Here are 100 books that The New Games Book fans have personally recommended if you like
The New Games Book.
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For the last 25 years, I have been a coach to business founders, leaders, and leadership teams. My work has taken me to every continent from my base in London. A lot of my work is done behind closed doors, but I have been instrumental in building two unicorns in the last decade. I’m a founder myself and have always been fascinated by what it takes to succeed as a founder. I have a powerful conviction that learning to lead is the heart of it. The books I love are either based on real-world research or deeply practical and based on hands-on experience. Practice trumps theory every time in my world!
This book makes strategy practical for founders, and strategy is so often done badly and contributes to business failure.
The essence of it is to recognize and solve the “decisive challenge.” For example, Elon Musk identified and solved the decisive challenge facing SpaceX when he made Falcon 9 the world’s first orbital class reusable rocket.
Back down to earth, strategy has to face the business challenges honestly and provide a coherent approach to tackling them. This book genuinely helps us to do just that.
When Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy was published in 2011, it immediately struck a chord, calling out as bad strategy the mish-mash of pop culture, motivational slogans and business buzz speak so often and misleadingly masquerading as the real thing.
Since then, his original and pragmatic ideas have won fans around the world and continue to help readers to recognise and avoid the elements of bad strategy and adopt good, action-oriented strategies that honestly acknowledge the challenges being faced and offer straightforward approaches to overcoming them. Strategy should not be equated with ambition, leadership, vision or planning; rather, it is…
Games and playing have always played a part of my life. I have created games and businesses and been fortunate enough to have worked with both at various levels as a mentor and guide. For me, this is the gift that keeps giving. The tee-shirt wearing creatives and the suit folk with their business acumen we seek to help scale our ideas. I have worked for years at the nexus of these tribes, and still find it a thrill to learn about the visions people have for the wonderful world of games and play and the oblique outcomes we couldn’t have predicted.
This book covers an often-overlooked aspect of finding a market and customers, users, or players for your game.
Tribes are the drivers of the traction you will need on social media and the impact your vision will have on your community. I love the case studies in this book, covering a global stage of BDSM through to the British Royal Family.
This book taught me the value of nurturing and caring for the diverse communities we serve.
Marketing and consumer research has traditionally conceptualized consumers as individuals- who exercise choice in the marketplace as individuals not as a class or a group. However an important new perspective is now emerging that rejects the individualistic view and focuses on the reality that human life is essentially social, and that who we are is an inherently social phenomenon. It is the tribus, the many little groups we belong to, that are fundamental to our experience of life. Tribal Marketing shows that it is not individual consumption of products that defines our lives but rather that this activity actually facilitates…
Games and playing have always played a part of my life. I have created games and businesses and been fortunate enough to have worked with both at various levels as a mentor and guide. For me, this is the gift that keeps giving. The tee-shirt wearing creatives and the suit folk with their business acumen we seek to help scale our ideas. I have worked for years at the nexus of these tribes, and still find it a thrill to learn about the visions people have for the wonderful world of games and play and the oblique outcomes we couldn’t have predicted.
Reading this book made me think hard about alternative truths and the consequences of these alternatives for communities everywhere.
From fake news, disinformation, and misinformation this book takes the reader on a fascinating journey where brands are having to face the reality that their marketing and communications. These are being eroded in ways brands find hard to manage.
Demonstrating authenticity is becoming more difficult as is persuading an audience that a brand knows best, that they are experts in their field and that they can be trusted. Purpose is at times in conflict with stakeholders needs and Chenecey quickly moves through the political and social aspects of these challenges while asking the reader to consider their own beliefs and knowledge within this context.
FINALIST - Business Book Awards 2019 - Embracing Change Category
Brands are built on trust, but in a post-truth world they're faced with a serious challenge: so much of modern life is defined by mistrust. A shattering of the vital trust connection between brands and consumers, together with the evaporation of authenticity as a core brand pillar, is causing enormous problems for businesses on a global scale. If a brand isn't seen as trustworthy, then when choice is available it will be rejected in favour of one that is.
The Post-Truth Business provides a way forward for any organization wishing…
Games and playing have always played a part of my life. I have created games and businesses and been fortunate enough to have worked with both at various levels as a mentor and guide. For me, this is the gift that keeps giving. The tee-shirt wearing creatives and the suit folk with their business acumen we seek to help scale our ideas. I have worked for years at the nexus of these tribes, and still find it a thrill to learn about the visions people have for the wonderful world of games and play and the oblique outcomes we couldn’t have predicted.
When we put our ideas out there in the real world, we take a risk.
