Better late than never. Here’s a list of books from the year’s first quarter that I recommend to help in your business. In almost no particular order:
- Keith Sawyer, “Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration”, 2008 – Collaboration is the best way to innovate. Did you know improv groups and jazz ensembles (and this book) can teach you a lot how do go about it?
- Youngme Moon, “Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd”, 2010 – To differentiate and stand out in the marketplace, you’d be better off if you stopped comparing yourself to the competition. There are three main ways to do that.
- Eduardo Porter, “The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do”, 2011 – What things really cost.
- Sheena Iyengar, “The Art of Choosing”, 2010 – Choose to read this book to learn how you and your customers make decisions about choices.
- John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio, “Spend Shift: How the Post-Crisis Values Revolution Is Changing the Way We Buy, Sell, and Live”, 2010 – Value-based consumption, anyone? Learn more about how one aspect of sustainability has tipped.
- Lisa Gansky, “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing”,  2010, and Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption”, 2010 – You really should know more about the collaborative consumption trend, too, and these two volumes will collaboratively deliver the insights you need.
- Nancy Lublin, “Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business” – Take a page from nonprofits’ book and market with a minimal budget. In fact, this book may prompt you to ask, Who needs a budget?
- Scott Belsky, “Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality”, 2010 – One idea from this book has already made me more efficient than I’ve ever been. There are several other good ones in it.
- Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other”, 2011Â - What being always connected is doing to us…
- William Powers, “Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age”, 2010 – …and what to do about it.
