If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

From several sources, I cull this list of worthwhile business books for your pleasure and profit:

Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces and Organizations Buzz With Energy and Others Don’t by Linda Gratton

The power of developing a collaborative mindset, spanning the boundaries that keep things from getting done, and fostering a sense of common purpose: practical ways of increasing productive capacity and achieving better results.

30 Reasons Employees Hate Their Managers: What your people may be thinking and what you can do about it by Bruce Katcher and Adam Snyder

Finally, a practical book aimed at the manager for addressing some of the common blind spots that can poison morale and the bottom line. (If you don’t think this is a problem in your organization, you may be right. But if you’re wrong, how will you ever find out?

First Break All the Rules: What the world’s greatest managers do differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman

This book changed added greatly to my street-savvy about what individual managers and supervisors can do to bring the best out of their people and improve results.

On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt (2005)

A professor emeritus of moral philosophy at Princeton examines the perils of lying.

Why it’s a must-read: “When a friend recommended it, I thought they were putting me on, that this was one of those edgy, in-your-face, humor items. In fact, it is a deadly serious look at what constitutes gray-area lying, in which someone represents him or herself as knowledgeable when in fact he or she isn’t. CEOs actually know rather little about conditions inside their firms and rely on the veracity of people and systems to convey what little they do know. This little book grapples with one of the fundamental problems that all CEOs face: When is one hearing the truth?” (Robert Bruner, dean of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business)

Primal Leadership: Learning to lead with emotional intelligenceby Daniel Goleman, et al.

Good leadership doesn’t consist in the adroit application of techniques. Rather, it creates a climate in the organization in which people will want to respond. It is resonant leadership, and the leader lacking in emotional intelligence will not only fail at this but not even perceive that the opportunity was missed. Read this.

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

Innovation is disruptive. So what do you do with it? How do you make the most of innovations without losing your shirt? ” It is a company’s customers who effectively control what a company can and cannot do. . . .companies [are] willing to bet enormous amounts on technologically risky projects when the customers need the resulting products.”