Books, Books, and More ... Books

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson has been a delightful read so far. Bryson walks the reader through engaging tales of how we (all of us human beings) came to know what we know about the world around us. It's amazing to me how much I missed along the way, and I consider myself fairly learned and well read. I paid attention in class, but class was a long time ago. And much has been added to the body of knowledge since I last attended class. I've been reading this on the treadmill at the health club and I easily pass an hour without looking up...I recommend it highly, not only to review much of what you may already know, but also to gain new insights into how the world around you works and why things are the way they are. This kind of comprehensive survey over everything helps, at least it does for me, to put things into context and make better sense of the world. A framework is vital if only to be able to stack new knowledge and insights into their proper context (like say, for instance, regarding RF communication, trends in broadband and popular uses of technology, like we try to do on this website).

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier, a science writer by trade who takes on the task of putting together the Basics that all should know in order to be scientifically literate. Science Illiteracy is a challenge for our nation, it seems, as the masses blissfully grow less and less aware of more and more, even as the experts learn more and more and in the process realize they know less and less. Phewww! Nevertheless, this book is a great one to have on the shelf; having read through it, you will then have a handy reference because there's no way to keep all of this knowledge at the tip of your tongue. Highly recommended.

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore A modern business classic, considered must-read in tech circles, this book makes what many may consider an obvious point: companies can start with a bang and gain great acceptance among "early adopters," but they must change the way they approach the market if they are going to duplicate that early success with the broader market, which will approach their product or service differently. This amounts to a "chasm" between Stage One and Stage Two, which must be crossed in order to have sustained growth and success. Here's the best review from Amazon.

Moore's primary point in this book is that the early adopters of a technology are not necessarily the same as the mainstream market. Moore points out that early adapters often buy things because they're cool, not for practical reasons. Early adapters deal with pain in the form of bad interfaces, minimal network effects. etc. Following this informal observation, Moore divides the population into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is his "Technology Adoption Life Cycle", of which the "underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that market" (p. 15). He illustrates this with a bell curve with a horizontal axis corresponding to time of adoption. There's no explanation for why a Bell curve; I'm guessing it just looks pretty in PowerPoint. Moore continues with "this process can be thought of as a continuum with definite stages, each associated with a definable group" (p. 15), although actual definitions are notable by their absence. So Moore advises us that marketing to the two groups might have to be different. Complex? No. Obvious? Perhaps. In any case, this observation is followed with 185 pages of examples and pep talks which I found perfectly readable, but without much additional content.

You can get much more insight about sales and marekting (as well as finance and logistics) about disruptive technologies from Clayton Christensen's excellent "The Innovator's Dilemma". You can learn more about marketing segmentation and network effects from Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules". I might be biased as both a techie and a recovering academic, but I liked the more heavily researched, serious case-study orientation as well as the precise, restrained, academic tone of these two books from business professors. On the other hand, Moore's book gives you an excellent feel for the seat of the pants consulting and hype side of the business world, which itself is a useful education.

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom makes the case for Leaderless Organizations. An organization without a leader? Is that a dream come true, or a nightmare? In this analysis, the "spider" represents the traditional, rigid hierarchy organization, with well-defined leadership roles and responsibilities - think Army or ATT, but, crush a spider's head, and it dies. In contrast, cut a starfish in half, and you'll end up with two. The "starfish" in this analogy represents the more organic, self-controlled, self-directed organization of the twenty-first century, which emerges in response to a shared set of needs and then deals with issues and tasks from the bottom up - MoveOn.org, for instance. Such a self-organizing organization was only a concept before we had a tool like the Internet to help such a movement along, and now we all "get" MySpace, FaceBook, and a growing number of us, LinkedIn.

From a review in Fast Company Reading List, "it sounds like the opening line to a bad joke: What do the Apache Indians, Craigslist, Skype, and Al Qaeda have in common? They're all decentralized organizations that have bedeviled the established hierarchy hell-bent on crushing them. The Starfish and the Spider is about the open-source revolution, a trend that the authors demonstrate is simultaneously dismantling many established industries while harnessing the creativity of the masses to generate new ones. Open source has spread far beyond its recent successes with file sharing and software. You can now find cooperatively developed art, literature, even religion."

