Tuesday, November 27, 2012

s+b's Best Business Books 2012


The annual Best Business Books special section is now online at strategy+business. We've got a great team of expert essayists, who chose and reviewed a terrific stack of books...in my not-so-humble opinion. Here's my intro to the section and the best of the best lineup. Read the rest here...
New and improved! This promise gets slapped on business books as often as on household cleansers. Many books are new each year, but those with genuine insight and value are very rare indeed.
We take the time to find them. In strategy+business’s Best Business Books 2012, our team of distinguished experts — some veterans of this annual special section, namely James O’Toole, Sally Helgesen, Phil Rosenzweig, and “Z” Holly, and some newcomers, Alice Schroeder, J. Philip Lathrop, and Shaun Holliday — review 21 tomes published between the autumn of 2011 and the autumn of 2012 that fulfill their promise.
Be sure to take a close look at our Top Shelf selections — our reviewers’ picks as the best of this year’s best business books. They include a new appraisal of Dwight David Eisenhower that will prompt you to consider your own effectiveness as a leader, a realistic plan for improving healthcare that eschews political rhetoric for practical solutions, an exploration of cloud computing that gets beyond the surface technological story to look more deeply at how it will change business practices, and four more books that merit your time and attention.

Here's the Top Shelf selections (lifted off the s+b website). Congrats to the authors! 



Biography
Eisenhower in War and Peace
by Jean Edward Smith
(Random House, 2012)
Strategy
The New Emerging Market Multinationals: Four Strategies forDisrupting Markets and Building Brands
by Amitava Chattopadhyay and Rajeev Batra, with Aysegul Ozsomer
(McGraw-Hill, 2012)
Marketing
Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies
by Jim Stengel
(Crown Business, 2011)
Innovation
Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think about Risk, Innovation, Scale, and Success
by Thomas M. Koulopoulos
(Bibliomotion, 2012)
Healthcare
Healthcare Beyond Reform: Doing It Right for Half the Cost
by Joe Flower
(Productivity Press, 2012)
Organizational Culture
Productive Workplaces: Dignity, Meaning, and Community in the 21st Century: 25th Anniversary Edition
by Marvin R. Weisbord
(Jossey-Bass, 2012)
Capitalism
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
(Pantheon, 2012)


            

Monday, November 19, 2012

Killer quotes #2

 

 

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"

--attributed to Winston Churchill