10 Career-Boosting Books For Your Summer Reading List
Take some of your free summer hours to dive into one of these books written by well-known business and IT leaders, including Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Andrew Grove, and learn their perspectives on management and success.
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Reading is a favorite pastime among many of history's greatest innovators and leaders, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs among them.
Unfortunately, many of us spend more time browsing the internet than we do with a book in our hands. It's more common to find someone skimming articles or scrolling though Twitter than diving into a book.
Despite the rise in global literacy rates, people are reading less deeply. Most American adults are reading less in general, and less than half are reading literature, as reported by the Harvard Business Review. This is especially true among leaders.
It's a shame, because reading poses several benefits to leaders. Reading is one of the fastest ways to absorb new information. It can provide insights from across industries that inspire innovation.
[Read: 10 big data books to give your career a boost.]
For tech professionals, there is no shortage of reading material to learn more about the growth of the technology industry, the visionaries behind it, and the skills they need to drive their careers.
Perhaps you need a good book to improve your programming skills or acquire some new leadership strategies. Maybe you hope to learn more about the lives of technology's greatest influencers and how they built their careers.
Before you're lying by the pool or lounging in a beach chair this summer, why not pick up an interesting read from one of many leaders in business and technology? Here, we spotlight books written by influencers including Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Tony Hsieh, who share their stories and strategies for achieving success.
Have you read any of the books listed here? Are there any books by tech or business leaders that have proven helpful in your career? We'd like to keep adding to this list, so please share your recommendations in the comments.
Michael Dell started his powerhouse tech company at the age of 19 from his University of Texas college dorm. Dell started with an idea, and with $1,000 that he invested in a business now known around the world. In Direct From Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, he takes readers through ups, downs, errors, and lessons learned as he built Dell.
Dell's honest insight serves as powerful guidance for aspiring and current leaders who need a motivational boost to keep going in the face of challenges. His strategy for success can help professionals grow their businesses and save themselves the trouble of expensive and potentially disastrous mistakes.
Andrew Grove, former chairman of the board and CEO at Intel, as well as the company's first employee, knew business must navigate massive changes in order to survive and succeed. In Only The Paranoid Survive: How To Exploit The Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company, he wrote about his own experiences doing so at Intel, where he led the company through what he called a strategic inflection point -- a time when major change hits, and the only options are to adapt or fail.
In his book, Grove described some of Intel's biggest hurdles: such as the Pentium flaw (which threatened the company's reputation) and the explosive growth of the Internet. He passed away in March, but his lessons predicting, surviving, and benefiting from corporate challenges live on.
In this book, Thomas J. Watson Jr. works with Peter Petre to write about how he and his father, Thomas J. Watson Sr., built the global tech giant IBM. It's the story of IBM's corporate growth, but also of the relationship between the father and son who drove it.
Watson's first-person account discusses how he and his father shared similar management styles, and together built a corporate culture that later inspired other companies in the growing tech industry. Father, Son & Co.: My Life At IBM And Beyond is also a story of family drama. The father-son duo had a loving but argumentative relationship that influenced some of IBM's major decisions.
This book stands the test of time in teaching professionals about the realities of corporate leadership. Read it if you'd like to learn more about the growth of IBM, the origins of tech leadership, or the dynamics of a father and son building a tech empire.
This may sound like a peculiar pick for tech leaders. Yvon Chouinard was a climber, environmentalist, and founder and CEO of Patagonia. However, his story of weaving adventure into his business can teach lessons to leaders of all industries.
In Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, Chouinard shares the stories of strength and tenacity that led him to create a corporate giant respected for its environmental responsibility. He tells about his childhood, early love of the outdoors, and entrepreneurial projects.
Business leaders will recognize the challenges Chouinard faced when Patagonia began to undergo rapid growth, became too ambitious, and suffered problems. The founder explains the different philosophies that took Patagonia through its difficult times and shaped it into the company it is today.
Entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal, works with legal research technology startup founder Blake Masters to write about the strong potential for startups to create uniquely innovative businesses. Even in the age of modern technology, there are still ideas that have not been explored and inventions we have yet to build.
In Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Thiel argues that even though society is saturated with technological devices, innovation has begun to lag. He believes innovators should not be adding to things that already exist, but doing new things instead. The next Bill Gates, for example, will not build an operating system. Startup leaders who will achieve success will not face competition because their ideas will be different from everyone else's.
This book is a good read for anyone looking for hope about the future of innovation. If you're looking for inspiration, you may find it here.
Ed Catmull, cofounder and president of Pixar Animation, and also president of Disney Animation, wrote Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration to help leaders spark a creative culture within their organizations. His writing highlights the ideas that make Pixar such a respected and profitable company.
Catmull's book takes readers from his childhood dream of creating a computer-animated movie to cofounding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter. He discusses their films, starting with breakout hit Toy Story, and how their movies' successes can be attributed to the Pixar culture and management philosophies that go outside the conventional box.
His philosophies, discussed in this book, extend outside the creative industry. They can be applied to all organizations. One example: "A company's communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody."
Venture for America founder and CEO Andrew Yang wrote this book to discuss how the answer to America's economic and social issues can be found in helping ambitious people to innovate and build new things.
The idea behind Venture for America is to accelerate startup growth and train the next group of entrepreneurs. The organization places bright college grads in start-ups located in emerging US cities for two-year time-frames.
Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America takes a closer look at talent flow in the US and the reasons why current patterns are leading to economic and cultural problems.
He also suggests different ways to help entrepreneurs more easily achieve success in the US. For tech pros hoping to spark innovation within their own organizations, this could prove an interesting and valuable read.
At the age of 21, Paul Allen teamed up with Bill Gates to create Microsoft. In Idea Man: A Memoir by the Co-Founder of Microsoft, he tells the story of Microsoft's early years from his perspective and discusses how the relationship between him and Gates evolved as they built one of the most powerful tech companies in the world.
Allen is a private person. Before his book, he had not shared many details on how he influenced the evolution of Microsoft. Idea Man is the story of how he started with the question of "What should exist?" and navigated the highs and lows of building a technology powerhouse.
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, writes about how culture can help companies achieve success. He built the company culture at Zappos to focus on service and on improving the lives of everyone involved in the business: employees, customers, and vendors.
In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Hsieh shares his own life experiences, and lessons from other companies, to provide examples of how culture is critical. It's the number-one priority at Zappos. The online shoe retailer pours marketing funds into customer experience and helps employees grow personally and professionally. The idea is that once the right culture is established, success will follow on its own.
Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and former CEO, writes about how technology is essential to improving the way modern businesses run, and will run in the future. Corporate leaders should not view tech as an overhead, he says, but as a component critical to the business.
In Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy, Gates argues that the use of information can make or break a company's success, and that each business must create a "digital nervous system" to handle data. He illustrates his points with examples from Microsoft, Dell, General Motors, and other major organizations that have leveraged networks to improve management of customer relationships, sales, and inventory.
This provides interesting insight for those who want a close look at how Gates viewed the future of businesses, and a wake-up call to those who need to boost their digital strategies.
Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and former CEO, writes about how technology is essential to improving the way modern businesses run, and will run in the future. Corporate leaders should not view tech as an overhead, he says, but as a component critical to the business.
In Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy, Gates argues that the use of information can make or break a company's success, and that each business must create a "digital nervous system" to handle data. He illustrates his points with examples from Microsoft, Dell, General Motors, and other major organizations that have leveraged networks to improve management of customer relationships, sales, and inventory.
This provides interesting insight for those who want a close look at how Gates viewed the future of businesses, and a wake-up call to those who need to boost their digital strategies.
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