It is an element of being entrepreneurial. But sometimes we can do something in service to others that creates value way beyond what we imagined. Something that has a good impact for those we serve. But this something may have been unpredicted, unseen in the planning stages.
Obliquity teaches us we can focus on the features or the benefits of what we do. This may not result in wealth for the founder, it may not mean a mega exit for the company in a few years. But equally, it may mean a bigger impact for the communities we serve and greater cohesion among those people than we had predicted when writing our business plans.
"John Kay tells a fast-paced detective story as he searches for the surprising secret to success...Brilliant." -Tim Harford, author of The Logic of Life
In this revolutionary book, economist John Kay proves a notion that feels at once paradoxical and deeply commonsensical: the best way to achieve any complex or broadly defined goal, from happiness to preventing forest fires, is the indirect way. We can learn how to achieve our objectives only through a gradual process of risk taking and discovery-what Kay calls obliquity. The author traces this seemingly counterintuitive path to success as it manifests itself in nearly every…
I studied economics and environmental policy but landed in entrepreneurship. I wrote The Parallel Entrepreneur after I sold my first company and continued to work on Rbucks, my blog, after I joined the next company. Outside of work I volunteer frequently in my community. I’m an Associate Professor in the Business Department at Diablo Valley College, where I teach marketing and sit on the advisory boards for both the Business and Computer Science departments. I also lead the Diablo Valley Tech Initiative (DVTI), an economic development organization incubated at DVC. Related to DVTI, I run Lamorinda Entrepreneurs, a community group that promotes and supports local entrepreneurship. I have a Master’s in Public Policy from theHarvard Kennedy School and a MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
This book came by recommendation from Jonathan Siegel, the brains and brawn behind Xenon Partners, a private equity firm that I joined in 2018. This book summarizes several profit models presented by a fictional mentor coaching a business executive. It’s clever, poignant, and was helpful to me in thinking about other profitable business models. For example, in my side-hustle life, I use the Profit-Multiplier Model: running multiple small SaaS businesses in parallel using the same tech stack (make money off the same good or skill in different markets).
Presented in 23 compact lessons, THE ART OF PROFITABILITY features an ongoing tutorial between two fictitious individuals: the old and wise teacher, David Shao, the business master, and his pupil, Steve Gardner, a young and ambitious manager. Along the way, Zhao goes through a number of business models and pushes his student to examine how a variety of businesses go about making money. Through Zhao's teachings, Steve begins to see how profits can be improved simply by taking a step back and gaining a new perspective.
I went to Afghanistan under the first Taliban government as a humanitarian aid worker. During the following decade, I experienced inadequate emotional, mental, and theological support from those who had sent me out. I began to research the field of risk and found a wealth of literature on how humans make decisions, how we see (or don’t see) danger, how to manage risk and fear, and more. We ignore the best practices and common sense of these fields to our peril. I am passionate about helping people not feel isolated and alone when they choose to serve in dangerous situations.
I loved being challenged with the idea that there is something beyond resilience, that strength can be redefined as antifragility, and the application of this concept is infinite. Often shocked and kept off balance by the unorthodox words he created and paired, the uncertainty as he jumped from ancient Greece to the 21st century in one paragraph, I was forced as a reader to analyze old ideas through a novel lens.
I admit I feel a little smarter and less fragile, but I am still a novice as a flâneur. I agree with “I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time,” though I don’t pretend to understand everything Taleb means by this. Thankfully, he left a glossary of all his innovative words.
'Really made me think about how I think' - Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West
Tough times don't last. Tough people do.
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncer tainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resil ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil.…
My main goal and purpose in life is to make a difference in people’s lives by helping you overcome obstacles that hold you back, so you can make more money, work less, and enjoy having even better work-life balance. Helping you realize how you can get around roadblocks that hold you back from achieving what you truly want in life gets me excited. I think many people make business and life so much harder than it needs to be and I like to share powerful books and resources that help you focus on how you can more easily realize your potential, accelerate your results, and fulfill what's truly important to you in life.
This
book is short and massively powerful. It gets you to think about all the
possibilities you have to reach your full potential and do more than you might
have thought possible. This 48-page, 2-word book just might change your life
forever. You will learn 3 simple, powerful tools you can use immediately to
access your unrealized potential. When you really start to think, What If?, around
any issues, goals, or challenges, your possibilities can be endless. This book can
inspire you to greatness, in my opinion. I bought hundreds of copies of this
book because I thought it was so powerful and wanted to share it with my
clients and prospective clients, so if you can’t find this book, I do have 5
more copies left.
