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dispatches from the new world of work

The Big Read

Tower of Books Haven't done a "What I'm reading" in a while. Embarrassed at how much stuff is sitting in the nearby pile, and the fact that I'm not comfortable going on so short as a two-day trip (tomorrow, to CA) with less than a dozen books. (But what if I were hijacked or ended up in the hospital?)

Hence, in three categories ...

Incredible/Life-altering!

Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. My (not so) secret passion-compulsion is statistics. Reading these two books honestly (heaven help me) makes my hands shake with excitement.

Forget means, medians, and modes—all three are downright dangerous. It's looking at the whole distribution of data that leads to the great insights (and helps us avoid the stupidest of errors). Taleb is new to me, and stunning; but I'm re-reading Full House for perhaps the 6th or 7th time—what a collection of dog ears! (Love this: Taleb is the Dean's Professor of the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at U Mass/Amherst—my God, signs of intelligent life in a B.School!)

One practical implication in my-our world: We pay far too much attention to the giants of industry, and far too little attention to the far more numerous pygmies which rarely even make it into our data sets; consider China, whose productivity is a wee fraction of ours, and not really catching up all that fast—its jillions of farmers, for example, are among the world's least productive people while our farmers (and hair salons and tanning salons and spas) are by and large computerized relative marvels of productivity. As to the "life altering" in the title, I can no less than guarantee that if you train yourself to look at and assess full distributions instead of the likes of simple-minded trend lines that ignore 98% of the data, your life will never be the same!

Non-fiction

Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life. (Opening epigraph: "A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying, SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES. The other writes back triumphantly, GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES.") Frank Smith, The Book of Learning and Forgetting. Derrick Jensen, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution. (These two set the conventional wisdom about how we learn on its ear—now, if only some of the "teach-to-test" goons were listening!) Robert Crease, The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science. (Hey, I love the history of science—it's so, so far from the "logical," "emotionless" process that most conjure up.) Fred Siegel, The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life. (Goes beyond 9/11 to examine the 75 years of decay in NYC that Giuliani successfully faced down against all odds—reminds me of Margaret Thatcher's "turnaround" in the UK.) Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. (Radio's impact was arguably as great as the Internet—watching this technological and social revolution unfold is both instructive and fun; I love stories of unintended consequences.) Sir Ranulf Fiennes, Race to the Pole: Tragedy, Heroism, and Scott's Antarctic Quest. (I'm a "Scottie," and one could argue we have more than enough books on the subject and the man—this one, however, is the first by an explorer, probably the most intrepid explorer of the last 75 years.) Fara Warner, The Power of the Purse: How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World's Most Important Customers—Women. (This is a re-re-read; I simply need to absorb these "first ever" detailed cases on one of the most important opportunities business faces or, rather, fails repeatedly to face.) Kerry Patterson et al., Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. (Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations are arguably the two most powerful business books of the last 10 years—if you take them aboard.)

Fiction

Marshall Browne, Inspector Anders and the Ship of Fools. Bill Eidson, The Repo. Mark Helprin, A Dove of the East and Other Stories. (Helprin is an amazing writer who can develop character in a paragraph better than most can in 400 pages; his A Soldier of the Great War may be my favorite work of fiction.) John Lawton, A Little White Death. Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy. (I'm late to Hiaasen, but hell bent on catching up.) Juris Jurjevics, The Trudeau Vector.

Tom Peters posted this on 02/27/06.

Comments

And my wife thinks "I" read too much?

Beautiful.

Leaders are readers.

I'll have to check out Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations after I finish my current set of business books.

Thanks for sharing your list Tom!

Posted by DUST!N at February 27, 2006 11:13 AM

Tom! You are an enabler. This doesn't help my reading addiction...

Posted by Troy Worman at February 27, 2006 11:23 AM

As the former global Director of Communications for Bata Limited, a large multinational footwear company, I grin when I read that Zander and Zander used the real-life example from the Bata organization as the epigraph of their book "The Art of Possibility".

The story is true - at one point in the 1930's two Bata executives were dispatched from Zlin, in what was then Czechoslovakia, to the African continent, and their responses were as quoted.

Tomas Bata - the founder of the Bata Shoe Organization, and Thomas J. Bata, his son and the patriarch of the company, were innovators seven decades before it was cool to quote innovation as a corporate differentiator.

The Africa anecdote is a great story - I just wanted to see it attributed.