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. Collaboration and the changes it brings is well documented in this book, which highlights Wiki software and the new potential it brings for getting work done. Ask the man- or woman-on-the-street if they know what a wiki is, and they are still likely to respond "Huh?" - Wikis remain the territory of the technogeek, in large part - but ask them if they've been out on Wikipedia and they are quite likely to nod and then share their opinion with you about something they read. Iin my opinion, Wikipedia is better suited to keeping pace with the modern world, because of it's highly flexible and adaptive basis in Wiki technology, drawing from millions of opinions on millions of subjects, instead of hundreds or thousands. Some input on Wikipedia articles is from experts, but much is simply persistent and self-correcting data input, that over time grows better with each iteration. Most often, the listings prove good enough for my purposes, and it's rarely my only source, at any rate. It's fascinating to contemplate how efficient such mass collaboration is, and this book captures that in spades. This collaboration model goes way beyond an on-line encyclopedia, however.

According to the Wikinomics book website, "billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. And when these masses of people collaborate they can collectively advance the arts, culture, science, education, government, and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways. Companies that engage with these exploding Web-enabled communities are already discovering the true dividends of collective capability and genius. To succeed, it will not be sufficient to simply intensify existing management strategies. Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call wikinomics. This is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject. Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally."

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger shows that the way we deal with information has transformed with a maturing Internet. Search Engines mean that we no longer have to have "a place for everything and everything in its place," at least when it comes to the digital "everythings" in our lives. We can leave them in a "big, messy pile," and when everything is tagged with descriptors, we just need a good search engine and a knack for describing our search problem to find what twe are looking for - we don't need to remember where we filed the item. According to a review on Boing Boing, we've traditionally divided the world into categories, topics, and hierarchies because physical objects need to be in one place or another (they can't be in all the places they might belong). But computers and the Internet turn this approach on its head: because a computer can "put things" in as many categories as they need to be in, at little to no cost, and because individuals can classify knowledge, tasks, and objects idiosyncraticall with "tags," the hierarchy has become an outdated mode to organize infomaation.

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life by Richard Florida. This NY Times Bestseller from 2002 has become what may be called a 21st Century Economic Development bible. If you are involved in city government at the leadership level, or in an Economic Development role, even at the staff level, this is recommended reading. Florida, a PhD in Regional Economic Development, formerly of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and now at George Mason University outside our nation's capital of Washington, D.C., has demonstrated Pioneer Spirit and Big Thinking by stepping out to create a new vocabulary for a change in society. Often those who get to name something do quite well, and that seems to be Florida's path.

What Florida gave a name to is a shift in working behavior patterns, and the advent of a new class of workers with new ideas about working and living. These young knowledgable workers are representatives of what Florida labels the "Creative Class" a new demographic category. Worklife has evolved over the past 125 years, changing society as the nature of work has changed. Agriculture was the dominant category, but the Industrial Revolution brought more and more workers into the city in search of preferable Industrial jobs, which became the dominant category for much of the 20th Century. But by the second half of that century we began to see the rise of the Service Sector, where workers provided services to society. Florida notes that more and more, there are new Creatives, who do not fit in the previous three categories, and who represent a sea change in their approach to working and living.

They make a living using their brains, and many are highly paid. They choose a place to live first, and a job second. They don't go to job interviews and then go to where their new employer sends them. They identify an area first, and those areas chosen seem to score high on what Florida calls the Three Ts: Talent, Technology, and Tolerance.

First, workers seek a high concentration of talented workers like themselves, reasoning that there will be plentiful jobs in the area, and acknowledging that the average tenure for their types of jobs tends to be measured in a few years rather than in decades like their parents generation. They want to know that they will have choices when its time to move on, so they won't have to move away. Second, workers seek a concentration of technology, the engine of economic growth in this new economy and an employer of choice for Creatives. Third, they seek an Open Society characterized by tolerance for diversity. Florida cites the Bohemia Index and the Gay Index, two ways to measure and compare cities and rank them according to diversity and tolerance. These types who live alternative lifestyles tend to congregate in cities that are open and accepting of diversity, and it's no coincidence that these same cities attract a large proportion of the Creative Class workers.

