Monday, April 2, 2012

Reading list for Apr-2012

Time to select the books I plan to read this month. Plan to take a "study break" of 4 days towards the end of this month and have not yet decided what exactly to study in those days, but have decided to read the following books during the course of this month.

The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future; Invest in Yourself and Transform Your Career
This book is written by the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman where he tries to apply the lessons learnt by Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs for one's career. The idea is to manage your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you. There are some interesting parallels drawn to a start-up vis-a-vis managing one's career:
Start-ups - and the entrepreneurs who run them - are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. Hoffman argues that these are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead today. 


Adapt: Why Success Always Start with Failure
This is one of the books mentioned as further reading in the previous book and besides that I love the author Tim Harford of the Undercover Economist fame, so picking this book was an easy choice. In this book Harford argues that today’s challenges simply cannot be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinion; the world has become far too unpredictable and profoundly complex. Instead, we must adapt. Taking us from corporate boardrooms to the deserts of Iraq, Adapt clearly explains the necessary ingredients for turning failure into success. Sounds like a very interesting read.




Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck - Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
Jim Collins is another of my favorite authors, having enjoyed and learned from his seminal work in Built to Last and Good to Great. This morning I happened to read an interview of his and immediately decided to read the book this month. This time Collins is asking - Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times. Continuing on the theme of the other two books, I also try to see whether there is anything in the book that can be applied to individual's career. I'm certain there'd be.