Continuing the book series from my last book recommendations post on 5 amazing books for personal development, here’s the list of books I found to be serving my professional growth this year. I write a bit about each book and my key takeaways so that you can better decide which you want to invest your time in reading! Happy reading!
1. The culture map, by Erin Meyer
I usually avoid business books for fear of boredom or tedium. But this book is so much fun to read for a ‘business’ book because it is full of funny cultural faux-pas stories. Erin is a Professor at the leading business school INSEAD and has developed an eight-dimension framework for plotting all the business cultures of the world. Acceptable ways to interact with your boss in Denmark are different from in India, the way to deliver an effective presentation is different in the US versus Germany, and this book details how. Read this book if you deal with people from different cultural backgrounds regularly, in life or in business and revisit for specific country insights ahead of doing business cross-culturally.
2. Talk like Ted, by Carmine Gallo
This book is a treasure trove of great recommendations for Ted Talks to watch and what you can learn from each one. Some of the key insights I took away were:
- If you can’t explain your big idea in 140 characters or less, keep working on your message
- Create the story before you open the tool (e.g. Powerpoint) (I don’t know that I agree btw — I sometimes find a blank slide to be a canvas for creativity!)
- Tell a personal story, find a way to make your presentation personal even if its a business presentation
- Ted Talks are ~18 mins long because that’s how long the human attention span is for one topic
- Be shocking to be memorable e.g. when Bill Gates released mosquitoes into a Ted audience at the beginning of a talk on malaria!!
3. The Confidence code, by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay
I think this book is a must-read for women – it’s full of useful insights on confidence, which many women lack versus men in the workplace. Shipman and Kay uncover a lot of interesting insights that aren’t common knowledge e.g. on the differences between male and female brains: Men have more gray brain cells, which are useful for isolated problems and women have more white matter, critical for integrating information. Women have 30% per more neurons firing at any given time vs. men. This made me think about why it’s so important to have diverse teams to leverage all types of strengths.
4. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, by Ashlee Vance
Elon Musk works so damn hard and reading about his dedication and focus and how he learnt about rocket science from reading text books, after he’d made a ton of money from PayPal, was so inspiring — someone else may have been tempted to just buy a private island and retire and drink mai-tais, rather than endeavor to make humans an inter-planetary species. He was entrepreneurial from his childhood and from a very adventurous family – it’s insightful to see how humans are shaped throughout their childhood and to contemplate that traits like risk-taking may also have a genetic or at least family-culture origin.
I also gleaned a few insights on how to learn and manage. One of his employees says of Elon: “He would quiz you until he learned 90 per cent of what you know”. It made me reflect on how hesitant many of us are to ask too many questions for fear of sounding intrusive or sounding like we are judging or testing someone – but then we miss out on learning – perhaps we can frame upfront the purpose of a line of questioning as a learning exercise.
Happy reading friends! I welcome your other recommendations in the comments section below!
