Reading list for Sep'08

Last month, I got a chance to spend 3 days in my village and completing the books planned was a cake walk. This village is about 25kms from Mysore and my mother comes from here. We have a coconut grove next to the house and reading anything over here is great - both for the speed of reading and the amount at which you can absorb. Here's the list for this month.

Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything
User Generated Content (UGC) has been much talked about subject these days. I was trying to understand UGC and its implications little more and ran into this book. In this book, the authors show how the masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. The authors argue that smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. You may want to check out wikinomics blog, which is a collaborative effort of several individuals, in the true spirit of the message of the book


The Definitive Drucker
Rajiv Mody, Chairman and CEO, Sasken Communication Technolgies, on whom Peter Drucker has had (and continue to have) tremondous influence, keep telling all the managers to read Drucker. He told me too and that is how I started reading Drucker's classics. Drucker just "tells" what you should do. Period. The Definitive Drucker, is a biography of his ideas, and not a traditional biography. The book has brief summaries of Drucker's thinking on various management topics (innovation, customers, leadership, decision making) with examples of how his ideas have been practiced at specific organizations and comments from contemporary business leaders.

Man's Eternal Quest: Collected Talks and Essays on Realizing God in Daily Life
I read Sri Sri Paramhamsa Yogananda's celebrated book "Autobiography of a yogi" in the month of July'08. Its a fat book and reading the book was an experience in itself. I was in a trans while I was reading the book and you feel that Sri Sri Yogananda is talking to you directly. The biography talks a lot of miracles and super-natural experiences, they all seem real and one gets drawn to Sri Sri Yogananda. This book is a collection of this talks and promises an another spiritual experience.