Best regards,

Graeme Spicer

Posted by Graeme Spicer at February 27, 2006 12:38 PM

Thanks Tom for sharing your list with us. I hope to pick up a copy of "Race to the Pole" very soon as well.

Mark Turok

Posted by Mark Turok at February 27, 2006 1:02 PM

The RG book - interesting that Giuliani used "imminent domain" laws so well to clean up Times Square and other areas - and now after the Supremes' decision it is getting out of hand in some places for home owners. RG though used it artfully.

Posted by Sean at February 27, 2006 1:25 PM

Tom:
It's possible that I missed it somewhere in all my reading, but I keep thinking I'd love to see a post from you on "how" you read a book. Do you underline? bend pages? take copious notes on a legal pad?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Fred

Posted by Fred Clough at February 27, 2006 2:29 PM

What are the top ten books that every bright teenager should read to understand themselves, their world and our future? The top fifty? Your lists are great for us working world adults seeking insight but our kids are our future and most are in the public education system we have.

Posted by JG at February 27, 2006 3:03 PM

JG,

Depends on your (or your kids') bent. My suggestions:

A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink
The Gift of Being Yourself, David Benner
Orbiting the Giant Hairball, Gordon MacKenzie
Rules of the Red Rubber Ball, Kevin Carroll
The Big Moo

Personally, I'd also make sure they have a copy of The Message (the Bible in contemporary language as translated by Eugene Peterson) and Velvet Elvis if you want them to challenge and own their faith as a Christian.

Posted by DUST!N at February 27, 2006 3:40 PM

Dear Tom, have you read books on/by Richard Feynman? He was a very curious character!

This one is a good collection of his letter. I think he was one hell of a physics "brand you"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0738206369/sr=8-6/qid=1141076201/ref=pd_bbs_6/102-6288009-2155314?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Posted by Namith at February 27, 2006 4:37 PM

Hi Tom,

Thanks for sharing! Luckily I don't seem to be the only one who reads a lot ;-)

One question though, how do you take notes? Multiple notebooks per subject, one notebook with everything in it, IPP (immediate PowerPointing) or ....

What's your thought/reading process? I'd love to hear (oops read!!) it!

Thanks,

Victor

Posted by Victor at February 27, 2006 5:29 PM

That is incredible. I like to read and find it keeps my mental flow, however I can't imagine being able to read that much. Most successful people read a great deal. Tom speaks of Ben Franklin a great deal. Ben was an avid reader. I am interested to know how many words per minute Tom can read? Just out of curiosity.

Posted by Rocky at February 27, 2006 9:19 PM

Tom, we've discussed Full House before. Glad to see you're back to it. I might need to pull my copy out again.

Posted by Steve Yastrow at February 28, 2006 2:23 AM

Full House is great...just re-read it last year, and I got more out of the second reading.

I'll read the Scott, too. But while Scott seems to have reached escape velocity, have you had the joy of readng about Amundsen? A superb manager, especially in the realm of project management. He earned the distaste people feel for him for premeditatedly killing the sled dogs, but, of course, most polar explorers lost their dogs anyway, just through lack of skill. If Amundsen had planned Katrina rescue ops or the war on the Iraqi or the Somalia operations, they would have been great victories instead of defeats.

If you have time/interest, the 1927 "My Life As An Explorer" is really fine, esp. Chapter XI, his "Problems of Food & Equipment" problem statements and logistics problem-solving.

Posted by jeff angus at February 28, 2006 12:06 PM

Tom:
As a former engineer & statistician, I love seeing a passion for statistics from a champion of leadership & design such as yourself! As you well know, the numbers aren't everything, though...you've got to consider the stats in context, and begin with the right question(s). And sometimes you've got to ignore the existing models...curve-breakers with well-timed and -targeted passion can produce those "outliers" which break from a market's existing bell curve to produce their own exceptional success.

Posted by curt wehrley at February 28, 2006 4:02 PM

All:
How many books do you read at one time? I know some who rarely read one book at a time, but instead juggle several at a time. Others prefer that one-at-a-time approach. I'm leaning more and more toward the juggling act these days. Here's why: My mind can spend time chewing on that mind-bending chapter I just read in one book while I pick up another book where I last left off. My brain then goes to work imaging what the next chapter in that first book will bring. That helps to reinforce what I just read, and gives my imagination a good workout -- after which I'm chomping at the bit to get back to that book.

Posted by curt wehrley at February 28, 2006 4:18 PM