Phew. Here’s what’s left unread after four years collection on three different Amazon wishlists:

Fiction

• A Woman Who (Rebecca Miller)
• Any Human Heart (William Boyd)
• Berlin. Steinerne Stadt (Jason Lutes)
• Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
• Die Bibliothek von Babel. (Jorge L. Borges)
• Fiktionen. Erzählungen 1939 – 1944 (Jorge L. Borges)
• Liebesgedichte (Spanisch – Deutsch) (Pablo Neruda)
• Love Poems (Erich Fried)
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Marisha Pessl)
• Talk Talk (T. C. Boyle)
• The Big Over Easy. An investigation with the Nursery Crime Division (Jasper Fforde)
• The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: Children’s Edition (Mark Haddon)
• The Fourth Bear (Jasper Fforde)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

Communication and Communities

• Communities Dominate Brands: Business and Marketing Challenges for the 21st Century (Tomi Ahonen)
• Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities (Amy Jo Kim)
• Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Etienne Wenger)
• Die heimliche Medienrevolution – Wie Weblogs, Wikis und freie Software die Welt verändern (TELEPOLIS) (Erik Möller)
• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (William Zinsser)
• Style Guide (Profile Books Ltd)
• Sustainable Development and Learning: Framing the Issues (Sir Neil Chalmers)
• The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (Paul H. Ray)
• Zielgerichtet moderieren (Martin Hartmann)

Music

• Altes Gasthaus Love (Erdmöbel)
• Faking the Books (Lali Puna)
• Lady in Satin (Billie Holiday)
• Lilith Fair [2cd] (Various)
• Pure Vernunft Darf Niemals Siegen (Tocotronic)
• Stolz der Rose – das Beste und mehr (Rosenstolz)

Politics

• A Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Nelson Mandela)
• An Inconvenient Truth (DVD ~ Davis Guggenheim)
• Erste Rechts-Hilfe (Rolf Gössner)
• Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Climate Change – Is Time Running Out? (Elizabeth Kolbert)
• go. stop. act! (Marc Amann)
• Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Amartya Sen)
• Rules for Radicals (Saul Alinsky)
• The Campaigning Handbook (Mark Lattimer)
• The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen)
• The Root Causes of Biodiversity Loss (Alexander Wood)
• Trade, Aid and Security: An Agenda for Peace and Development (Lloyd Axworthy)
• Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (by Haruki Murakami)
• Was für eine Welt wollen wir? (Richard von Weizsäcker)

Life and Stuff

• Kauderwelsch, Scots, die Sprache der Schotten (Manfred Malzahn)
• Kochen (fast) ohne Rezept (Hans Gerlach)
• Kochen! Das Gelbe von GU. 1295 Rezepte, die man wirklich braucht (Sebastian Dickhaut)
• Proofs from the Book (Martin Aigner)
• Self-Made Man (Norah Vincent)
• The Ancestor’s Tale (Richard Dawkins)
• The Good Shopping Guide: Your Guide to Shopping with a Clear Conscience (Ethical Consumer Research Association)
• The Return of the Naked Chef (Jamie Oliver)
• The Tao of Pooh & the Te of Piglet (Benjamin Hoff)

Business and Productivity

• Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out (Douglas Rushkoff)
• Getting Things Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (David Allen)
• Managing from Clarity (James L. Ritchie-Dunham)
• Never Check E-mail in the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work (Julie Morgenstern)
• On Bullshit (by Harry G. Frankfurt)
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
• The Dilbert Principle (Scott Adams)
• The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management (Peter F. Drucker)
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (by Malcolm Gladwell)
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (by James Surowiecki (Author))
• What Color Is Your Parachute?: A Practical Guide for Job-Hunters and Career Changers (Richard N. Bolles)
• Why Smart People Do Dumb Things (Mortimer R. Feinberg)

Guess it’s time for a visit to my local bookshop.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve recently found myself a smallish wheel in a big organisation.

As someone who tends to feel responsible for everything that crosses her path, I found it sometimes difficult to deal with structural problems, and wasn’t entirely content with the obvious solution of sticking to my terms of reference. Luckily I’m not the only person asking how to lead when you’re not in charge, and so I stumbled across a book of the same title by Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

Fisher and Sharp introduce the concept of lateral leadership and encourage everyone to take on the worthwhile task of improving the culture of working together.

Bored at work? You will find the task of choosing to help fresh and challenging. There is nothing in your job description that precludes you from doing so.

Sure, you’re not going to change culture by telling people to do so. Better is to ask people to contribute their own thinking, to offer your own thoughts and to do something constructive:

Modeling behavior will be more visible if it cuts against people’s expectations. A senior executive sets a powerful example by picking up coffee cups left at the end of a meeting.

No matter which sector, Fisher and Sharp propose five key elements of working together. All of these benefit from lateral leadership:

• a shared purpose: Where are we going?
• clear and structured thinking: What do we do?
• learning from experience: How can we do better?
• engaging everyone to his/her best: What can you contribute?
• giving and taking feedback: How do we work together?

Before embarking on lateral leadership, the book encourages readers to develop necessary personal skills first. As a second step, it sketches a vision of jointly using these skills. Concrete ideas for lateral leadership come last in each chapter, and consist of examples how to ASK for data, to OFFER direction or to DO something.

Highly recommended for everyone who needs a slight nudge to claim back motivation and responsibility at work.

[Amazon link]