Difference between revisions of "Ray King's Book Picks"

back to Ray King's page

Web / Tech

• Crush It - Gary Vaynerchuk
• Inbound Marketing - Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah
• What would Google do? - Jeff Jarvis
• The Four Hour Work Week - Tim Ferriss
• Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
• SuperCrunchers - Ian Ayers
• Designing for the social web - Joshua Porter
• Elements of User Experience - Jesse James Garrett
• Smartmobs book by Howard Reingold
• Groundswell, Charlene Li
• The Search - John Battelle
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Seth Godin
  • Permission Marketing
  • IdeaVirus
  • Purple Cow
  • Tribes
• The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki
• Emergence - Stephen Johnson
• Ruling the Root - Milton Mueller

How the Mind Works

• Linchpin - Seth Godin
• Drive - Daniel Pink
• The Three Laws of Performance - Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan
• Switch - Dan and Chip Heath
• Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins (amazing book)
• Mind Wide Open - Steve Johnson
• Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
• Emotional Intelligence - Dan Goleman

Operational Excellence

• Who - Geoff Smart and Randy Street
• Who's got your back - Keith Ferrazzi
• Getting Things Done - David Allen
• Mastering the Rockefeller Habits - Verne Harnish (The methods we use at AboutUs)
• Jim Collins
  • Built to Last
  • Good to Great - (a must read)
• Inside Advantage - Robert Bloom
• Leadership and Self Deception - The Arbinger Institute
• Pat Lencioni (short fable style books)
  • Getting Naked (for service folks)
  • 5 Temptations of a CEO
  • Death by Meeting
  • 5 Dysfunctions of a team (Best of the group)

Economics

• Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
• The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

Politics

• The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama

Investigative Reporting

• Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson (Northern Pakistan)
• Jon Krakauer books:
  • Into Thin Air (Mt. Everest)
  • Under the Banner of Heaven (Mormon Fundamentalism)
  • Into the Wild (Alaska)
• The New New Thing - Michael Lewis
• Liars Poker - Michael Lewis

Biographical

• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford
• The Snowball - Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, Alice Schroeder
• The Motorcycle Diaries - Che Guavara
• Lessons: An Autobiography - An Wang (Wang Laboratories)
• The Ultimate Entrepreneur - Ken Olsen (DEC)
• The Winner Within - Pat Riley (Lakers, Knicks)

About Specific Businesses

• Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove (Intel)
• Maverick - Ricardo Semler (Semco)
• Odyssey - John Scully (Apple)
• Faster Company - Patrick Kelly (Physician Sales & Service)
• Business at the Speed of Thought - Bill Gates (Microsoft)
• The Road Ahead - Bill Gates (Microsoft)

Happiness

• Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh (Zappos guy)
• The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt (super book)
• Unleashing the Soul of Money - Lynne Twist

Self Help

• The Power of Now - Eckhard Towle

Fiction

• Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
• The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
• A Case of Exploding Mangoes - Mohammed Hanif
• In other rooms other wonders - Daniyal Mueenuddin (Great perspective on Pakistan)
• Down and out in the Magic Kingdom - Cory Doctorow
• Curious incident of the dog in the nighttime
• Kite Runner
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Fountainhead
• Dan Brown Books (ok I'll admit it)
  • The Lost Symbol
  • DaVinci Code (Best in my opinion)
  • Angels and Demons
  • Digital Fortress
  • Deception Point
• Gates of Fire - Steven Pressfield

Recommended to me

• Everything's an offer - Robert Poynton
• Obed's picks:
  • The god of small things, Arundhuti Roy
  • Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
  • The Dancing Girls of Lahore, Louise Brown
  • The Sandman Comics, Neil Gaiman
• Asad's picks:
  • Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe