Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone.
by Mitch Joel

Six Pixels of Separation begins as a primer for any business leader with limited knowledge of the Internet’s capabilities and quickly turns into an indispensable set of guidelines and advice for any business person who plans to make use of the web (which should be any business person). Mitch Joel offers excellent insight and plenty of simple, direct, digestible advice. This is a must read.

The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty
by Sam L. Savage

Every business person should read this book. We are so often looking for precise numbers when precise numbers are unrealistic. The reality is, we would actually be much more accurate to use probabilities and ranges when referencing uncertain number such as sales forecasts or project timelines. Savage takes us through the dangers of using averages to describe distributions and offers solid solutions that can be used to better manage our business.
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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This book made me think more than any book in recent memory. That may be partly because it’s pretty dense and I had to read it more slowly than I normally read. However, I’ll give a lot more credit to the fact that Taleb’s makes some very interesting points about the amount of randomness in our lives and how that randomness is all too often mistaken for something more substantive.
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How We Decide
by Jonah Lehrer
I loved this book. Jonah Lehrer takes us through some fairly common behavior economics principles and experiments, but the very interesting twist he takes is to explain the brain mechanics that drive our thinking and decisions. He really uncovers why we’re “predictably irrational” and provides great insight into how we make decisions and how we can use that knowledge to improve our decision making.

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow

I’m on a randomness kick lately, and this is the book that got me started on it. Mlodinow does a nice job of illustrating some of the finer statistical points in a pretty accessible manner. While this book isn’t as deep at the book I’m currently reading, “Fooled by Randomness,” it’s definitely an easier read and does a nice job of covering the basics.
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Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
by Ori Brafman, Rom Brafman

Another one of the behavior economics books I so love. This one has some pretty interesting stories and anecdotes, and its insights benefit from one of the writers being a psychologist and the other a businessman.
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More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson
By Rich Teerlink and Lee Ozley

This is a very interesting book about culture change at Harley-Davidson during the ’90s written by the CEO and lead consultant who initiated the change. It can be a bit dry at times, but the details behind the thinking and the execution are excellent. I learned a lot by reading it.
Preview More than a Motorcycle

And here are some great books that I re-read this year:

The OPEN Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World
by Kelly Mooney, Nita Rollins
The world is changing rapidly, and those who fail to realize it will be left in the dust. However, those who open their brand and see the value of allowing their best customers to participate in the brand will not only reap the benefits of those customers ideas, but they will also benefit from those customers becoming the largest and more credible Marketing department a company could have. Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins explore these themes in an extremely insightful book that comes with lots of examples that help the reader visualize how these ideas could apply to his or her own business. The writing style and formatting is fun and extremely easy to read. This is a great handbook for any marketer in the 21st century.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
by Michael Lewis

While this is ostensibly a baseball book about the success of Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane, I actually found this to be an excellent business book. Michael Lewis tells the story of Beane defying the conventional wisdom of longtime baseball scouts about what good baseball players look like. Rather than trust scouts who literally would determine a baseball player’s prospects by how he physically looked, Beane went to the data as a disciple of Bill James’ Sabermetrics theories. Lewis describes how James took a new look at traditional baseball statistics and created new statistics that were actually more causally related to winning games. By following the James’ approach, Beane was able to put together consistently winning teams while working with one of the lowest payrolls in the Major Leagues. How can the same principles of trusting data over tradition and “gut” play in the business world? That is a thought I constantly ponder thanks to reading this book.
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The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do
by Clotaire Rapaille

I picked this book up on a whim one day because the title was interesting. I was quickly engrossed by reading the story in the introduction of Clotaire Rapaille’s work with Chrysler on Jeep Wrangler. He describes the “code” word for Jeep in America is HORSE and advises executives to design round headlights instead of square headlights because horses have round eyes. They think he’s nuts, of course, but when it turns out round headlights are cheaper they go with them — and they’re a hit. They also then position the Wrangler as a “horse” in their ads and have great success. Rapaille goes on to describe what he means by “culture code” and details some of the hidden cultural patterns that affect most all of us. Some samples of other codes within the book are:
- The American Culture Code for love is FALSE EXPECTATION
- The female code for sex is VIOLENCE (Whoa! You’ve got to read the book to understand)
- The code for hospital in America is PROCESSING PLANT

There are tons more of these interesting observations embedded in short, easy-to-read chapters. Whether or not you buy into everything he says, it’s very interesting to see how he developed each code and certainly will expand your understanding of how and why people behave as they do under the powerful forces of culture
Preview The Culture Code

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely

This is the book that first turned me on to the fascinating world of behavioral economics. Ariely does an excellent job of explaining many of the core principles of behavioral economics with stories and experiments. Every retailer should read this book to better understand how people (customers) think and behave. It will absolutely open your eyes.

Those are some of my favorites. I’m always looking for a new read. What books fired you up this year?