Books you must read...

I am going to share a brief summary of some of the good books i have read which you can try as well. These are my personal views and can vary when compared to the rest of the world. These are more of a "Books I recommend" post for all you readers out there.....

Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter
This is a easy to read simple fable about a bunch of penguins who live on an iceberg without knowing that it is melting. There is one penguin that sees this coming and works on enlightning the rest of the group and finding a new habitat. This is a good read for starters, the languauge used by the author is simple yet powerful. This book teaches you change management and enables to look at things differently. If you are a book worm you will complete this book in <>The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma
I don't think this book needs an introduction nor a recommendation. This book again teaches you a lot of corporate stuff and some values in the form of a fable. When youread this book you definitely do come across instances where you can relate to any one of the characters. This book even sometimes leaves you thinking "how come i did not see it this way." Another good book for starters.

First Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckhingham & Curt Coffman
Actually one of my friend had asked me find out the cost of this book when I'd been to a bookstore. I read the review on the cover of the book and thought I'll read it. This is not a kind of book for starters or first time readers (atleast from my understanding of starters and first time readers). This is a must read for all people managers and more so for the ones who are aspiring to be people managers. There are a lot of useful management concepts that you can take away from this book. This book teaches you and provides tools that would make you life as a people manager a lot easier, effective and efficient.

Conversations with God 1, 2, & 3 by Neale Donald Walsh
If you are very religious and have completely faith in the God you worship, this book might turn out to be a shocker. I gave my girlfriend (well I don't know if that word is still appropriate) part one of this series, she is a person who falls under the criteria mentioned in the previous sentance and she did not like the book and she did not even complete the book. This book takes a completely different approach towards religion, god, life and the world. One fine day the author decides to write a letter to God and suddenly he realises that God is responding to his letter through him. End result the author asks the questions and god answers them. I thoroughly enjoyed this series because the concept of god and religion this book deals with is very much closer to my ideology of god and religion. This book make you imagine certain thing that you would have never imagined before, somethings like darkness doesnot exist it is a mere absence of light, because we've seen light we created darkness in its absence. Same thing goes for good & bad, head & cold, etc. This book is refreshing and reviving, though it can get too texty texty a couple times (especially the third part) which might reduce your attention span.

This series has some real good phrases that eveyone will like such as, "If you saw you as God sees you, you'll smile a lot." "God is in the sadness and the laughter, in the bitter and the sweet. There is a devine purpose behind everything and therefore a divine presence in everything." "God has no way to speprate himself from you or anything else. Hell is simply not knowing this. Salvation is knowing and inderstanding it completely."

Cows Don't Give Milk by Pramod Batra
This is another interesiting read for first time readers. There are a few places where this book teaches you some strategies and stuff but mostly it preaches things that have alerdy been preached a number of times in various other books, text books, seminars, etc. In a nutshell this book takes a very practical approach towars some of the most frequent and common issues we come across. The tag line is "Cows don't give milk, you have to take it."

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance by Louis V. Grestner Jr
If you are techie you'll enjoy this book and if you are not a techie and is aspiring to be an entreprenuer then its even better. Lou Grestner is not a techie, but he takes over as the CEO of IBM when IBM is going through its all time low in is history. Lou gets the basics in place and transforms this mega corporation into one of the most profitable IT company in the world. It is said that as companies get bigger, they tend to forget the basics and do a lot of complicated stuff that would set the company in the path of destruction. IBM was on one such path when Lou took over, some of the things he brings in are simple solutions that has a long term fix and immense potential for cost saving & profit making. A lot of oltimers in IMB did go through a culture shock when Lou brought in such changes but Lou and his team have managed to stay focussed and achieve waht they wanted. Some of the things that Lou got in as immediate and long term fixes were centralisation, verticalisation of the orgs, performance based variable pay structures, things that helped drive more accountability at all level. There are some graphs that depict IBMs performance before and after Lou took over and that's a kind of graph that can substitute your resume! There is one phrase that Lou keeps telling his people which I have also started using a lot these days, "People do what you inspect and not what you expect."

The Greatness Guide 1 & 2 by Robn Sharma
Another easy read from Mr. Sharma. The Greatness Guide series is a compilation of small articles that talk about all aspects of life. Each chapter is about 1 or 2 pages each so this is a bokk that you can pause or stop reading at any time. But guess what it is quite difficult to pause / stop reading this book. If you buy this book you also get to download one of Robin's 60 minute speach on what differentiates a great organisation from mediocre organisations. That is a very interesting audio, atleast most of it. If you are a people manager then some of the stuff he talks about in this audio will definitely turn out to be very useful. You can even use some of the chapters in these books to train your pople managers.

The Google Story by David A Vice
One coincedance you'd notice if you read books like this is some of the big IT giants in the world today once started off as a collage project. Google and Sun Microsystems (SUN - Stanford University Network) are one of those companies that started from Stanford. This book is amazing due to the amout of detail that it deals with, it covers a lot of interesting trivia about google, the internet search industry, how google stays on top, why google employees are so happy with their job, etc. There is one entire chapter in this book that talks about how the google cafeterias are designed! It also anwers our question on how Google make money, what is the basic concept of page rank, etc. If you have a gmail account, have you ever noticed that whenever you read an e-mail, all the sponsored links that you would see on the right side of the screen will be related to the subject of your e-mail (well there was a law suite filed on Goole for breach of privacy for the same but that story is history now)?

This book also talks about why google does not have any competitors till date, how aggressive and obsessive are the founders of goolge to capture every region of the world market, how obssessive is google in redifining benchmarks that they themselves set in the industry a while ago, how obssessive is google in innovating. Do you know gmail was project by one of the google employees? Well google gives each employee a few hours every week where they can work on their own projects and innovate, gmail is one such project. It is a must read for management professionals and techies. This book also has some stuff for the common man... How to use google as a calculator, how to use google as a currency converter, how to look up people, phone #s, address using google, how to optimise your search in google, etc.

Shift by Carlos Goshn & Philippe
Another transformation story of one of the biggest auto makers in the world. Carlos comes to Nissan from Renault to fix the company and save the company from going bankrupt. This is another book that reinforces that if you don't have your basics in place then you are in for disaster. Carlos brings in a lot of optimisation that minimises costs and also changes a lot of traditional practices that existed in Nissan that was actually slowing down its progress and turning the organisation in the opposite direction. There is a lot you can know about the auto industry, do you know how one of the hot selling car segment, "the SUVs" come into existance? Well this book can answer this for your. There is a fair amount of Carlos' biography that may not interest you that much but all in all an interesting book to read.