Over a year ago, I started doing business book reviews for our newsletter. One of the great things about doing a book review is that it forces me to actually read something fairly consistently each month. It has been fun looking at the books in retrospect and writing something about them and what they mean personally to me. These book reviews are hardly the scathing tough-minded review one might find in The New Yorker magazine, New York Times or some other literary publication. Instead, these reviews are meant to provide life to an otherwise inanimate object. I hope I achieved that with some measure of success.  I have to admit that I didn’t do all the reviews. My thanks go out to staff member Ken Springer for reviewing Freakonomics and Harlan Geiser, board member, for reviewing The Great Game of Business.

I have many books already in mind to review next year. I am looking for books on leadership and new thoughts about business, leadership, how people use their minds, etc. You won’t see me reviewing political books or books about very divisive topics facing our world today. I have my opinions, and sometimes they are strong opinions about these topics, but having me spew those forward in the form of a book review would be unfair to the people I work with and work for. There are already many unproductive opinions about how things are or are not working, and I’m not sure I could add anything to that conversation (or shouting) as it may be.

I did want to reflect in this essay my fondness for the few books that stood out over the past year. One book I found very useful and has helped me understand a number of trends in current business is the book written by Donald Tapscott, Grown Up Digital. This book is very good at explaining the differences between generations, how they think and why they act the way they do. Donald Tapscott has been around for a while. I first saw him in 1994 at a real estate conference talking about his book, Paradigm Shift.  Yes, you can blame him for reintroducing the word “paradigm” into our lexicon. Just as fast as it came in to use, it was overused. Nevertheless, Tapscott has written a great book describing why we need to understand the youngest generation about to hit the workforce. They have much to say, they certainly work differently than other generations and they are all digital, all the time.

Another book I found useful was Groundswell:  Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.  This book digs into the details of why people are using social media technologies, who is using these technologies and how they are transforming the world of communication. Both authors are researchers at Forrester Research, a media research organization, so the book comes with a lot of research and empirical evidence to back it up.

There were a couple of books I found merely interesting, not because of a business reason, but because they were just good reads. First was From the Bottom Up by Chad Pregracke with Jeff Burrow. Pregracke has created an organization that has spent the past 10 years cleaning up the Mississippi River and many of its tributaries. He started with equipment he could beg, borrow or…ok, he didn’t steal anything, but often the equipment he did get to help his cause did come as a “steal.” Pregracke is an inspiration to anyone who feels their progress in the world has been hampered by obstacles they can’t overcome. He proves you can skip the research part and merely start “doing” and ask permission later. The other book I enjoyed was The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. It is a short book about how the world would look after the human species became extinct through disease or other means.

All of the books I reviewed are worth reading. There will be more next year. Are there books you would like me to review? Or is there someone out there who would like to give reviewing a book a try? Give me a call or email me with your suggestions.