Reading List

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, PhD, discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mind-set.

In this book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavour can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. 

Reality Check: Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition

In Silicon Valley slang, a “bozo explosion” is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, “If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don’t make sense”…then it’s time for a reality check.

For nearly three decades, Kawasaki has earned a stellar reputation as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and irreverent pundit. His best seller The Art of the Start has become the most acclaimed bible for small business. And his blog is consistently among the 50 most popular in the world.

Now, Kawasaki has compiled his best wit, wisdom, and contrarian opinions in handy book form. From competition to customer service, innovation to marketing, he shows readers how to ignore fads and foolishness while sticking to commonsense practices. He explains, for instance:

• How to get a standing ovation
• The art of schmoozing
• How to create a community
• The top 10 lies of entrepreneurs
• Everything you wanted to know about getting a job in Silicon Valley but didn’t know who to ask

Provocative, useful, and very funny, this straightforward book will show you why readers around the world love Guy Kawasaki.

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

Why have all the sprinters who have run the 100 meters in under 10 seconds been black?

What’s one thing Mozart, Venus Williams, and Michelangelo have in common?

Is it good to praise a child’s intelligence?

Why are baseball players so superstitious?

Few things in life are more satisfying than beating a rival. We love to win and hate to lose, whether it’s on the playing field or at the ballot box, in the office or in the classroom. In this bold new look at human behavior, award-winning journalist and Olympian Matthew Syed explores the truth about our competitive nature: why we win, why we don’t, and how we really play the game of life.

Bounce reveals how competition – the most vivid, primal, and dramatic of human pursuits – provides vital insight into many of the most controversial issues of our time, from biology and economics, to psychology and culture, to genetics and race, to sports and politics.

Backed by cutting-edge scientific research and case studies, Syed shatters long-held myths about meritocracy, talent, performance, and the mind. He explains why some people thrive under pressure and others choke, and weighs the value of innate ability against that of practice, hard work, and will. From sex to math, from the motivation of children to the culture of big business, Bounce shows how competition provides a master key with which to unlock the mysteries of the world.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people–at work, at school, at home. It’s wrong. As Daniel H. Pink explains in his new and paradigm-shattering book, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does – and how that affects every aspect of our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it’s precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:

• Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives
• Mastery – the urge to get better and better at something that matters
• Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

Along the way, he takes us to companies that are enlisting new approaches to motivation and introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are pointing a bold way forward.

Drive is bursting with big ideas– the rare book that will change how you think and transform how you live.

Principles: Life and Work

In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine.

In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemised into rules and understood like machines.

The book contains hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams.

He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerised decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions.

While the book brims with novel ideas for organisations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve.

Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone

Six Pixels of Separation is the first book to unify the concepts of personal branding, digital marketing, and entrepreneurship in a clear, fun and provocative manner. By using case studies, this audiobook offers a complete set of tools, tactics, and insights to empower individuals to reach a global audience and consumer base with a few clicks of the mouse, and almost all of them for free.

Digital marketing expert Mitch Joel unravels the fascinating world of new marketing, with a brand new perspective. Entrepreneurs are leveraging the digital channels to get their voice “out there”, connecting to similar others, becoming better community citizens, and ultimately, making more money and rocketing their personal and business lives into the stratosphere.

The trick is, personal brands are becoming bigger than corporate brands – and in Six Pixels of Separation listeners will begin to understand the “how” and “why” of how certain entrepreneurs have mastered the internet to propel their businesses.

The Persuasion Code: How Neuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime

Most of your attempts to persuade are doomed to fail because the brains of your audience automatically reject messages that disrupt their attention. This book makes the complex science of persuasion simple. Learn to develop better marketing and sales messages based on a scientific model; NeuroMap. Regardless of your level of expertise in marketing, neuromarketing, neuroscience or psychology: The Persuasion Code: How Neuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime will make your personal and business lives more successful by unveiling a credible and practical approach towards creating a breakthrough persuasion strategy.  

This audiobook will satisfy your interest in neuromarketing, scientific persuasion, sales, advertising effectiveness, website conversion, marketing strategy, and sales presentations. It’ll teach you the value of the award-winning persuasion model NeuroMap: the only model based on the science of how your customers use their brain to make any decision including a buying decision. You will appreciate why this scientific approach has helped hundreds of companies and thousands of executives achieve remarkable results.  

