Here are 100 books that The Voltage Effect fans have personally recommended if you like
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I study and share winning marketing practices. My passion is making organizations better by utilizing precision segmentation strategies and creating superior customer value. Like most successful entrepreneurs, I wear many hats and juggle many ventures. I am a marketing professor, market researcher, business scholar, book author, case writer, blogmaster, speaker, and strategic consultant. Most of my work focuses on entrepreneurial businesses, information-based organizations, service firms, and technology and Now Economy companies. I am always searching for and thinking about the latest/greatest keys to business success. I work with future leaders to build, manage, and improve marketing operations in the great enterprises of today and tomorrow.
The author has a doctorate in psychology but chose a most unusual route to success and fortune. Rather than pursuing a traditional career in academia or medical practice, Dr. Konnikova became a superstar in the exciting and glamorous world of high-stakes poker.
This is a fascinating and intriguing story of how a card-playing novice learned the inside tricks and tactics from an incredible mentor. Read about how she used superior intellect, strategic decision-making, and an unwavering commitment to learn what it takes to climb to the top of the professional gambling arena.
A New York Times bestseller * A New York Times Notable Book
"The tale of how Konnikova followed a story about poker players and wound up becoming a story herself will have you riveted, first as you learn about her big winnings, and then as she conveys the lessons she learned both about human nature and herself." -The Washington Post
It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I study and share winning marketing practices. My passion is making organizations better by utilizing precision segmentation strategies and creating superior customer value. Like most successful entrepreneurs, I wear many hats and juggle many ventures. I am a marketing professor, market researcher, business scholar, book author, case writer, blogmaster, speaker, and strategic consultant. Most of my work focuses on entrepreneurial businesses, information-based organizations, service firms, and technology and Now Economy companies. I am always searching for and thinking about the latest/greatest keys to business success. I work with future leaders to build, manage, and improve marketing operations in the great enterprises of today and tomorrow.
While most of us are happy getting the little things done in life (whether at work or home), we can all benefit from learning about the best practices employed in the successful design and management of one-of-a-kind, global megaprojects. Interesting applications were provided from construction, manufacturing, and real estate as well as winning products and services such as Amazon Prime and Apple’s iPod.
This book provides keen insights to help you succeed in your small venture/project by understanding how to turn a vision into reality, manage costs, ensure top quality, overcome obstacles, and stick to deadlines.
The secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious, complex projects on any scale--from home renovation to space exploration--by the world's leading expert on megaprojects.
Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York's skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple's iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months.
These are wonderful stories. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. Remember Boston's "Big Dig"? Almost every sizeable city…
I study and share winning marketing practices. My passion is making organizations better by utilizing precision segmentation strategies and creating superior customer value. Like most successful entrepreneurs, I wear many hats and juggle many ventures. I am a marketing professor, market researcher, business scholar, book author, case writer, blogmaster, speaker, and strategic consultant. Most of my work focuses on entrepreneurial businesses, information-based organizations, service firms, and technology and Now Economy companies. I am always searching for and thinking about the latest/greatest keys to business success. I work with future leaders to build, manage, and improve marketing operations in the great enterprises of today and tomorrow.
Have a great idea for a new venture? Perhaps you thought it was all about finding that “a-ha” moment. Not exactly–there’s so much more to turning a great idea into a profitable business opportunity.
Johnson presents a new way of looking at innovation as a multi-discipline, multi-faceted process. Creativity, collaboration, communication, competition, diffusion theory, disruption, environment, historical perspective, organizational culture, passion, networks, real-world value, risk, technology, and time–these components make innovation happen.
A fascinating deep dive on innovation from the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Unexpected Life
The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery--these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the breakthrough technologies that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson's answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I study and share winning marketing practices. My passion is making organizations better by utilizing precision segmentation strategies and creating superior customer value. Like most successful entrepreneurs, I wear many hats and juggle many ventures. I am a marketing professor, market researcher, business scholar, book author, case writer, blogmaster, speaker, and strategic consultant. Most of my work focuses on entrepreneurial businesses, information-based organizations, service firms, and technology and Now Economy companies. I am always searching for and thinking about the latest/greatest keys to business success. I work with future leaders to build, manage, and improve marketing operations in the great enterprises of today and tomorrow.
Baseball has been called America’s game. Yet, many fans find the season way too long and games way too boring. Jesse Cole, the Walt Disney of baseball, purchased a minor league team and totally reimagined the sport by changing accepted business practices and creating a super fan-friendly, game-day experience.
