50 Politics Classics: Freedom Equality Power: Mind-Changing, World-Changing Ideas from Fifty Landmark Books Tom Butler-Bowdon Nicholas Brealey Publishing (2015) “The world is a dangerous place to live…because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”  Albert EinsteinActually, the complete quotation is this: “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the… The post 50 Politics Classics: A Book Review Revisited by Bob Morris first appeared on Blogging on Business ..read more

Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2011) Why I think this is one of the most important books published during the past decade Given the number and quality of the reviews of this book that have already appeared, there really is not much (if anything) I can contribute…except to explain what I have learned from Daniel Kahneman and why I think this is one of the most important books published during the past decade. These are the questions that Daniel Kahneman has answered for me: o  How to balance intuitive judgment with rational and emotional judgment? o&n ..read more

Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life Hal Gregersen Harper Business (November 2018) If you want better answers, you must ask better questions In his predictably brilliant Foreword, Ed Catmull asks: What if “we valued the answers we arrive at mainly because of all the new and better questions they lead us to? Put another way, what if instead of seeing questions as the keys that unlock answers, we saw answers as stepping stones to the next questions? That strikes me as a different mindset — and one th ..read more

The Power of Closure: Why We Want It, How to Get It, nd When to Walk Away  Gary McClain TarcherPerigee/An Imprint of Penguin Random House (July 2024) How to seek closure while treating both yourself and others with kindness and respect As I began to read this book, I was again reminded of Don Schlitz’s lyrics for The Gambler, a song made popular by Kenny Rogers: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em Know when to fold ’em Know when to walk away And know when to run You never count your money When you’re sittin’ at the table There’ll be time enough for countin’ When the dealin’s done.” Accor ..read more

A Chance Meeting: American Encounters Rachel Carson NYRB Classics (March 2024) What if?   At some point, Rachel Carson must have asked herself, “What if I were a fly on the wall” when two or three American writers or artists were engaged in conversation? What would they talk about? How would they get along? The answers to these and other questions — perhaps including a few questions that may occur to you —  are provided in A Chance Meeting, first published in 2004. There are 36 encounters (1854-1967). The first involves Henry James and Matthew Brady; the last involves Norman Mai ..read more

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries Safi Bahcall St. Martin’s Press (March 2019) If an idea doesn’t sound loony, it probably needs much more development…and protection. In this compellingly entertaining as well as informative book, Safi Bahcall explains how great leaders recognize, develop, and protect “widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy.” For example, Pixar’s Ed Catmull (right) refers to early stage ideas for films — loonshots — as “Ugly Babies.” In the passage that follows, Catmull describes the n ..read more

Talent: The Market Cap Multiplier Anish Batlaw and Ram Charan Ideapress Publishing (January 2022) How and why strategic talent management drives exceptional value creation  Here’s this book’s basic concept: Ram Charan and Anish Batlaw examine “a methodology and practice that can unlock outsized shareholder gains, in many cases in excess of 4X over four to six years.” Organizations do not achieve these gains: individuals do. That is, exceptional practitioners of this precise, proven methodology for getting-performing talents in the right places at the right time. More specifically, “only t ..read more

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on High Performance Various Contributors and HBR Editors Harvard Business Review Press (May 2022) “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle’s insight refers to organizations as well as to individuals and helps to explain both success and failure. This book is one of the most recent volumes in a series that anthologizes what the editors of the Harvard Business Review consider to be “must reads” in a given business subject area. In this instance, high or peak performance. Each of the selections is eminently deserving of inclusion ..read more

Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman PublicAffairs (July 2024) “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Pogo the Possum Mike Maples and Peter Ziebelman agree. They created this book in order to convince as many people as possible that, “in different ways, all of us unwittingly let our own self-imposed limits govern how we think and act throughout our lives. The trickiest part is that they can become so embedded in our assumptions we fail to even realize they exist, not to mention how they hold us back.” False assumptions are like chains ..read more

Shocks, Cr!ses, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Microeconomic Risk Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak and Paul Swartz Harvard Business Review Press (July 2024) How and why assessing macroeconomic risks requires highly developed judgment Carlsson-Szlezak and Swartz have wide and deep real-world experience with all manner of organizations that were struggling to avoid or overcome barriers to accurate assessments of macroeconomic risk. As they explain with exquisite precision, they focus on (begin italics) what it would take for true crises to happen (end italics) — “not simply on the question of whet ..read more