My 'How to Save the World' actions list
Armed with the list of the 46 nominees
for best business book from S+B magazine, I recently made my annual
trek to the book mega-store to browse the nominated tomes (my twelve selections from a year ago, for 2005, are here).
S+B's lists cover the following categories: The Future, Economics,
Marketing, Media, Negotiation, Strategy, Governance, Management, The
Business of Defense, Fiction, and Leadership. I'd browsed most of the
nominees earlier in the year, and bought only one of them: Tim
Flannery's The Weather Makers,
which S+B has in its 'The Future' category. The few I hadn't already
seen didn't produce any more winners, so the entire exercise was pretty
depressing. In fact, it's quite a stretch to call The Weather Makers and the fiction nominees 'business books' at all. And where are the books on innovation, entrepreneurship, information and technology?
But
if 'fiction' and 'the future' qualify as business subjects, maybe I
don't have to end this article the way I had planned to (saying that 2006 produced not a single quality business book).
Rather than reading the hackneyed books by egomaniacal CEOs and their
sycophants on 'leadership' and 'management', those who want to
understand and succeed in business would be much better off trying some
of these books:
What's Really Going On in the World:
- The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery -- what global warming will wreak in the coming years
- Heat by George Monbiot -- how to stop global warming by reducing CO2 by 90%
- The Great Turning by David Korten -- principles for a Living Economy
- Waiting for the Macaws by Terry Glavin -- how we're precipitating the Sixth Great Extinction
- The Place You Love is Gone by Melissa Pierson -- how the loss of place, and our sense of it, impoverishes our culture
- Made to Break by Giles Slate -- planned obsolescence and the economic necessity for a throw-away culture
- On the Rampage
by Robert Weissman and Russell Mokhiber -- "71 trenchant essays on
corporate soulessness from two of America's leading reporters on
corporate misbehavior" (says Dennis Kucinich)
Entrepreneurship, and Living & Working Responsibly:
- To Be of Use by Dave Smith -- how and why to be an entrepreneur and of service to humanity at the same time
- The Small-Mart Revolution by Michael Shuman -- diagnosing the reasons entrepreneurial
businesses face an uneven playing field and an unfair competitive
disadvantage versus the multinational corporatist oligopolies, and what to do about it
- Values-Driven Business by Ben Cohen & Mal Warwick -- why putting principles before profit is not only right, but sustainable as well
- The Logic of Sufficiency
by Thomas Princen -- why an economy based on collective, networked
community-based self-management, optimizing the well-being of all life,
balancing all interests and appreciating natural constraints, and
producing and distributing only, but generously, what is needed, just
makes sense
Research, Information & Technology:
- Knowing Knowledge
by George Siemens -- How technology and complexity are changing the
nature of knowledge, connection and learning (my review coming
shortly); available for download free
- The Shangri-La Diet
by Seth Roberts -- not a diet book as much as a book on
self-experimentation as a fundamental mechanism for primary research,
and also, because it became a best-seller by stealth, also a great case
study in viral marketing
Market Intelligence: Understanding Human Behaviour:
- American Backlash
by Michael Adams -- how Americans (as consumers and citizens) are
diverging more and more from those living in other affluent nations
- Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert -- why you're less likely to be happy in the future than you think
So
there you have it. The 15 best 'business books' of 2006. Don't look for
them in the business section of your bookstore. In fact, don't waste
your time in the business section at all, at least until the publishers
stop recycling the nonsense of the last century and come clean about
what's really going on in the
corporate world. I'm not holding my breath. The emperor has no clothes,
yet the publishers are making a fortune selling emperors and
emperor-wannabes 'invisible cloth'. If you buy it, better hope you've
got nothing to hide.
In the meantime, the 15 books above are
worth an investment of your time and money. If you're thinking of
starting your own business, they'll give you knowledge that will put
you in good stead. And if you're still working for corporatists, they
might give you the courage to break free and become part of the
solution instead of part of the problem. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
