N + 6 useful books

Hello! This is the sixth post about books: we read and remember them, which were useful for the development of the company and in general. Since this is not the first collection, a lot of strange things have fallen into it - the classic of project management and business does not change much.

The first in the list is “Aggression” by Conrad Lorenz . It is actually about animals and people, but this thing is so systematic and exciting that it directly superimposes business. Well, just for life. Especially interesting are the calculations about the level of aggression in different communities. Well, he described the bugs of various animals that I personally always wildly happy.
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Collaboration - Morten Hansen
This is an instruction on teamwork and interaction between people in a team and teams. She reassured me a lot of research, for example, the fact that in general you do not need to engage in networking if you are engaged in business. You do not need to know 200-400 people to find the right - you need to know 10 people, each of whom knows from 50-100. And it is much simpler and more efficient. Networking for an introvert - that's great.

The Power of Habit - Charles Dahigg
About how to change old workflows. The most remarkable thing inside is the change history of Alcoa, when the new director came and said: “We drown only for the safety of production, this is the highest priority”. As a result of this security strategy, they were almost the first among corporations to introduce e-mail (because they needed to change data faster within the company), introduced a system of non-financial indicators, and divided a lot of things to personnel. This 1987–1992 story fights very much with the modern course on management dispersion. He also has a wonderful second book - “ The Power of Habit ” about the incentive-reward model and how to hack a person.

Online news journalism - Alexander Amzin
Freely laid out book, clearly written under the PR of one person. But the utility inside is still more than self-promotion. Of course, I am ready for such an exchange. A lot of helpful tips about editing from inside the company. Short and practical.

It won't be easy - Ben Horovitz
About the guy who pulled the IT company from an incredible ass. There are many realities of the American market, but the chronicles of the diving liner are still interesting. All 2016, during the crisis, we felt about the same. There is such a famous story - a successful entrepreneur differs from an unsuccessful one in that he withstood and did not give up everything one time more. This one withstood three times more.

Inner fish - Nil Shubin
The guy was asked to hold the students for the blind man's autopsy, and he only knew about the fish. Well, he began to tell what has grown from what and how it developed in fish, and what it has become in man. Again about biology, more precisely, about paleontology and “Class.Object” interactions in biology. Considering how everything is rapidly intersecting with the evolution in business trends, I personally was very helpful. And so - a classic beautiful nauchpop.

Airport - Arthur Haley
This is the genre of “production novel”, where the problems of a single object are described, but thickly and comprehensively. Arthur Haley is the American equivalent of our Sanin (I recommend him to the “Big Fire” or any thing from the cycle about the South Pole). Only Sanin glorified the USSR, and Haley wrote the same book about everything he saw - the hospital, the power station, the airport. The plot is the same - complete ass, everything is bad, in the end a lot is resolved, but not all. The elaboration of details is valuable - I don’t know how he pulled them out in such quantity and quality, but it’s absolutely awesome to read the “Airport”. I advise both as an artist and as a way to understand the airport's ecosystem.

Traffic. Psychology of behavior on the roads - T. Wangebilt
Again, it would seem, no relation to business. But no. Inside a huge layer of psychology, which turned out to be very important. The book, in general, about the management of the crowd and the flow, the danger zone and other things, as well as how the city controls the movement of changing the ecosystem, rather than introducing micromanagement. The latter is probably the most valuable for us.

Guns, Microbes and Steel - Jared Diamond
Dude gave Pulitzer for this book. Very long, but read like a detective. Gestalt concludes about why some businesses (excuse me, human communities) are developing successfully, while others are not. Short - successful lucky. I liked most of all the chapter on research about which animals and plants were domesticated and why. There is such a branch of technology that we discovered and did not open. Complements the vision of a business ecosystem, again, with a completely non-business topic from ecology and history.

Holacratia - a revolutionary approach to management, Brian J. Robertson
Watery, but relatively rich in examples, describes the holacratic structure of the company. This is one of the variances of management, an analogue of turquoise organizations (about which Uncle Frederick Lalue wrote). In essence, it is a design scientific research institute in wartime, well, management through incessant hakaton. Interestingly, we are now thinking that we can implement the usefulness of his calculations. The uncle himself says lively that everything is possible at once, otherwise it will not work. And he immediately recovers - if you introduce everything at once, there are no guarantees either. That's life. But there are examples - Kiwi and Point is already working on this management scheme in Russia.

Generation Z at work - David Stillman
How to prepare those who were born in 1995-2012 - features of the perception of the world by those who were born and grew up completely with external memory organs (network), a different approach to learning, practicality, cynicism and intolerance to old customs. A good system study, very vividly written thanks to the dialogue with his son. Well, sobering. Lots of good insights.

How people see - Chernyshev
“We must take schizophrenics as space explorers” - a book about this and about a bunch of creative exercises. The author is a peculiar guy with good experience and a deeply subjective point of view. However, reading is cool and interesting. Information density is very high, I adore such things. After it, it is worth looking through Paul Design’s “Design: Form and Chaos” about the fact that good design is distinguished from bad by unity, grace, rhythm and harmony. Formula no good design, every time everything is subjective. The uncle brings more practice into this story, more heuristics for evaluation, more pragmatics and also an incredible amount of subjectivity. It's like going to the Bauhaus Museum in Berlin and getting a lamp there on the head. Strange, but can answer a couple of questions from the field of design. Short but useful.

And here are past selections: first , second , third , fourth , fifth .