From my perspective at MetroNetIQ, the bottom line lesson for those interested in Metropolitan Broadband is that there is a connection here between having a citywide wireless network and fitting in with these cities, like Austin (my hometown is highlighted throughout this book, which is fun), San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle. In addition to ranking high on Florida's Creative Class criteria, all of these cties successfully attract creative talent in droves AND are out in front in terms of ensuring ubiquitous and affordable broadband access, both wired and wireless.

Cities and the Creative Class by Richard Florida. Florida came out with this book as a follow up to his widely succesful first effort, providing a raft of statistical analysis to back up his provocative text from The Rise of the Creative Class. I read this one too, but at some point, I figured it was too much detail for an amateur like myself, and my interest began to wane. I recommend this book for your bookshelf, but it really is more of a reference book than a book to cozy up by the fire with.

The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent by Richard Florida. I haven't read this one yet, published in April 2005, so this review is conjecture at this point. If Florida has done his homework and he is one thorough Subject Matter Expert, so I expect he has, then he has expanded the scope of his work to provide global relevance. I'm a firm believer that when it comes to cities and urban life, we are much more alike than we are different, so I'm hopeful that this will be a valuable addition. I'll get it and read it and share my thoughts in the near term.

The Forgotten Half of Change : Achieving Greater Creativity through Changes in Perception by Luc de Brabandere. A partner in the Boston Consulting Group and a leading author on business innovation in Europe, Luc de Brabandere makes the argument in The Other Half of Change that change comes in two parts: the actual, physical change, which requires a following change in perception (a change in the way we see things), in order for the actual change to become permanent. To be aware of the potential for change, de Brabandere suggests that we be on the lookout for five leading indicators of change, early warning signs if you will. He highlights these five "weak signals that indicate a mismatch between our assumptions and the real world." 1) Minor defects that signal disruptions to the status quo; 2) Dissonance, a warning of failure ahead; 3) Serendipity, when things seem to happen as if they were magic, as if they were planned ahead by some unseeing force; 4) Paradox - my favorite paradox to emphasize the change we're in is the rapid replacement of the hundreds-year old instituion Encyclopedia Britannica, the Icon of the Age of Reason, by Microsoft's Encarta, symbolizing the maturity of the Digital Era, only to be supplanted by Wikipedia a few years later - hello, Internet, World Wide Web, and the Network Era; and finally, 5) Boredom, where a new concept becomes commonplace (remember all the fuss about eCommerce just a few years ago, back when Business 2.0 was 300 pages long?). This book is so loaded with good stuff that i can't begin to cover it in this short space. Read it to get a new perception on change, and to open up your mind.

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Editor's Note: these reviews are borrowed from Amazon.com. Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds.

In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted the existence of some people who would be born to poverty and hardship. Elsewhere, by analyzing data gathered from inner-city Chicago drug-dealing gangs, Levitt outlines a corporate structure much like McDonald's, where the top bosses make great money while scores of underlings make something below minimum wage. And in a section that may alarm or relieve worried parents, Levitt argues that parenting methods don't really matter much and that a backyard swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun. These enlightening chapters are separated by effusive passages from Dubner's 2003 profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, which led to the book being written. In a book filled with bold logic, such back-patting veers Freakonomics, however briefly, away from what Levitt actually has to say. Although maybe there's a good economic reason for that too, and we're just not getting it yet. --John Moe

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitt's search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior. There isn't really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it's wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns. While some chapters might seem frivolous, others touch on more serious issues, including a detailed look at Levitt's controversial linkage between the legalization of abortion and a reduced crime rate two decades later. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective. Levitt has a knack for making that principle relevant to our daily lives, which could make this book a hit. Malcolm Gladwell blurbs that Levitt "has the most interesting mind in America," an invitation Gladwell's own substantial fan base will find hard to resist. 50-city radio campaign. (May 1)

Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World by Eamon Kelly

"Some of our most basic assumptions about the rules of the global economic game will increasingly come under attack in the coming decade." Eamon Kelly

The world has always been uncertain. But, says Eamonn Kelly, not like this. This book is published by the Wharton Business School Press, and Kelly is the founder of the Global Business Network, an interesting array of "big thinkers who take the long view" and use scenario planning to help hundreds of companies and governments manage the future. So, expectations are high for this book.

I was interested enough to pick it up in an airport book store - I'm a sucker for a good book when I'm traveling, and i was pleasantly surprised to find this one a well-written and intriguing work about what lays ahead in the next decade. Lots of disruption and uncertainty, if you buy this analysis.

This is a book for deep thinkers. Technological, financial, social, economic, cultural, and political systems - what makes up our world - are all moving faster and faster, towards greater complexity and interdependence, according to Kelly. Paradox rears it head here - paradox is a common element of our modern world. I wrote about paradox yesterday, where I explained that what we think we know is not necessarily true, and only by practicing an ever vigilant awareness and education program can we stay in the know.

Kelly explains that we humans seek patterns, but our simplifications of complex issues obscure more than they clarify, and our "either/or" mindsets don't really fit well in today's world. Foundational change is underway: Kelly demonstrates that deep, fundamental dynamics may be unraveling much of what we've taken for granted since the Enlightenment dawned some 400 years ago.

From the Amazon book review: Some of Kelly's dynamic tensions are less familiar, but also vitally important. For example, while value will continue to migrate towards the intangible - services, experiences, relationships - improving physical infrastructure will take on ever-greater urgency. The world is growing more transparent, thanks to a deepening web of computers, networks, sensors, and surveillance systems. However, "conspiracy theories and falsehoods will travel the world instantaneously," and the technologies of transparency will also promote more sophisticated theft and fraud.

Down at "street level," Kelly uncovers some surprising innovations in local governance. In British Columbia, 160 randomly selected citizens have recommended important changes in the province's electoral processes. In Zeguo, China, the local Communist Party secretary offered detailed briefings about several proposed municipal projects to 257 citizens, then polled them on which projects should proceed. In Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico, enlightened local governments are experimenting with new ways to involve citizens year-round, not just on election day.

If you choose to be more aware, this is a book that would be good to have on your bookshelf. I'd like to read it again in two years, five years, and ten years, and see how things have unfolded. I know that ten years ago, I would not have imagined this future that is our present today.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman Every five years or so, there comes a book that you just want to tell everyone to go get and read, so you can talk about it. There comes a book that has such a compelling story line that the way you view things will be forever changed. SO GO GET THIS BOOK (AND READ IT)! The rest of these books are very compelling, but this book is at the top of the stack for a reason - it's timely and very signficant. Trust me.

Those are pretty strong words, but then, this is a pretty strong set of ideas. NY Times Foreign Affairs Editorial writer Tom Friedman picks up on the theme he began five years ago with his bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which described the globalization of the world since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. In this fascinating book, Friedman describes his epiphany regarding the dramatic changes to the world economy since he wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree in 1999.

I'll try to describe in a few words what took Friedman over 400 pages: The Internet bubble in the late 1990s led to a dramatic build out of telecom networks, which resulted in tremendous amounts of fiber being laid to connect the world, and the companies that built the networks promptly went bust and the lines were purchased out of bankruptcy at pennies on the dollar, resulting in nearly free capacity to connect the world's countries and cities. At the same time, the highly trained and skilled workers in India, China, and Eastern Europe/Russia, all countries big on science and math, began to benefit from more liberal economic policies, so the best and brightest could now stay at home, rather than wait for visas to travel to the US, long the promised land for smart energetic young workers the world around.

