Ray King's Book Picks
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Web / Tech
- The Viral Loop - Adam L. Penenberg
- Rework - 37 Signals folks
- Marketing in the age of Google - Vanessa Fox
- Crush It - Gary Vaynerchuk
- Inbound Marketing - Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah
- What would Google do? - Jeff Jarvis
- The Four Hour Work Week - Tim Ferriss
- Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
- SuperCrunchers - Ian Ayers
- Designing for the social web - Joshua Porter
- Elements of User Experience - Jesse James Garrett
- Smartmobs book by Howard Reingold
- Groundswell, Charlene Li
- The Search - John Battelle
- The Cluetrain Manifesto
- Seth Godin
- Permission Marketing
- IdeaVirus
- Purple Cow
- Tribes
- The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki
- Emergence - Stephen Johnson
- Ruling the Root - Milton Mueller
How the Mind Works
- Linchpin - Seth Godin
- Drive - Daniel Pink
- The Three Laws of Performance - Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan
- Switch - Dan and Chip Heath
- Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins (amazing book)
- Mind Wide Open - Steve Johnson
- Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
- Emotional Intelligence - Dan Goleman
Operational Excellence
- Who - Geoff Smart and Randy Street
- Who's got your back - Keith Ferrazzi
- Getting Things Done - David Allen
- Mastering the Rockefeller Habits - Verne Harnish (The methods we use at AboutUs)
- Jim Collins
- Built to Last
- Good to Great - (a must read)
- Inside Advantage - Robert Bloom
- Leadership and Self Deception - The Arbinger Institute
- Pat Lencioni (short fable style books)
- Getting Naked (for service folks)
- 5 Temptations of a CEO
- Death by Meeting
- 5 Dysfunctions of a team (Best of the group)
Economics
- Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
- The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
Politics
- The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama
Investigative Reporting
- Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson (Northern Pakistan)
- Jon Krakauer books:
- Into Thin Air (Mt. Everest)
- Under the Banner of Heaven (Mormon Fundamentalism)
- Into the Wild (Alaska)
- The New New Thing - Michael Lewis
- Liars Poker - Michael Lewis
Biographical
- Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford
- The Snowball - Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, Alice Schroeder
- The Motorcycle Diaries - Che Guavara
- Lessons: An Autobiography - An Wang (Wang Laboratories)
- The Ultimate Entrepreneur - Ken Olsen (DEC)
- The Winner Within - Pat Riley (Lakers, Knicks)
About Specific Businesses
- Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove (Intel)
- Maverick - Ricardo Semler (Semco)
- Odyssey - John Scully (Apple)
- Faster Company - Patrick Kelly (Physician Sales & Service)
- Business at the Speed of Thought - Bill Gates (Microsoft)
- The Road Ahead - Bill Gates (Microsoft)
Happiness
- Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh (Zappos guy)
- The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt (super book)
Self Help
- Unleashing the Soul of Money - Lynne Twist
- The Power of Now - Eckhard Towle
Fiction
- The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
- Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
- The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
- A Case of Exploding Mangoes - Mohammed Hanif
- In other rooms other wonders - Daniyal Mueenuddin (Great perspective on Pakistan)
- Down and out in the Magic Kingdom - Cory Doctorow
- Curious incident of the dog in the nighttime
- Kite Runner
- Memoirs of a Geisha
- Fountainhead
- Dan Brown Books (ok I'll admit it)
- The Lost Symbol
- DaVinci Code (Best in my opinion)
- Angels and Demons
- Digital Fortress
- Deception Point
- Gates of Fire - Steven Pressfield
Recommended to me
- Everything's an offer - Robert Poynton
- Obed's picks:
- The god of small things, Arundhuti Roy
- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
- The Dancing Girls of Lahore, Louise Brown
- The Sandman Comics, Neil Gaiman
- Asad's picks:
- Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe