What RamP's Reading: May'15

Profit from the Core: A Return to Growth in Turbulent Times
In Profit from the Core, authors Chris Zook and James Allen show that a renewed focus on the core is more critical than ever as firms seek to rebuild their competitive advantage coming out of the downturn—and that a strong core will be the foundation for successful expansion as the economy recovers. Based on more than ten years of Bain & Company research and analysis and fresh examples from firms responding to the current downturn, the book outlines what today’s executives and managers need to do now to revitalize their core, identify the next wave of profitable growth, and build on it successfully.

The Power of Purpose: Find Meaning, Live Longer, Better

Purpose is an active expression of our values and our compassion for others—it makes us want to get up in the morning and add value to the world. Leider details a graceful, practical, and ultimately spiritual process for making it central to your life. This revitalized guide will help you integrate it into everything you do.

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
Strategy is not complex. But it is hard. It’s hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future—something that doesn’t happen in most companies. Now two of today’s best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy—explaining what it’s for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point.

What RamP's Reading: Mar'15

The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation
How you can increase and sustain organic revenue and profit growth . . . whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job. Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; significantly improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. How? A. G. Lafley and his leadership team have integrated innovation into everything P&G does and created new customers and new markets. Through eye-opening stories A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan show how P&G and companies such as Honeywell, Nokia, LEGO, GE, HP, and DuPont have become game-changers.

Leadership 2.0
Sharing discoveries from a groundbreaking study that separated the leadership skills that get results from those that are inconsequential or harmful, Leadership 2.0 introduces a new paradigm of leadership. Leadership 2.0 delivers a step-by-step program for increasing 22 core and adaptive leadership skills. Core leadership skills (those that get people into leadership positions) will sharpen your saw, and adaptive leadership skills (those that set great leaders apart) will make you into the leader you've always wanted to be.

Better Than Good: Creating a Life You Can't Wait to Live
Written in Ziglar's trademark style, this book isn?t just about success now, excellence tomorrow or even motivation for next month, but about making a lasting impact ? an impact that goes beyond financial gains and creative partnerships. Everything we are and do, he says, must be seen in the bigger perspective of continuously investing your spirit, mind and talents in what endures. Better Than Good offers Zig's practical and spiritual vision for what life can be when we allow the power of purpose and passion to permeate our soul.

What RamP's Reading: Feb'15

The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time

The Google Story takes you deep inside the company’s wild ride from an idea that struggled for funding in 1998 to a firm that today rakes in billions in profits. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, this fast-moving narrative reveals how an unorthodox management style and a culture of innovation enabled a search-engine giant to shake up Madison Avenue, clash with governments that accuse it of being a monopoly, deploy self-driving cars to forever change how we travel, and launch high-flying Internet balloons. 

How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle -- How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers
For the first time, William Poundstone reveals the toughest questions used at Microsoft and other Fortune 500 companies -- and supplies the answers. He traces the rise and controversial fall of employer-mandated IQ tests, the peculiar obsessions of Bill Gates (who plays jigsaw puzzles as a competitive sport), the sadistic mind games of Wall Street (which reportedly led one job seeker to smash a forty-third-story window), and the bizarre excesses of today's hiring managers (who may start off your interview with a box of Legos or a game of virtual Russian roulette).

Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Good Life
“Living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work, on purpose.” This is how Richard Leider and David Shapiro define “the good life.” Technological advances, economic shifts, and longer life spans mean most of us will need to repeatedly reimagine our lives. In this wise and practical guide, Leider and Shapiro help you weigh all that you’re carrying, leverage what helps you live well, and let go of those burdens that merely weigh you down.

What RamP's Reading: Jan'15

Thinking of better managing your time this year, just like me? You may want to read the books I plan to read this month!

First Things First: (Re-read) In First Things First, Stephen M. R. Covey advocates categorizing tasks by urgency and importance so that you can focus on what actually needs to be done in the limited amount of time that you have. Using personal examples and insight from years of business experience, he argues for a new way of looking at your “to-do” list. Rather than offering you another clock, First Things First provides you with a compass, because where you're headed is more important than how fast you're going.

The 10 Natural Laws of Time and Life Management: (Re-read) Written for anyone who suffers from "time famine", this essential handbook provides simple, effective methods for successfully taking control of one's hours--and one's life. Smith shows how, by managing time better, anyone can lead a happier, more confident and fulfilled life.

Unwinding the Clock - 10 thoughts on our relationship to time: A physicist draws on her own inside knowledge of science to discuss the impact of technological progress on human bodies and minds and shares practical suggestions on how to preserve our humanity in the fast-paced, high-tech modern world and how to slow down and enjoy life.