Y2K and a maturing technology landscape led coporations to outsource work to this highly qualified set of workers, and now that trend is maturing. No longer do cities and individuals in the US compete primarily within their state, region, nation, or even hemisphere. The global economy effectively doubled in size with the addition of the labor forces in these three regions, and those smart, aggressive workers in India, China, and elsewhere are wearing track shoes. They want your job, for half your wage.

This book is a MUST READ for city planners because metropolitan wireless networks enable and accelerate the technologies that will enable cities worldwide to compete on this new playing field. One executive interviewed says that these changes may well prove as significant to the world as the invention of the printing press. The reason is that never before has so much information been so readily available to so many people. Get the book, read it, and let's talk!

Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World by Hugh Hewitt Hewitt promised to keep the book short enough to read on a single trip - true to his word, I was able to knock this book out on my flight back from Los Angeles. In this recently published work, Hewitt takes you into the world of blogs and opens up possibilities for anyone who ever had an opinion and needed to find someone to listen to them. This is the third book that I've read recently that draws comparisons between events of the 17th Century Reformation and Guttenberg's movable type printing press and our 21st Century information revolution. Hewitt works it into his title.

In essence, the invention of the printing press allowed Luther's ideas to be widely disseminated, leading to the emancipation of the people from the dominance of the Roman Catholic church. New technology opened up the world for cultural change. Similarly, Hewitt shows how personal blogging software frees readers from reliance on traditional media and editors, who process information for the reading public and choose what we call news. Easy-to-use blog software provides aspiring writers and those with an opinion with a tool so that anyone can publish. Bloggers just have to be good enough to draw an audience - there is nobody stopping them from publishing, or telling them what to write. Increasingly, these blogs are being viewed as more trustworthy than Mainstream Media, according to Hewitt.

Blogs and communities go hand in hand. My vision is for our budding metropolitan wireless community to develop around UnwireMyCity.com. I encourage you to get this book and start a blog to help you manage your wireless effort, to get your whole community involved in the effort, and to let others share in and contribute to your experience. And, to link your blog to mine. It really is too easy and too cheap not to. Come on in, the water's fine!

I recommend, ironically, Movable Type software (and the Movable Type 3.0 Bible Desktop Edition) to get you started down the blogging path. What a deal - find your inner blogger and help to change the world, all with one website!

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi This book is a wonderful, very readable story about the new science of Networks. Before the Internet, Barabasi explains, the science of networks was a sleepy academic backwater. With the Internet, scientists found a tool to study how networks work, and their discoveries are breathtaking. Networks are the best means to organize complexity, and could there be a better word than "complex" to describe our lives today? From the role of hubs, to the Power Curve distribution, to emergence, Barabasi shows how much alike networks are: from the network of the human body to social networks, cities, railroads, airports, the Internet, it becomes clear the impact that networks have on the way we live.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson This book made a lasting impression on me. Johnson shows how working from the bottom up, with a few simple rules, individuals can create new, complex things that seemingly "emerge" from out of nowhere. How, for instance, do neighborhoods form when they are not planned? What will be the impact of all the Hot Spots, Hot Zones, Metropolitan Networks, and coming WiMax networks, cellular networks, DSL networks, and Cable networks when they all start working together? To understand the complex nature of change in our world, this is a great book!

The City : A Global History by Joel Kotkin This recently published book gives great perspective on the city and its impact on our lives. The city, Kotkin says, is one of man's greatest inventions because it concentrated the learning of people into a dense area and allowed that knowledge to pass down through generations. Civilization really took off when cities became connected, first by ships (Phoenicia), then roads (Rome), then canals, then railroads, then telecommunications. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell This term has entered the popular vernacular - the tipping point is the point when a trend goes mainstream. That may be where we are getting to in the near term with municipal networks. This book will help you to understand popular behavior and give you a vocabulary for some things you already know.

The Wisdom of the Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki Believe it or not, studies show that a roomful of average people, with adequate information, will arrive at better decisions than a handful of experts. This is a compelling study that will change the way you look at things. When the Internet and modern communications technology empower those crowds with the information they need to be smarter than the experts, you can see how much of the change we envision is starting to go on Autopilot. Hold on to your hat!

Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive by Making Innovation a Way of Life by Gary Hamel With all the new tools that buyers have, companies are left with nothing but being good at innovation to provide them with competitive advantage. As technology and the Internet increasingly dominate our economy, it is innovation that becomes our watchword. Hamel argues that organizations, public or private, must make innovation a core competency if they are to have a hope for success.

The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen does a great job of explaining how innovations (and innovators) have to struggle to gain support and mindshare in large organizations. He looks at well-run, etablished companies and examines how they are able to counter the threat from new companies, which enter the market on the low end with lower quality, cheaper products and in time improve the products and take greater market share. Either private or public sector management will benefit from the insights offered herein, as innovation becomes an ever greater presence in our lives.

New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World by Kevin Kelly In Kelly's own words: "Communication is the foundation of society, of our culture, of our humanity, of our own individual identity, and of all economic systems. This is why networks are such a big deal. Communication is so close to culture and society itself that the effects of technologizing it are beyond the scale of a mere industrial-sector cycle. Communication, and its ally computers, is a special case in economic history. Not because it happens to be the fashionable leading business sector of our day, but because its cultural, technological, and conceptual impacts reverberate at the root of our lives." Read this book.

Creating Value in the Network Economy by Don Tapscott This compendium of Harvard Business Review articles from 1999 is a great view of how the impact of the Internet was interpreted during the boom. Prescient in their analyses, I believe many of these guys got it right.

Leading Change by John P. Kotter With change becoming one of the few constants in our lives, this book written at the dawn of the Internet (1995) offers a practical approach to an organized means of leading, not managing, change. Kotter presents an eight-stage process of change with highly useful examples that show how to go about implementing it.

The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace by Thomas Petzinger With intriguing stories of the people behind innovative companies, this book details the personal stories in the new economy. Petzinger sees workers who are entrepreneurial, not corporate; stressing adaptation rather than bureaucratic planning, "teamwork" and "empowerment" rather than rigid command-and-control structures.

The History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren is a good read to put into context what may be a new revolution in the world's capabilities regarding knowledge and awareness, brought on by technological convergence. Van Doren, the same individual who was caught up in the Quiz Show scandal of the 1950s, came out with this book in 1991, after spending the previous twenty years editing the Encyclopedia Britannica. We've certainly come a long way in our time here on earth, and Van Doren tells a good story of how humans got to be so darn smart.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful : Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen Covey I find myself quoting from this book so often, I thought I better add it to the list. Published in 1990, this book has sold over 10 million copies and there's a good reason for that. It is well written, and Covey has assembled a system and anthology of the world's greatest personal success lessons, from the Bible to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Covey has woven an easy-to-remember set of habits that will make you more effective at whatever it is you choose to do. To become effective, Covey argues, you must first have a Paradigm Shift to see things differently, and then incorporate these habits into your daily life.

For the record, here are the habits with the associated skills in parentheses: A. Personal Independence 1. Be Proactive. (initiative) 2. Begin with the End in Mind. (leadership) 3. First Things First (Management) B. Social Interdependence (4. Seek First to Understand, and Then to be Understood (listening) 5. Go For Win Win Solutions (cooperation) 6. Synergize (creativity) and C. Regeneration 7. Sharpen the Saw (health and balance).

I read this book in the early 90s, read it again, outlined it, and then gave seminars on it at my job. That internalization of these concepts has made a huge difference in my effectiveness, both in my business life and my personal life. This book is worth the time.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie If there is a better, more timeless set of principles on human relationships, please let me know. This book, written in 1937, has sold 15 million copies. I first read it in 1977, when I was a young man going door-to-door selling books in Appalachia, a life-changing experience for me in what is now a dying profession. The principles, such as "People love to hear the sound of their own name" ring true today. This book will make you think twice about how you relate to others, and your friends willl thank you for taking the time. And you will have more of those. Friends, I mean. And what's wrong with that? Spending a few bucks or so for this paperback will be the best few bucks you have spent in a long while.