My students know that I am a voracious reader and in years past, some of them would often ask me to recommend some good readings that would keep their scholarly juices flowing after graduation. I would verbally give them recommendations from books I had read in the past year. As I begin the first blog of the New Year, I thought I’d go over the books I read in 2016 and list the 6 books that I recommend for 2017. Here’s my list (in random order).
- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (Founder of Nike). Shoe Dog is an outstanding book that describes the founding and establishment of Nike. The book, written as a memoir by Knight, describes how he took a simple class project at Stanford and transformed it into one of the iconic corporations of our time. The story is fascinating in itself, but what makes the book especially impactful are the detailed insights about the key decisions, risks and the hard choices that had to be made in bringing Nike to the stature it has today. These insights are riveting and instructional and describe a company very different from the flashy image conjured up by the “Just Do It” campaign.
- Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace. Ed Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar, and he teams with Amy Wallace to provide a fascinating story of how Pixar was founded and grew up to be the movie making machine that has given us animation hits such as Toy Story, UP, Finding Nemo and the like. As opposed to Shoe Dog, where the primary focus of the book is on key decisions involved in the nurturing of Nike, Creativity does a phenomenal job focusing on how the company developed a culture that allowed creativity and innovation to thrive. And for followers of Steve Jobs (and especially those who have read Isaacsons’s biography of Jobs), the chapter where Catmull describes how Steve Jobs, a co-founder of Pixar, worked with Pixar’s management team is a revelation.
3. Mastery by Robert Greene. Mastery was published in 2012 but I was late to the party and read it a few months ago. This is an incredibly amazing book that profiles living and dead ‘masters’ who reached the pinnacle of their fields. Using archived material from the ancient masters such as Mozart and Henry Ford, and with interviews of current masters, Greene distills the factors that made these individuals successful and identifies commonalities across them. Like the preceding two books, Mastery provides many lessons to those seeking to excel in a sphere of their life. For me one of the key reminders was that when focusing on the success of masters and successful leaders such as Ed Catmull and Phil Knight (not talked about in this book, but Masters nevertheless), we often focus on their ultimate success and forget the pain and suffering and hours of endless toil that took them to the pinnacle. That while they were building their careers or companies, they had numerous setbacks and were often a day away from bankruptcy. Time and Time again it gets emphasized that success is a result of multiple factors but the one common one is endurance, the ability to deal with hardship and the ability to put in long hours of work.
- The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. A couple of years ago I was introduced to the concept of neuroplasticity, when my good friend, Anne O’Leary-Kelly suggested that I read Norman Doidge’s book. Since then I have read many other books on neuroplasticity, but am definitely partial to this one and re-read it a few months ago. Drawing on significant research in neuroscience, including that which led to Nobel Prizes, Doidge focuses on how the neurons in our brain alter to address disabilities individuals may have and how this knowledge can be used to help victims of stroke, blindness and other conditions. An important track within the books focuses on how our brain alters as we acquire skills, and how we can work to keep it more receptive to learn even at an old age. The book opened up several new avenues for self-development not taught in traditional classes. The concepts of neuroplasticity have the potential to be incredibly powerful self-help aids for all individuals. Some exposure to these concepts will, at the very least, create optimism among individuals that skills they believed were beyond them can indeed be conquered.
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The Little Prince was first published in 1943. It is a children’s book … and it is not. Very short – just 50 pages or so, the book (and the movie that recently came out) chronicles the travels of the Little Prince to various asteroids in Space where he meets a variety of individuals. And he asks questions. The questions, the answers, and his reflections are incredibly revealing. I first read this book in 1980 as part of my readings in my French class. I have subsequently read it multiple times at various stages in my life and each time I’ve come away with a different takeaway – I credit this book with leading me to my current profession and strongly believe that every individual should read this book at least once in their lifetime.
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. By Jack Thorne with JK Rowling. Ah well. Certainly different from the above books and not as good, in my opinion, as any of the Harry Potter Books. But I firmly believe that everyone should have read every Harry Potter Book. So there it is.
Happy 2017 all. I hope to keep coming through periodically with thoughts and welcome feedback, suggestions, bouquets and even brickbats (my target is once in three weeks but I hold the right to be more or less J).
P.S. Before I started this blog, I had set a limit of 6 books to highlight. That would discipline me to keep the list short, brief and the very top books that I wanted to highlight for 2017. I was sorely tempted to increase the list to 8 and add two books that I think are phenomenal: Matchmakers (by Evans and Schmalensee) and The Idea Factory (by Jon Gertner).