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 selection, a lot of strange things fell into it - the classics of project management and business do not change much.

The first on the list is “Aggression” by Konrad Lorenz . It's actually about animals and people, but this thing is so systemic and exciting that it directly overlaps with business. Well, just for life. Especially interesting are the calculations about the level of aggression in different communities. Well, he described the bugs of different animals, which I personally always wildly happy.

Collaboration - Morten Hansen
This is an instruction for teamwork and interaction between people in a team and teams. She reassured me great with a number of studies, for example, the fact that you don’t really need to do networking if you are doing business. You don’t need to know 200-400 people to find the right one - you need to know 10 people, each of whom knows 50-100. And this is many times easier and more efficient. Introvert networking is great.

The Power of Habit - Charles Dahigg
About how to change outdated workflows. The most noteworthy inside is the story of Alcoa's changes, when the new director came and said: "We drown only for the safety of production, this is the top priority." As a result of this security strategy, they were almost the first among corporations to introduce e-mail (because it was necessary to change data within the company faster), introduced a system of non-financial indicators, and shared a lot of things with the staff. This story of 1987-1992 is very struggling with the modern course on control 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
A free book, clearly written under the PR of one person. But there are still more utility inside than self-promotion. Of course, I am ready for such an exchange. Lots of good editorial advice from inside the company. Short and practical.

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

Inner fish - Neil Shubin
The guy was invited to conduct an autopsy on the students, and he only knew about the fish. Well, he began to tell what he grew out of and how it developed in fish, and what it became in man. Again about biology, more precisely, about paleontology and interactions "Class. Object" in biology. Given how everything intersects violently with evolution in business trends, I personally was very helpful. And so - a classic beautiful science.

Airport - Arthur Haley
This is the genre of “production novel”, which describes the problems of a single object, but it is thick and comprehensive. Arthur Haley is the American analogue of our Sanin (I recommend the "Big Fire" him 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 - a hospital, a power station, an airport. The plot is the same - a complete ass, everything is bad, in the end a lot of things go wrong, but not all. The elaboration of details is valuable - I don’t know how he pulled them out in such quantity and quality, but reading the Airport is absolutely awesome. I advise both as an artist and as a way to understand the ecosystem of the airport.

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

Shotguns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
Dude was given 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. In short - successful lucky. Most of all I liked the chapter with studies about which animals and plants were domesticated and why. There directly traced such a branch of technology that we discovered and did not open. Complementing the vision of the business ecosystem, again, with a completely non-business theme from ecology and history.

Holacracy - A Revolutionary Management Approach, Brian J. Robertson
Watery, but relatively rich in examples, describes the company's holacratic structure. This is one of the variances of management, an analogue of turquoise organizations (about which Uncle Frederick Lalu wrote). In fact - a design research institute in wartime, well, control through an ongoing hackathon. Interestingly, we are now considering that it is possible to introduce useful things from his calculations. The uncle himself says live that you can only do everything at once, otherwise it won’t work. And immediately it gets better - if you implement everything at once, there are no guarantees either. This is life. But there are examples - Qiwi and Tochka are already working on this management scheme in Russia.

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

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

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