I am fortunate enough to have everything I need this holiday season, but there are always books that I want.  So for this post, I thought I would share what’s on my current work-related “to read” list, as well as my “wish list” for the first part of 2012.  Maybe my list will inspire you to check out some of the titles.  If you’ve read any of these yourself, I’d love to hear YOUR reviews.  Happy reading, everyone!

In my “To Read” pile, you’ll find…

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences.

“System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.  Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior.”

Linchpin:  Are You Indispensable?, by Seth Godin.

“There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.”

Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self, by David Brodzinsky, et al.

“Recent studies have shown that being adopted can affect many aspects of adoptees’ lives, from relationships with adoptive parents to bonds with their own children. Using their combined total of 55 years experience in clinical and research work with adoptees and their families, the authors use the voices of adoptees themselves to trace how adoption is experienced over a lifetime.”

 

And some of the books on my list for Santa are…

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time:  What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You, by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten.

“This collection is more than just a list. Covert and Sattersten highlight important takeaways and put each book in context. Their insights can help anyone cut through the clutter and discover the business books that are truly worth their time and money.”

Too Big to Know:  Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room, by David Weinberger.

“This groundbreaking book shakes the foundations of our concept of knowledge—from the role of facts to the value of books and the authority of experts—providing a compelling vision of the future of knowledge in a connected world.”

Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, by William C. Taylor.

“Practically Radical goes deep inside twenty-five for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations to find out how they’ve made remarkable strides in tough circumstances. They include IBM, Zappos, Swatch, the Girl Scouts, Interpol, big-city hospitals, fast-growing banks, and high-flying airlines.”

How Remarkable Women Lead:  The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life, by Joanna Barsh and Susie Cranston.

“Based on five years of proprietary research, How Remarkable Women Lead speaks to you as no other book has, with its hopeful outlook and unique ideas about success. It’s the new “right stuff” of leadership, raising provocative issues such as whether feminine leadership traits (for women and men) are better suited for our fast-changing, hyper-competitive, and increasingly complex world.”

Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

“Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why [business] plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Those are all just excuses.”

The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, by the hitRECord collaborative and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

“To create The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, [the actor] known within the hitRECord community as RegularJOE—directed thousands of collaborators to tell tiny stories through words and art. With the help of the entire creative collective, Gordon-Levitt culled, edited and curated over 8,500 contributions into this finely tuned collection of original art from 67 contributors.”

The Language Instinct:  How the Mind Creates Language, by Steven Pinker.

“In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution.”

Demand:  Creating What People Love before They Know They Want It, by Adrian J. Slywotzky with Karl Weber.

“In Demand, Adrian Slywotzky provides a radically new way to think about demand, with a big idea and a host of practical applications—not just for people in business but also for social activists, government leaders, non-profit managers, and other would-be innovators. To succeed in their various missions, all these groups need to master such ground-breaking concepts as the hassle map (and the secrets of fixing it); the curse of the incomplete product (and how to avoid it); why ‘very good’ does not equal ‘magnetic’; how what you don’t see can make or break a product; the art of transforming fence sitters into customers; why there’s no such thing as an average customer; and why real demand comes from a 45-degree angle of improvement (rather than the five degrees most organizations manage).”