Recommended Reading

Louis L. Marines, President

• Twenty Books That Changed My Life: "These books have changed my life not because they have changed me, but because they have helped me better understand who I am and what matters, so I am better able to answer Wayne Muller's question, 'How, Then, Shall I Live?'"

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Books 2009

What AMI faculty and staff are reading during 2009:

Clicking on the title of a book will take you to its order page on Amazon.

• Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America
  by Thomas Friedman
  Friedman makes it clear that the green revolution we need is like no revolution the world has seen. It will be the biggest innovation project in American history; it will be hard, not easy; and it will change everything from what you put into your car to what you see on your electric bill.


• Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time
  by Margaret J. Wheatley
  Credited with establishing a fundamentally new approach to leadership based on living systems theory, or, as she puts it, "how Life organizes", Wheatley shares her first-ever compendium of essays about her real-world experiences helping clients introduce more authentic, life-affirming practices into their organizations. Essays cover a wide scope of topics including leadership strategies, raising children in turbulent times, and the role of communities in the lives of organizations.


• The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation
  by Frans Johansson
  Johansson, founder and former CEO of an enterprise software company, argues that innovations occur when people see beyond their expertise and approach situations actively, with an eye toward putting available materials together in new combinations.


• A Sense of Urgency
  by John Kotter
  Author and international business consultant Kotter (Leading Change, Our Iceberg is Melting) returns with an engaging look at companies that need to overcome a lack of urgency, or a surfeit of complacency, with a proactive agenda.


• The Accelerated Learning Fieldbook
  by Lou Russell
  The Accelerated Learning Fieldbook gives you the tools you need to ensure that maximum learning and maximum retention are taking place in your training sessions, sales sessions, and classrooms.


• Competence at Work: Models for Superior Performance
  by Signe Spencer, Lyle Spencer
  Provides analysis of 650 jobs, based on 20 years of research using the McClelland/McBer job competence assessment (JCA) methodology. Includes generic job models for entrepreneurs, technical professionals, salespeople, service workers and corporate managers. Defines JCA and describes in detail how to conduct JCA studies. Suggests future directions and uses for competency research.


• Building the Bridge As You Walk On It: A Guide for Leading Change
  by Robert E. Quinn
  Quinn shows how anyone can enter the fundamental state of leadership by engaging in the eight practices that center on the theme of ever-increasing integrity — reflective action, authentic engagement, appreciative inquiry, grounded vision, adaptive confidence, detached interdependence, responsible freedom, and tough love. After each chapter, Quinn challenges you to assess yourself with respect to each practice and to formulate a strategy for personal growth.


• Building the Bridge As You Walk On It: A Guide for Leading Change
  by Robert E. Quinn
  Quinn shows how anyone can enter the fundamental state of leadership by engaging in the eight practices that center on the theme of ever-increasing integrity — reflective action, authentic engagement, appreciative inquiry, grounded vision, adaptive confidence, detached interdependence, responsible freedom, and tough love. After each chapter, Quinn challenges you to assess yourself with respect to each practice and to formulate a strategy for personal growth.


• Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life
  by Kevin Cashman
  Framed in seven simple yet profound "mastery areas," this book serves as an integrated coaching experience that helps leaders understand how to harness their authentic, value-creating influence and elevate their impact as individuals, in teams, and in organizations.


• Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life
  by Gregg Michael Levoy
  In this inspiring book, Levoy, formerly a columnist for the Cincinnati Inquirer, shares the personal journeys of an assortment of people who were willing to take risks to find their authentic selves, unsure whether they would achieve self-actualization or enrichment.


• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
  by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  In business and government, major money is spent on prediction. Uselessly, according to Taleb, who administers a severe thrashing to MBA- and Nobel Prize-credentialed experts who make their living from economic forecasting. A financial trader and current rebel with a cause, Taleb is mathematically oriented and alludes to statistical concepts that underlie models of prediction, while his expressive energy is expended on roller-coaster passages, bordering on gleeful diatribes, on why experts are wrong.


• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
  by Barbara W. Tuchman
  In this sweeping historical narrative, Barbara Tuchman writes of the cataclysmic 14th century, when the energies of medieval Europe were devoted to fighting internecine wars and warding off the plague. Some medieval thinkers viewed these disasters as divine punishment for mortal wrongs; others, more practically, viewed them as opportunities to accumulate wealth and power. This fascinating portrayal of a tumultuous time provides insights into the present and hope for the future.


• Mark Twain: A Life
  by Ron Powers
  Powers demonstrates that Twain embodied America during the tumultuous latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, from the divided self of the Civil War, through the unstable prosperity of the Gilded Age, to the verge of WWI. All the while, Twain asserted in both literature and life his confidence in New World progress over Old World conservatism.


• Personal History
  by Katherine Graham
  The owner of the Washington Post has chosen to be remarkably candid about the insecurities prompted by remote parents and a difficult marriage to the charismatic, manic-depressive Phil Graham, who ran the newspaper her father acquired. Katharine's account of her years as subservient daughter and wife is so painful that by the time she finally asserts herself at the Post following Phil's suicide in 1963 (more than halfway through the book), readers will want to cheer. After that, Watergate is practically an anticlimax.


• The Architecture of Happiness
  by Alain De Botton
  With this entertaining and stimulating book, de Botton examines the ways architecture speaks to us, evoking associations that, if we are alive to them, can put us in touch with our true selves and influence how we conduct our lives. Because of this, he contends, it's the architect's task to design buildings that contribute to happiness by embodying ennobling values.


• The Omnivore's Dilemma
  by Michael Pollan
  Pollan writes about how our food is grown — what it is, in fact, that we are eating. The book is really three in one: The first section discusses industrial farming; the second, organic food, both as big business and on a relatively small farm; and the third, what it is like to hunt and gather food for oneself. And each section culminates in a meal — a cheeseburger and fries from McDonald's; roast chicken, vegetables and a salad from Whole Foods; and grilled chicken, corn and a chocolate soufflé (made with fresh eggs) from a sustainable farm; and, finally, mushrooms and pork, foraged from the wild.


• Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World
  by Brian Walker and David Salt
  Resilience thinking offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down.


• Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
  by Bill McKibbin
  Challenging the prevailing wisdom that the goal of economies should be unlimited growth, McKibben argues that the world doesn't have enough natural resources to sustain endless economic expansion. Drawing the phrase "deep economy" from the expression "deep ecology," a term environmentalists use to signify new ways of thinking about the environment, he suggests we need to explore new economic ideas. Rather then promoting accelerated cycles of economic expansion we should concentrate on creating localized economies. Some of the ideas seem overly optimistic, nevertheless, McKibben's proposals for new, less growth-centered ways of thinking about economics are intriguing, and offer hope that change is possible.

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