100 Books Like The Ten Faces of Innovation

In Changing the World, Alex tells his own story, and it’s a compelling one, chocked full of useful lessons for anyone hoping to find a way to make a difference and take on any of the world’s seemingly intractable problems.   It’s all here, from how to break in, to recognizing an opportunity when it presents itself and knowing how to take full advantage of it, to building an organization and populating it with the right people, and how to raise the dough to finance your dream.  As to how to break-in, while he doesn’t say as much, I know Alex shares my view that the fastest and best way to break into international development work is to go and live where the problems of poverty live – which in Alex’s case was Bangladesh.  There he apprenticed himself to a 100-karat visionary, authentic social entrepreneur, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.… show more.

This is a great guide for people considering embarking on a social enterprise journey, a kind of pump primer that canvasses many people in the field for their advice and imparts a lot from the author himself who is in as good a position as anyone to offer it, having "walked the walk "from acolyte/novitiate to investor, to professor and to convener of the like-minded in one of the most enjoyable conferences I have ever attended, chocked full of social entrepreneurs and other interesting people, and happily keynote-free. I think the most valuable advice Jonathan imparts, and it plays like a lite motif throughout this breezily-paced book is that the best way to be effective in this multi-variegated field is to learn the language of your beneficiaries, not so much to be able to speak to them, but rather to listen to them and understand their plight and what they… show more.

Alex Lazarow is one of those rare people who can observe things taking place around the world and package them for us in a way we can comprehend that an important change in the way things used to be done is taking place, and if we want to keep up we need to pay attention.  The change Alex sees is in the way start-ups are happening and companies are being structured.  Whereas investors and entrepreneurs alike used to try to create “unicorns” – i.e., companies that “disrupted” an existing sector with little capital investment and could scale from thousands to millions in sales in less than a year, and IPO the next year to achieve a market cap of billions – Alex thinks the future is with “Camels”, which do not try to scale recklessly to achieve a gigantic short term payday but rather try to build something that is… show more.

This book is a guide to surviving an existential crisis – what Grove calls a Strategic Inflection Point – when your business is subjected to one or more of six external forces, which, if powerful enough, could destroy the business.  Some of them are obvious – competitors, regulators, customers, vendors – but others more esoteric, like “the possibility your business could be done a different way”, what today we would call being disrupted.  I read it in 2015, when the company I run, FINCA International, was facing five of these six forces, each of which clobbered us with a 10x force compared to the first three decades of our existence, when competition was weak and most external forces enabled our success. How does a CEO respond to this challenge?  Grove’s answer is summarized in the title: remain in a permanent state of dread, which to outsiders might appear on the… show more.

For almost six decades, I have studied the histories of firms and their successes and failures in creating value. I am always looking for heavy hitters who write about their thinking/doing process. Curt Carlson qualifies.

When he was CEO of SRI International, he guided the conception and development of HDTV, Siri, the computer mouse, electronic banking, robotic surgery which evolved into Intuitive Surgical (the dominant robotics surgical firm with its Da Vinci system), and much more.

I first found Carlson via a Harvard Business Review article in which he laid out his proven steps for value creation that seem so straightforward, yet are rarely followed. I wanted a more comprehensive discussion, and I got it with this book.    

This book provides a backstage pass into IDEO, one of the top design firms in the world. Combining humor and storytelling with practical advice, it offers insights into their process of innovation, from observation and brainstorming to prototyping and breaking through barriers. Written before design thinking evolved into a major force in education and industry, this book welcomed me into IDEO's world of playful invention.

Much of the advertising we see is not something that we can recognize as advertising. Marketing campaigns are orchestrated behind the scenes, influencing us through subtle product placement in films and television, paid mouthpieces made to appear to us like everyday strangers, and social media influencers with less-than-transparent relationships to luxury brands. This kind of advertising is not only effective in the moment, but it also succeeds in normalizing a culture of continuous selling. Serazio, a former journalist, is a skilled investigator and writer and it shows on every page.

Author Jacqueline Byrd has spent her life researching and delivering insight on how to create innovations in organizations. The leader doesn’t have to be innovative to create breakthrough thinking.

She needs to surround herself with individuals who will challenge the status quo and leverage creativity and risk-taking to deliver novel ideas, two key tenants in the book. She’s interviewed a number of truly innovative thinkers and shares their perspectives on breakthrough thinking.  

In this book, Baron provides an accessible and comprehensive guide to the latest knowledge on a specific digital activity: reading with screens. Her focused and nuanced perspective on a specific aspect of living with screens is a refreshing approach. I enjoyed reading about research on digital reading from various perspectives and the practical advice for applying this knowledge to my own reading habits. I particularly liked the engaging account of the differences between reading print and digital books and how that is different from audio stories. As someone who has been researching young children’s reading in relation to new media, I found the summary of research on various types of text particularly interesting.

Can ideas change the world? How does belief in political equality—the idea that everyone deserves basic unbridgeable liberties—affect innovation and economic development?

Dierdre McCloskey—one of the most creative and interesting economists alive—takes on these topics and much more in her characteristically witty, fast-paced style. She loves describing and refuting bad ideas—or even ideas widely regarded as brilliant—in an effort to go deeper into the forces that lifted humans out of poverty and sustain innovation to this day.