Business books of 2020 – my choice – 7innovation
No Filter – The Inside Story of Instagram
Sarah Frier
Award-winning reporter Sarah Frier reveals an inside, never-before-told, behind-the-scenes look at how Instagram defied the odds to become one of the most culturally defining apps of the decade.
Intrapreneurs: Who, What, How and Why
Susan Foley
Who, What, How and Why was written to help you understand who these individuals are at the core. It provides insight from working with Intrapreneurs from around the world.
Create in a Flash: A Leader’s Recipe for Breakthrough Innovation
Roger Firestien
A Guide through creative process by experienced author. Create in a Flash is based on Dr. Roger Firestien’s 40 years helping companies unleash the innovation of their workforce.
Start Within: How to Sell Your Idea, Overcome Roadblocks, And Love Your Job
Karen Holst, Douglas Ferguson
Start Within is the playbook guiding through the process of launching an idea within a company and helping to get around the corporate obstacles that will come along the way.
This Might Get Me Fired: A Manual for Thriving in the Corporate Entrepreneurial Underground
Gregory Larkin
Filled with stories of success and failure, this book gives you the tools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and recognize when (and why) to prioritize your product over your job.
The Innovator’s Book: Rules for Rebels, Mavericks and Innovators
Max McKeown
New book from one of my favorite authors… How to move from original insights to new ideas, and from new ideas to valuable real-world innovation
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
Daniel H. Pink
A bit older book that I found this year… Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don’t know much about timing itself. Our lives are a neverending stream of ‘when’ decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person.
Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson
A leader’s guide to success in a rapidly changing economy. We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs.
Elon Musk. How The Billionaire Ceo Of Spacex And Tesla Is Shaping Our Future
Vance Ashlee
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future is Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk, published in 2015. The book traces Elon Musk’s life from his childhood up to the time he spent at Zip2 and PayPal, and then onto SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity.
Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
W. Bernard Carlson
Nikola Tesla was a major contributor to the electrical revolution that transformed daily life at the turn of the twentieth century. His inventions, patents, and theoretical work formed the basis of modern AC electricity, and contributed to the development of radio and television.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
David J. Epstein
Range – defined as more diverse experience across multiple fields – is more relevant in today’s society than specialization because the wicked problems of the modern world requires bridging experience and knowledge from multiple fields to foster solutions
Matthew C. Le Merle, Alison Davis
Silicon Valley insiders Matthew C. Le Merle and Alison Davis share the lessons they have learned from two decades of interaction with Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft as well as other leading companies. The authors describe this new approach so that every company can be ready as we enter the Fifth Era.
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Matt Ridley
We need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people.
An addition, I published a book this year:
Developing Innovation: Innovation Management in IT Companies
In the ever-changing world of IT, the challenging mission is to create and maintain innovation culture and align innovation activities with company strategy. This book is giving a fresh perspective on innovation management activities in IT environment using examples from startups and companies like Cisco, Ericsson Nikola Tesla, Lufthansa Systems, Worldline, Amdocs, Telefonica, Enea and others.