Many great lessons here on how to build an enterprise through creativity, differentiation, entrepreneurship, perseverance, and strategy.
The Savannah Bananas have peeled back the game of baseball and made it fun again.
This is their story.
For his entire childhood, Jesse Cole dreamed of pitching in the Majors. Now, he has a life in baseball that he could have only imagined: he met the love of his life in the industry; they shaped Savannah, Georgia's professional team into the league champion Savannah Bananas; and now the Bananas have restyled baseball itself into something all their own: Banana Ball.
Fast, fun, and outrageously entertaining, Banana Ball brings fans right into the game. The Bananas throw out a first…
The world of entrepreneurship has been my driving passion for decades. Why? It is entrepreneurs, despite their many quirks, who make the world a better place. It’s entrepreneurs who create jobs in a world where jobs in many places are in short supply. It’s entrepreneurs who wake up every day with a passion to forge their own path with the freedom to do so. And it’s why I embarked at mid-life on a second career as a business-school professor. It’s why I teach and why I write. The books I suggest here will give you a fighting chance to deal effectively with the challenges you’ll surely find along your entrepreneurial journey.
In his years leading innovation efforts as Google’s Director of Engineering, Savoia learned that what you really need to figure out if your newfangled idea will sell is YODA: Your Own DAta.
Conventional market research simply isn’t going to cut it, as the Law of Market Failure (that the vast majority of new products and new ventures fail) is brutal. You need to know how customers will react to the thing you are trying to build.
I love the ingenuity of the methods Savoia reveals, including ‘’pretotyping” (to test product-market fit) before you build a prototype, to name just one. Indispensable advice throughout, in my view.
The Law of Market Failure: Most new products will fail in the market, even if competently executed.
Using his experience at Google, his remarkable success as an entrepreneur and consultant, and insights from his lectures at Stanford University and Google, Alberto Savoia's The Right It offers an unparalleled approach to beating the beast that is market failure.
Millions of people around the world are working hard to bring to life new ideas. Some of these ideas will turn out to be stunning successes that will have a major impact on our world and our culture: The next Google, the next…
The truth is, I’ve never fit in. I'm always asking questions like: Why do we do it that way? And, what if we tried this instead? These types of questions, however, though intriguing to me and other creatives, make the keepers of the status quo really nervous. As a professor and narrative inquiry researcher, I study the stories of people who've been silenced—extracting the characters, plot, and setting these narratives have in common. For workplace abuse survivors, a salient theme is they think big! To support this mission, I'm on the Executive Board and serve as the Education Director for the National Workplace Bullying Coalition and am a regular contributor to Psychology Today.
It was my research on creativity that led me to study workplace abuse.
Surprisingly, there are remarkable similarities among targets of bullying; most salient, they tend to shake the status quo at work while exploring and offering novel solutions to institutionalized problems. Unfortunately, as Grant details in his research, instead of embracing these innovators as forecasters of the future, organizations attempt to silence and minimize their contributions.
However, creatives are not in it for the money or accolades, but for the love of the game and dedication to the mission, thus when they are forced to bow to tradition and play smaller than who they were born to be, they exit the stifling work environment, thus further stagnating an already lagging work culture.
In this book, Grant brilliantly hails the power of the creative to both change our minds and change the world, urging institutions to give them space to…
The #1 New York Times bestseller that examines how people can champion new ideas in their careers and everyday life-and how leaders can fight groupthink, from the author of Think Again and co-author of Option B
"Filled with fresh insights on a broad array of topics that are important to our personal and professional lives."-The New York Times DealBook
"Originals is one of the most important and captivating books I have ever read, full of surprising and powerful ideas. It will not only change the way you see the world; it might just change the way you live your life.…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I have devoted my career to helping leaders navigate challenging transitions into new roles, build their teams, and transform their organizations. Strategic thinking is a key foundation of my work as an executive coach and advisor at Genesis Advisers and a professor at the IMD Business School. Whether executives are taking new roles or driving large-scale transformations, they must be able to rapidly analyze the context, craft good visions and strategies, and mobilize people to realize them. I try to equip the leaders I work with with the mental frameworks, tools, and skillsets to adapt and succeed in the first 90 days and beyond.
I liked that this book highlighted how supposedly tried-and-true approaches to innovation fail to deliver results.
The book’s insights about how to drive radical innovation informed the advice I now give executives about how to approach organizational transformation, starting with an ambitious vision, communicating the “why,” and enlisting great people to go on the journey with them.
It helped me to understand that building organizations to develop disruptive technologies requires leaders to envision things that may sound crazy until they are realized.
What Valuable Company Is Nobody Building? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there. "Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how". (Elon…
I’ve been fascinated with the future ever since I watched 2001 Space Odyssey. An amazing spaceship that could help us explore other planets! Then all that weird stuff about an A.I. gone crazy and apes banging sticks around monoliths. What the…? That curiosity smashed into a major concern at the age of fifteen on a canoe trip where I was trying to work out how to live and work closely with other humans - and failing. It turns out humans are crazy creatures. We love being together, and doing amazing things together, but that can be really hard. So leadership and the future fused into a lifelong passionate pursuit.
The case studies of leaders, businesses, government, and agencies implementing new technologies for the improvement of work, agriculture, nutrition, productivity, and the climate is amazing.
My favourite case study snapshot is of Vivobarefoot footwear brand that partners with algae technology startup Bloom and their patented BLOOM foam - which takes harmful algae blooms out of waterways.
Shoes made out of algae blooms. By making shoes, it’s actually making the environment better. This is the ‘beyond net zero’ promise and potential. So cool.
The authors offer provocative ‘what if…’ questions at the beginning and end of each chapter to help the reader explore what the trends mean and how they might affect their current leadership paradigm.
One of the most useful aspects of the book is the ‘industry playlist’ infographic at the back of the book. You can look up your own industry and…
Making outlandish predictions about the future is easy.
Predicting the future normal is far harder.
For the past decade, Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason
have been on the front lines of exploring the global forces shaping our future
normal through their work independently leading two of the most successful
trend consultancies in the world: TrendWatching and the Non-Obvious Company.
From donning full body haptic suits to sampling cultivated
meat, their work has taken them into cutting-edge labs, private testing
facilities, and invite-only showcases across the world. Now for the first time,
they are teaming…
Dennis E. Hensley, Ph.D., is the author of 64 books on such topics as motivation, financial management, theology, futurism, professional writing, literary analysis, and time management. Dr. Hensley served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army and was awarded six medals for two tours in Vietnam. He and his wife Rose have been married for 49 years and have two grown married children and four grandkids. Dr. Hensley was a college professor for 21 years and has been a trainer for Wells Fargo Bank, Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Co., Vera Bradley Corp., North American Van Lines, and Lincoln Life Insurance Co., among many others.
Michael Nesmith was famous for being a member of “The Monkees,” but his family was rich before that success. His mother, Bette Nesmith, a secretary, and amateur artist, invented Liquid Paper in 1958. She sold her company to Gillette in 1979 for $49,500,000. This book chronicles the amazing achievement of hundreds of people just like Bette. Some became famous (Orville Wright, Levi Strauss, Fred, and Donald Trump, Helen Keller), whereas others were outshone by their creations. The author explains the thought processes, work systems, promotional efforts, and production demands behind each creative person’s journey from idea to finished product. Superb drawings enhance the explanations of machines, bridges, tunnels, and skyscrapers.
“Among the many rewards of America the Ingenious, Kevin Baker’s survey of Yankee know-how, is stumbling on its buried nuggets. . . . Baker examines a wide range of the achievements that have made, and still make, America great again—and again.” —The Wall Street Journal
All made in America: The skyscraper and subway car. The telephone and telegraph. The safety elevator and safety pin. Plus the microprocessor, amusement park, MRI, supermarket, Pennsylvania rifle, and Tennessee Valley Authority. Not to mention the city of Chicago or jazz or that magnificent Golden Gate Bridge.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I learned about leadership and building organizations in a volunteer, community-based organization growing up. I ran my first leadership workshop as an 18-year-old for 15-16-year-old kids, and at its peak, led a passionate group of 200+ kids. I then woke up from that dream into a “real job” as a product manager in a company selling products like bath soap and shampoo, and later as a strategy consultant. It was there that I noticed the significant pain people were experiencing in the corporate world, and I realized I could help leaders build organizations where both the business and its people could thrive.
This book by Noam Wasserman brought scientific rigor to the difficult, often painful decisions entrepreneurs face. Wasserman was one of the first to deeply analyze these challenges, and I found his approach innovative.
I was particularly impressed by his creative method of gathering data—founders who were too busy to fill out traditional surveys were drawn in by an executive compensation benchmarking survey, only to find that 90% of the questions fed directly into his research.
Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman…
