3 books I enjoyed reading in 2016.

These days I’m not much of a reader but I try to use my travel time to catch up on books. Here are three books I enjoyed reading in 2016.

Book #1: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. I enjoyed this book. The title pretty much sums up my philosophy, although I mentally add ‘purpose’ to passion and perseverance. In seminars I often speak of how it took a few moments of passion to light the spark and many long years of perseverance to keep the fires lit, but I also needed Purpose to want the fire in the first place. For example, I was an engineer who wanted to help other engineers do their jobs better, so I started an IT company because I saw software as an effective tool to achieve that. Today I’m using the cloud and mobile devices to help project companies work better. So my purpose hasn’t changed. But I couldn’t have done it without ‘grit’ – my own and other people’s.

Book #2:The Innovator’s DNA by Jeff Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen. This book was an almost-nostalgic experience. In an age where new ideas and new thinking seems to be going out of fashion it reminded me that innovation really is a state of mind. One of my college projects (this is more than 20 years ago, before the internet) was a cricket bowling ball machine and involved 4 guys, a shoestring budget, and a rusty wheel rim (among other ‘scavenged’ items). Nobody took us seriously. Not our classmates and not our professors. But the story ends in true filmi style: the very first shot from our machine took the middle stump with the right and left following seconds later! You can imagine how we celebrated! It was a life-changing moment because I realised that doing things other people consider ‘stupid’ or ‘unnecessary’ is exactly where innovation resides. It’s going against, not with, accepted ideas of success and failure. I’d like to think that the ‘DNA of innovation’ the book talks about is alive and well in my R&D Centre’s Innovation Lab. At least I hope so.

Book #3: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. This book was a bit unexpected. Not because the ideas in it were new per se but because it made me realise how much my own views have evolved over the years. Those who know me will know that marketing and everything associated with it has never appealed to me. I’m a sales guy through and through. I like talking to real people, real users. This book made me think Wow – sales and marketing are so close and yet so far. Sales talks to one person at a time, marketing to many. Sales is intensely personal, marketing is utterly objective. Sales can be emotional and raw – marketing uses emotions and manipulates them (to everybody’s benefit). But for me the thing that binds both together is the element of ‘persuasion’, which is different in sales and marketing…and yet, in a way, the same. I’m still figuring it out, and I have the feeling I’ll be going back to this book and others like it for some time to come.

Well, I hope this was interesting. Let me know if there are any books you have read and enjoyed – or not – and why.