I spent my first decade in business assuming the game was chess: play well, win. It took an embarrassingly long time to notice most rooms run on rules nobody wrote down. Power, persuasion, what breaks teams, who you measure yourself against. Each book here named a rule I was losing to without knowing it existed. And the deepest unwritten rule of all was the ladder itself: do the junior work, get trained, move up. Nobody questioned it because it had always held. I build AI tools for a living, and I can see it coming apart. Which is probably why I wrote a book about what replaces it.
This is the Harari that looks forward, and that is the one I keep recommending.
I read it just before the pandemic, right as I was turning my agency into a consultancy, which was unfortunate timing. Sapiens looks backward; this one looks at what is coming, and that pulled me in harder. It sits close to the future of work I would actually want, though I do not think we get there, because people reject the things that make them feel bad long before they will change.
I lent my copy to a friend chewing over the same questions. He read it until the spine broke and never gave it back.
In twenty-one bite-sized lessons, Yuval Noah Harari explores what it means to be human in an age of bewilderment.
How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war, ecological cataclysms and technological disruptions? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? What should we teach our children?
The world-renowned historian and intellectual Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a thrilling journey through today's most urgent issues. The golden thread running through his exhilarating new book is the challenge of maintaining our collective and individual focus in the face of constant…
I have used this book almost daily since 2016, not to manipulate anyone, but to get my perspective across so it actually lands.
It reshaped my advisory practice. I build liking by being personable and honest, reciprocity by giving real advice that sits outside the sale, and I notice scarcity everywhere now. The deflating part is watching someone's cognitive biases hold so firm that no amount of care moves them.
I would keep it away from anyone who persuades for manipulative ends, because in the wrong hands it is a manual. In mine, it is a way of thinking more carefully about my own thinking.
The foundational and wildly popular go-to resource for influence and persuasion-a renowned international bestseller, with over 5 million copies sold-now revised adding: new research, new insights, new examples, and online applications.
In the new edition of this highly acclaimed bestseller, Robert Cialdini-New York Times bestselling author of Pre-Suasion and the seminal expert in the fields of influence and persuasion-explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these insights ethically in business and everyday settings. Using memorable stories and relatable examples, Cialdini makes this crucially important subject surprisingly easy. With Cialdini as a guide, you don't have…
The Go-Giver tells the story of an ambitious young man named Joe who yearns for success. Joe is a true go-getter, though sometimes he feels as if the harder and faster he works, the further away his goals seem to be.
I read this in 2021, just after I launched my advisory, when I started noticing power dynamics in rooms I had never been in before and wanted to understand them.
I read Greene as describing the world, not recommending it. Most people never consciously learn any of this; they have copied behaviours that seem to work, a bit like a cargo cult.
Law ten, avoid the unhappy and the unlucky, still makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I think it only holds if you are a zealot. I recommend it not so anyone can run these plays, but so they can recognise the world around them when someone else does.
Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature.
In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum.
Early on, it was inattention to results, because my ego was convinced I ran the best digital agency going. Later, and more damaging, it was a fear of conflict: not dealing with problems until they turned personal. In any team above four or five people, these show up, and the hard part is that the founder usually cannot fix them, because they are one of them.
I have sat in a board meeting doing 85% of the work for half the value, watching one partner chase results and another dodge all accountability. It is a fable, and that is exactly why it sticks.
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams. Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as…
The rule I actually applied was the one about competing with who you were rather than the people around you.
I had been watching colleagues as comparison rather than research, and it dragged me down without helping any of the businesses. Reading it felt like having a teacher in semi-real time: each rule mapped onto something I was dealing with that week.
It falls apart in small edge cases, and people love to use edge cases to dismiss a whole book. The one I disagree with most is finding and living your personal truth, because those truths shift as your life does. I doubt there is a single one you hold forever.
Penguin presents the CD edition of 12 Rules for Life written and read by Jordan B. Peterson
Jordan Peterson's work as a clinical psychologist has reshaped the modern understanding of personality, and now he has become one of the world's most popular public thinkers, with his lectures on topics ranging from the Bible to romantic relationships drawing tens of millions of viewers. In an era of polarizing politics, echo chambers and trigger warnings, his startling message about the value of personal responsibility and the dangers of ideology has resonated around the world.
AI is not coming for your job in one dramatic announcement. It's quietly eating the bottom of the career ladder: the junior work that used to train people into senior roles. Chris Simmance builds the tools doing the displacing, advises the owners deciding who to keep, and wrote this book because he could no longer dodge the question that sits between those two jobs.
The Next Rung is about what happens to work, households, and institutions when the entry-level rungs go. The graduate nobody trains. The manager whose orchestration role turns out to be the easiest thing in the building to automate. It ends somewhere useful: an honest audit of your own exposure and your own runway, and three ways through depending on how much time you have.
People Are People: Signals from the Human Side of Systems explores what remains constant in a world defined by accelerating technology. Drawing on personal experience, recovery, family, illness, and years of conversations with founders, entrepreneurs, and builders, Jamil Hasan examines the relationship between systems and the people who create, inherit,…
The Smart Mission brings together NASA’s most important lessons on how people, knowledge, and systems shape complex projects.
Drawing on decades of experience at NASA—including my time as the agency’s first Chief Knowledge Officer—this book explains why mission success depends less on process and more on culture, learning, and collaboration.…