"You will learn 3 simple, powerful tools you can use immediately and forever to access your gold mine of unrealized potential. You'll learn strategies to take you and your organization beyond what you ever imagined." A Very difficult to find book.
I am a former book publishing professional turned full-time children’s book author. I’ve never swallowed a frog, battled imaginary bears, or had a slime war with ghosts like my character, Roosevelt Banks, but I have written more than fifty books for children. These range from beginning readers (You Should Meet Misty Copeland) and chapter books (Roosevelt Banks, Good-Kid-in-Training) to middle grade historical novels (Daniel at the Siege of Boston, 1775).
Sam the Man wants a job. His next-door neighbor will pay him a whole dollar each time he can convince her dad, Mr. Stockfish, to join him for a daily walk. But getting Mr. Stockfish to leave the living room isn’t easy. So when another neighbor asks if Sam would like to watch her chickens, he jumps at the chance. Chicken-sitting is way more fun than he expects, and soon Sam the Man is watching a chicken of his very own. The story is satisfying and funny and readers will want to learn all about Sam’s adventures in the rest of the series. Sam’s creative problem-solving skills had me laughing out loud.
Sam the Man wants to earn some money and he’s got a cluck-worthy plan in this endearing chapter book that’s the first in a new series from Frances O’Roark Dowell.
Sam the Man needs a job. His sister gets twenty bucks a pop for mowing people’s lawns. But seven-year-olds aren’t allowed to mow lawns, so Sam decides to ask his next door neighbor if she needs help doing other chores. It turns out she’ll pay him a whole dollar each time he can convince her dad, Mr. Stockfish, to join him for a daily walk. But it turns out that…
My family moved to Italy when I was six, and I attended Italian first grade in a fishing village where I had to rely on reading body language as I didn’t grasp the language for a bit. Fortunately for me, Italians have lots of body language to read so I could navigate the inevitable cliques and power dynamics evident even at the elementary school level. From that experience to being taken to view the Dachau concentration camp a year later, I’ve always been sensitive to how “the other” gets treated—often unfairly—and the role leaders can play for good or evil.
Trust is, indeed, the emotion of business but it’s also just a starting point. The endpoint is by contrast to be delayed as long as possible, as retaining workers is best achieved by making them feel appreciated and given respect and a fair degree of autonomy. Great leaders can follow this recipe whether in business, the non-profit sector, or beyond.
Emmy Award-winning speaker Clint Pulver-aka the Undercover Millennial-shares insights gleaned from more than ten thousand undercover interviews with employees across the country, revealing the best methods for identifying talent, building a sense of ownership, and developing a successful workplace culture that employees will love. You'll also learn the number one driver of employee turnover (spoiler: it has everything to do with you!), what you can do to stop an exodus, and how to build a team that really works. Soon, you'll be recognizing possibilities where others see problems, and capturing the power…
I’m a cognitive scientist, and I love reading, thinking, and researching about the nature of the human – and especially the young – mind, and what it is capable of. Even while I was still doing my PhD in experimental psychology at Oxford in the early 1970s, I was gripped by the new possibilities for thinking about education that were being opened up by science. In particular, the assumption of a close association between intelligence and intellect was being profoundly challenged, and I could see that there was so much more that education could be, and increasing needed to be, than filling kids’ heads with pockets of dusty knowledge and the ability to knock out small essays and routine calculations. In particular, we now know that learning itself is not a simple reflection of IQ, but is a complex craft that draws on a number of acquired habits that are capable of being systematically cultivated in school – if we have a mind to do it.
Postman is another of my heroes, not least because – like Perkins – of the quality of his thinking and writing. Again, all his books are a pleasure to read – right back to one I read as a young lecturer in the early 1970s called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The pun in his title is deliberate and speaks to the heart of his argument: that if we do not rediscover a coherent and compelling end – i.e. purpose – for education, it will probably, and deservedly, be the end of education as we know it. Postman explores five possible narratives that could be compelling enough to revive young people’s interest and faith in their school. Again, like Perkins, he does not end by giving us an easy answer, but boy, does he make you think about what might be possible. A true visionary, with his feet firmly on…
Postman suggests that the current crisis in our educational system derives from its failure to supply students with a translucent, unifying "narrative" like those that inspired earlier generations. Instead, today's schools promote the false "gods" of economic utility, consumerism, or ethnic separatism and resentment. What alternative strategies can we use to instill our children with a sense of global citizenship, healthy intellectual skepticism, respect of America's traditions, and appreciation of its diversity? In answering this question, The End of Education restores meaning and common sense to the arena in which they are most urgently needed.
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