Saturday Summaries

White Books

I’m a sucker for books. At any given time I’ll be reading five, six books in parallel (though at different speeds), and I hardly ever give up on one, not wanting to miss the wisdom hidden on the later pages. Unfortunately, I also hardly ever capture the learning from books I read. After having made the International Day of the Book the theme of our Toastmaster Meeting on 23 April, I’ll follow up with a summary of books I’ve finished in 2009.

1. Nudge (Sunstein/Thaler)
   How can we design use nudges and default choices to help people make better decisions? A concept not new to marketeers applied to public policy, ranging from the design of school cafeterias to retirement funds and greenhouse gases.
2. The Audacity of Hope (Obama)
   Well, well, we’ve all heard him speak. A summary of Obama’s ethics, the big issues in American politics and some personal history. Not a necessary read, but definitely a pleasant listen.
3. Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut)
   Weird. A set of characters with broken histories happens to converge in a hotel in rural America. Someone runs amok. Not my cup of tea.
4. Freakonomics (Levitt/Dubner)
   Applying economics to all kinds of situations: Race and given names, parenting, drug dealers and swimming pools. Entertaining read with some surprising insights.
5. Eden (Smit)
   How Cornwall’s Eden project came about. A detailed history with more insight on project management than on botanical gardens.
6. Digital Fortress (Brown)
   The NSA’s most powerful code-breaking machine is under attack. Excellent page-turner for the ride home from London.
7. The Code Book (Singh)
   A history of codes and ciphers, and how to break them. Surprisingly little overlap with Information Security 101, instead stories from the people making the codes and breaking them.
8. The 7 habits of highly effective people (Covey)
   A classic. Even though I knew the 7 habits before, listening to the book introduced me to some previously unknown concepts, including the circle of influence.
9. Everything is miscellaneous (Weinberger)
   How taxonomies are increasingly created after the fact, and how to fit one thing into many places. Once you’ve understood the difference between categories and tags, there’s no further need for this book.
10. Here comes everybody (Shirky)
    This book blew me away. Is power really moving from our central organisations back to the individual, and how can we use that for good?

Currently reading: Strategic Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations (Andreasen), Don’t think of an elephant (Lakoff), Brainrules (Medina), The Shadow of the Wind (Zafon) and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel (Clarke).