What Matters Most: In What Matters Most, bestselling author Hyrum W. Smith explains why so many people feel something is missing from their lives because of conflicts between actions and personal values. Through compelling examples from others and from his own extensive experience, Smith outlines a simple but powerful formula to help you identify your own values and live them to the fullest. This strategy consists of three valuable steps: Discover what matters most to you Make a plan Act on that plan By incorporating Smith's strategy into your life, you will not only re-embrace your values but you will make them your priority. What Matters Most is an indispensable and timely guide to living a truly fulfilling life and becoming the person you always wanted to be.

What RamP's Reading: Nov'14

Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change
From the bestselling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes the new edition of Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You'll be taught each and every step of the influence process--including robust strategies for making change inevitable in your personal life, your business, and your world.

Power, Freedom, and Grace: Living from the Source of Lasting Happiness
Deepak Chopra considers the mystery of our existence and its significance in our eternal quest for happiness. Who am I? Where did I come from? Where do I go when I die? Chopra draws upon the ancient philosophy of Vedanta and the findings of modern science to help us understand and experience our true nature, which is a field of pure consciousness.When we understand our true nature, we begin to live from the source of true happiness, which is not mere happiness for this or that reason, but true inner joy. When we know who we are, we allow the universe to flow through us with effortless ease, and our lives are infused with power, freedom, and grace.

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits
Drawing on Prahalad's breakthrough insights in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, great companies worldwide have sought to identify, build, and profit from new markets amongst the world's several billion poorest people, while at the same time helping to alleviate poverty. Prahalad also offers an up-to-date assessment of the key questions his ideas raised: Is there truly a market? Is there scale? Is there profit? Is there innovation? Is this a global opportunity? Five years ago, executives could be hopeful that the answers to these questions would be positive. Now, as Prahalad demonstrates, they can be certain of it.

What RamP's Reading: Oct'14

The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue EXCELLENCE
Business uber-guru Tom Peters is back with his first book in a decade, The Little Big Things. In this age of economic recession and financial uncertainty, the patented Peters approach to business and management—no-nonsense, witty, down-to-earth, insightful—is more pertinent now than ever. As essential for small-business owners as it is for the heads of major corporations, The Little Big Things is a rousing call-to-arms to American business to get “back to the basics” of running a successful enterprise.

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company
The roller-coaster rags-to-riches story behind the phenomenal success of Pixar Animation Studios: the first in-depth look at the company that forever changed the film industry and the "fraternity of geeks" who shaped it. The Pixar Touch is a story of technical innovation that revolutionized animation, transforming hand-drawn cel animation to computer-generated 3-D graphics. It’s a triumphant business story of a company that began with a dream, remained true to the ideals of its founders—antibureaucratic and artist driven—and ended up a multibillion-dollar success.

Autobiography of a Yogi
Autobiography of a Yogi is at once a beautifully written account of an exceptional life and a profound introduction to the ancient science of Yoga and its time-honored tradition of meditation. Profoundly inspiring, it is at the same time vastly entertaining, warmly humorous and filled with extraordinary personages.

What RamP's Reading: Aug'14

 

Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation: What They Can't Teach You at Business or Design School

Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation presents a framework for design thinking that is relevant to business management, marketing, and design strategies and also provides a toolkit to apply concepts for immediate use in everyday work. It explains how design thinking can bring about creative solutions to solve complex business problems. Organized into five sections, this book provides an introduction to the values and applications of design thinking, explains design thinking approaches for eight key challenges that most businesses face, and offers an application framework for these business challenges through exercises, activities, and resources.

Persuadable: How Great Leaders Change Their Minds to Change the World
As a leader, changing your mind has always been perceived as a weakness. Not anymore. In a world that’s changing faster than ever, successful leaders realize that a genuine willingness to change their own minds is the ultimate competitive advantage. Drawing on evidence from social science, history, politics, and more, business consultant Al Pittampalli reveals why confidence, consistency, and conviction, are increasingly becoming liabilities—while humility, inconsistency, and radical open-mindedness are powerful leadership assets.

Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen
Not Always So is based on Shunryu Suzuki's lectures and is framed in his own inimitable, allusive, paradoxical style, rich with unexpected insights. In Not Always So Suzuki once again voices Zen in everyday language with the vigour, sensitivity, and buoyancy of a true friend. Here is support and nourishment. Here is a mother and father lending a hand, but letting you find your own way. Here is guidance which empowers your freedom (or way–seeking mind), rather than pinning you down to directions and techniques. Here is teaching which encourages you to touch and know your true heart and to express yourself fully, teaching which is not teaching from outside, but a voice arising in your own being.