When was the last time someone handed you a reading list? College? Grad school?
At a small gathering held recently to mark the 20th anniversary of the business magazine Fast Company, Tom Peters, the management author and provocateur, circulated the latest iteration of his recommended reading list. It’s a fantastic collection of 52 books, predominantly from the past five years, that Tom considers essential reads. They cover everything from big data to robotics to gamification to loyalty to neurotechnology. I wanted to share them with you here. Tom singled out a few titles as extra-emphatic recommendations; those are marked with an asterisk.
- Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas — Natasha Dow Schüll
- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World — Christopher Steiner
- Big Data — Victor Mayer-Schönberger & Kenneth Cukier
- The Circle — Dave Eggers
- Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business — John Mackey
- Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World — Tony Wagner
- Creation: How Science is Reinventing Life Itself — Adam Rutherford
- Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It — Richard A. Clarke
- Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down — Vineet Nayar
- Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter — Steven Johnson
- Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter — Tom Bissell
- Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication — Neil Gershenfeld
- Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation is Shaping the World — David Burstein
- The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You — Eli Pariser
- Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Change in Life and in the Markets — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business — Kevin Werbach
- The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation and What It Means for You — Michael Malone
- The Gamification Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game Mechanics to Crush the Competition — Gabe Zicherman
- How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed — Ray Kurzweil
- Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing Our World — George Gilder
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses — Eric Ries
- Lords of Strategy: The Secret History of the New Corporate World — Walter Kiechel
- Loyalty 3.0: How Big Data and Gamification are Revolutionizing Customer and Employee Engagement — Rajat Paharia
- Makers: The New Industrial Revolution — Chris Anderson
- Models Behaving Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster on Wall Street and in Life — Emanuel Derman
- Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline…and the Growth of a New Economy — Daniel Gross
- Nanotechnology for Dummies — Earl Boysen
- Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era — Henry Chesbrough
- The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office — Ray Fisman
- The Power of Co-Creation: Build it With Them to Boost Growth, Productivity, and Profits — Venkat Ramaswamy
- Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die — Eric Siegel
- Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now — Douglas Rushkoff
- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking — Susan Cain
- * Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy — Eric Brynjolfsson
- Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World — Jane McGonigal
- Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection — Ethan Zuckerman
- Robot Futures — Ellah Reza Bourbakhsh
- The Rise of the Creative Class — Richard Florida
- * The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public — Lynn Stout
- The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t — Nate Silver
- The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Social Business By Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies for the Connected Company — Dion Hinchcliffe
- The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself and Transform Your Career — Reid Hoffman
- Taming the Big Data Tidal Wave: Finding Opportunities in Huge Data Streams with Advanced Analytics — Bill Franks
- * Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
- To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism — Evgeny Morozov
- Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet — Andrew Blum
- Wait: The Art and Science of Delay — Frank Partnoy
- What You Can Change…And What You Can’t: The Complete Guide to Successful Self Improvement — Martin Seligman
- Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century — P.W. Singer
- You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto — Jaron Lanier
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
— Christopher Steiner
— Victor Mayer-Schönberger & Kenneth Cukier
