Our November book picks are informative, interesting, and entertaining—great for holiday gift-giving. And to close out the year, we also bring you TFP’s most popular 2017 book picks, on topics ranging from the rise of additive technology and the science of popularity to the implications of a digital future and what it will take to get ahead in this transformed environment.
November Book Picks: Future of Technology, Success Stories, Connecting with Customers, Management Wisdom, and New Trends
WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us by Tim O’Reilly
This “combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action” provides insight into the role that emerging technologies will play in the future of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy.
“O’Reilly shares the techniques he’s used at O’Reilly Media to make sense of and predict past innovation waves and applies those same techniques to provide a framework for thinking about how today’s world-spanning platforms and networks, on-demand services, and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole. He provides tools for understanding how all the parts of modern digital businesses work together to create marketplace advantage and customer value, and why ultimately, they cannot succeed unless their ecosystem succeeds along with them.”
The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway
Discover the inner workings and strategies of “the Four”—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—and get insight into just how powerful and successful they are. Use the lessons of their ascent in your own business or career.
“Instead of buying the myths these companies broadcast, Galloway asks fundamental questions. How did the Four infiltrate our lives so completely that they’re almost impossible to avoid (or boycott)? Why does the stock market forgive them for sins that would destroy other firms? And as they race to become the world’s first trillion-dollar company, can anyone challenge them? ”
Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller
Learn the process that will help your business connect with customers and stay competitive. See how simplifying brand messaging and creating effective messaging for websites, brochures, and social media get the responses from customers that lead to success.
“New York Times bestselling author Donald Miller uses the seven universal elements of powerful stories to teach readers how to dramatically improve how they connect with customers and grow their businesses.”
HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2018: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review Paperback by Harvard Business Review
Get inspired with this collection of Harvard Business Review articles from the past year. Read “a year’s worth of management wisdom, all in one place,” and get insights and ideas that will propel your business. Customer loyalty, dealing with change, empowering employees, understanding blockchain, accelerating research and development, and more are discussed.
“With authors from Michael E. Porter to Daniel Kahneman and company examples from P&G to Adobe, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations to your fingertips.”
Outside Insight: Navigating a World Drowning in Data by Jorn Lyseggen
Learn how external data can help businesses take advantage of opportunities and gain industry-wide insight, and use the information to leave their competition behind. Get practical examples of how data-driven decisions have helped create success stories for many companies and individuals.
“The world today is drowning in data. There is a treasure trove of valuable and underutilized insights that can be gleaned from information companies and people leave behind on the Internet—our ‘digital breadcrumbs’—from job postings, to online news, social media, online ad spend, and more.”
Most Popular TFP Book Picks in 2017
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by
Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction: We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today’s products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist. By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, the author explains how we can harness addictive products for the good—to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play—and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children.
Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by
Even the most brilliant ideas wither in obscurity if they fail to connect with the right network, and the consumers that matter most aren’t the early adopters, but rather their friends, followers, and imitators—the audience of your audience. In his groundbreaking investigation, Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson uncovers the hidden psychology of why we like what we like and reveals the economics of cultural markets that invisibly shape our lives. Shattering the sentimental myths of hit-making that dominate pop culture and business, Thompson shows quality is insufficient for success, nobody has “good taste,” and some of the most popular products in history were one bad break away from utter failure. Every business, every artist, every person looking to promote themselves and their work wants to know what makes some works so successful while others disappear. Hit Makers is a magical mystery tour through the last century of pop culture blockbusters and the most valuable currency of the 21st century—people’s attention.
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by
Feeling attention challenged? Even assaulted? American business depends on it. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising enticements, branding, sponsored social media, and other efforts to harvest our attention, contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century’s growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to the explosion of the mobile web; from AOL and the invention of email to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to celebrity power brands like Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, and Donald Trump, the basic business model of “attention merchants” has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. As Wu describes, attention merchants are always growing new heads, even as their means of getting inside our heads are changing our very nature—cognitive, social, political, and otherwise—in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.
Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson
Machine, Platform, Crowd offers the reader essential information regarding the current state of the digital world, the elements, such as populist ideas, that have the greatest effects on business, and the tools companies need to succeed.
“MIT’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd. In all three cases, the balance now favors the second element of the pair, with massive implications for how we run our companies and live our lives.”
Non-Obvious 2017 Edition: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict the Future by
The winner of the 2017 Axiom Business Silver Medal in Business Theory, the 2017 edition of this Wall Street Journal bestseller features 15 new trends and updated ratings of over 60 previously predicted trends. For the past 7 years, marketing expert and Georgetown University professor Rohit Bhargava has curated his best-selling list of non-obvious trends by asking the questions that most trend predictors miss. It’s why his insights on future trends and the art of curating trends have been utilized by dozens of the biggest brands and organizations in the world, like Intel, Under Armour, and World Bank. In this all-new seventh edition, discover what more than a million readers already have: how to use the power of non-obvious thinking to grow your business and make a bigger impact in the world.
Source: Quotes pulled from Amazon book descriptions
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Posted by: Monica Murphy