• Written by the founders of SalesBrain who pioneered the field of neuromarketing 
• SalesBrain has trained more than 100,000 executives worldwide including over 15,000 CEO
• Includes guidance for creating your own neuromarketing plan 
• Advance your business or career by creating persuasive messages based on the working principle of the brain

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Why do some products capture our attention, while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? This audiobook introduces listeners to the “Hooked Model”, a four-step process companies use to build customer habits. Through consecutive cycles through the hook, successful products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back repeatedly – without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

Hooked is a guide to building products people use because they want to, not because they have to. Written for product managers, designers, marketers, startup founders, and people eager to learn more about the things that control our behaviors, this audiobook gives listeners:

• Practical insights to create user habits that stick.
• Actionable steps for building products people love.
• Behavioral techniques used by Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other habit-forming products.
• New for second edition! An additional case study for building health habits.

Nir Eyal distilled years of research, consulting, and practical experience to write a manual for creating habit-forming products. Nir has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. His writing on technology, psychology, and business appears in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today. Be sure to also check out Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.

The Thank You Economy

If this were 1923, this book would have been called “Why Radio Is Going to Change the Game” . . .

If it were 1995, it would be “Why Amazon Is Going to Take Over the Retailing World” . . .

The Thank You Economy is about something big, something greater than any single revolutionary platform. It isn’t some abstract concept or wacky business strategy—it’s real, and every one of us is doing business in it every day, whether we choose to recognize it or not. It’s the way we communicate, the way we buy and sell, the way businesses and consumers interact online and offline. The Internet, where the Thank You Economy was born, has given consumers back their voice, and the tremendous power of their opinions via social media means that companies and brands have to compete on a whole different level than they used to.

Gone are the days when a blizzard of marketing dollars could be used to overwhelm the airwaves, shut out the competition, and grab customer awareness. Now customers’ demands for authenticity, originality, creativity, honesty, and good intent have made it necessary for companies and brands to revert to a level of customer service rarely seen since our great-grandparents’ day, when business owners often knew their customers personally, and gave them individual attention.

Here renowned entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk reveals how companies big and small can scale that kind of personal, one-on-one attention to their entire customer base, no matter how large, using the same social media platforms that carry consumer word of mouth.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he’d just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They’d have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress – to measure what mattered.

Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove (“the greatest manager of his or any era”) drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove’s brainchild with more than 50 companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked.

In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone’s goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.

The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization’s most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organisations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Superintelligence asks the questions:

What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us?

Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack.

It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful – possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.

But we have one advantage: We get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?

This profoundly ambitious and original book breaks down a vast track of difficult intellectual terrain. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom’s work nothing less than a reconceptualisation of the essential task of our time.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

There are two well-known facts:

1. Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the world as we know it.
2. The United States has long been, and remains, the global leader in AI.

That first fact is correct. But in his provocative new book, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee – one of the world’s most respected experts on AI – reveals that China has suddenly caught up to the US at an astonishingly rapid pace. As the US-Sino competition begins to heat up, Lee envisions China and the US forming a powerful duopoly in AI, but one that is based on each nation’s unique and traditional cultural inclinations. 

Building upon his longstanding US-Sino technology career (working at Apple, Microsoft, and Google) and his much-heralded New York Times Op-Ed from June 2017, Dr. Lee predicts that Chinese and American AI will have a stunning impact on not just traditional blue-collar industries but will also have a devastating effect on white-collar professions. Is the concept of universal basic income the solution? In Dr. Lee’s opinion, probably not. 

In AI Superpowers, he outlines how millions of suddenly displaced workers must find new ways to make their lives meaningful, and how government policies will have to deal with the unprecedented inequality between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Even worse, Lee says the transformation to AI is already happening all around us, whether we are aware of it or not.

Dr. Lee – a native of China but educated in America – argues powerfully that these unprecedented developments will happen much sooner than we think. He cautions us about the truly dramatic upheaval that AI will unleash and how we need to start thinking now on how to address these profound changes that are coming to our world.