Thanks to a short vacation, a brief respite from traveling, and my general inclination to avoid real work, I’ve been able read a lot the last few weeks. Here are two more books — neither of which has much to do with business, motivation, or talent — that I really enjoyed. The first is Barbara [...]
One of my favorite books of recent years was Predictably Irrational by Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely. Now Ariely is back with a new book, The Upside of Irrationality, and it’s just as good and, in some ways, even better. Where the last book focused on how poor reasoning can lead us astray, this one explores [...]
In 2003, my pal Mark Frauenfelder (one of the impresarios behind Boing Boing) and his wife Carla Sinclair — two young parents suffering from dot-com bubble burnout — distilled their frustration into a brief manifesto. They made a vow: To take more control of our lives; To cut through the absurd chaos of modern life and [...]
For all the talk we hear about “work-life balance,” it sure doesn’t feel like life is getting any easier or work less stressful. Tony Schwartz’s new book, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, looks at the four basic needs all human beings share once the bare necessities of survival have been met: the need for [...]
Those of you who participated in our New Year’s Day Teleseminar learned that one of my favorite magazines — the kind I read, not just subscribe to — is The Week. And one of my favorite sections is a middle-of-the-magazine feature in which they ask a writer to list his or her six favorite books, [...]
Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin, launches today. And like all of Seth’s work, this one will rattle your neurons and rouse your heart. As part of his effort to spark conversations, he’s interviewed several other authors about their work — and how their ideas relate to his. Below is the interview Seth did with me on [...]
Stuck on an airplane this morning, I had a chance to read today’s New York Times almost from cover to cover. (Ink on paper is a pretty good technology, no? — Ed.) Five stories, most of them small and easily overlooked, made me think, smile, or wince. 1. Person of the day. When retailer H&M [...]
High on the growing list of endangered media species is long-form magazine journalism. In a world of 140-character updates and 60-second video clips, do we have the attention span (and the business model) to sustain carefully-crafted 5,000-word articles? I sure hope so. Because even in a tough environment, there’s some great work coming out of [...]
Harvard professor Teresa Amabile, whose transformative work I describe in Drive, has a fascinating piece in the (newly revamped) Harvard Business Review, which is just hitting newsstands. Amabile tracked the day-to-day activities and motivations of several hundred workers over a few years and found that their greatest motivation isn’t external incentives, but something different: Making [...]
Apple Insider points to a demo of the soon-to-be-launched digital edition Sports Illustrated. If this is the future — and Wired and others are also working on their own digital editions — then maybe the magazine business isn’t doomed. (HT: Doug Flather)
