me to my current roles: Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Principal Economist at Gallup. I care deeply about the social conditions that create cooperation and conflict.
Can ideas change the world? How does belief in political equality—the idea that everyone deserves basic unbridgeable liberties—affect innovation and economic development?
Dierdre McCloskey—one of the most creative and interesting economists alive—takes on these topics and much more in her characteristically witty, fast-paced style. She loves describing and refuting bad ideas—or even ideas widely regarded as brilliant—in an effort to go deeper into the forces that lifted humans out of poverty and sustain innovation to this day.
There's little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in the concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana. Why? Most economists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees, fiercely. "Our riches," she argues, "were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling…
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