Friday 29 July 2016

Book Reviews : Best Books of July on Business & Leadership .


According to amazon.com ,these books have been selected as the best books to read in July 2016. So book lovers, let the reading begin !

1.


Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez


Review :
Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a data center powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (Airbnb) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most provocative chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez.
After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team, turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg and Chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg’s desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sports cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley cad.
Now this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization, and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, how will we survive?
The reality is, Silicon Valley capitalism is very simple: Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-between.
Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.
Price : $17.99

2.

Great Teams: 16 Things High Performing Organizations Do Differently Hardcover – July 19, 2016 by Don Yaeger 

Review : 
There is nothing more magical than watching a team come together, to manage adversity as a group, selflessly give to others, to find common purpose. Inspiring that to happen year-in and year-out is what keeps us in leadership. Don Yaeger has studied the best of the best. Now it is our turn to study this book.
Price : $17.65

3.

Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country Hardcover – July 12, 2016 by Alex Cuadros
Review : 
For readers of Michael Lewis comes an engrossing tale of a country’s spectacular rise and fall, intertwined with the story of Brazil’s wealthiest citizen, Eike Batista—a universal story of hubris and tragedy that uncovers the deeper meaning of this era of billionaires.
Price : $16.80

4.

The Laws of Wealth: Psychology and the secret to investing success Hardcover – June 27, 2016 by Daniel Crosby
Review : 
In The Laws of Wealth, psychologist and behavioral finance expert Daniel Crosby offers an accessible and applied take on a discipline that has long tended toward theory at the expense of the practical. Readers are treated to real, actionable guidance as the promise of behavioral finance is realised and practical applications for everyday investors are delivered.
Price : $23.81


5.

Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown Hardcover – July 12, 2016 by Gerri Hirshey
Review :  When Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl first appeared in 1962, it whistled into buttoned-down America like a bombshell: Brown declared that it was okay― even imperative―for unmarried women to have and enjoy a sex life, and that equal rights for women should extend to the bedroom and the workplace. “How dare you?” thundered newspapers, radio hosts, and (mostly male) citizens. But more than two million women bought the book and hailed her as a heroine. Brown was also pilloried as a scarlet woman and a traitor to the women’s movement when she took over the failing Hearst magazine Cosmopolitan and turned it into a fizzy pink guidebook for “do-me” feminism. As the first magazine geared to the rising wave of single working women, it sold wildly. Today, more than 68 million young women worldwide are still reading some form of Helen Gurley Brown’s audacious yet comforting brand of self-help.
Price : $16.07

6.

Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses – July 5, 2016
Review : 
An indispensable and inspiring guide to creativity in the workplace and beyond, drawing on art, psychology, science, sports, law, business, and technology to help you land big ideas in the practical world.
Anyone from CEO to freelancer knows how hard it is to think big, let alone follow up, while under pressure to get things done. Art Thinking offers practical principles, inspiration, and a healthy dose of pragmatism to help you navigate the difficulties of balancing creative thinking with driving toward results.
Price :  $16.19

7.

Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies 1st Edition by Calestous Juma
Review :  The rise of artificial intelligence has rekindled a long-standing debate regarding the impact of technology on employment. This is just one of many areas where exponential advances in technology signal both hope and fear, leading to public controversy. This book shows that many debates over new technologies are framed in the context of risks to moral values, human health, and environmental safety. But it argues that behind these legitimate concerns often lie deeper, but unacknowledged, socioeconomic considerations. Technological tensions are often heightened by perceptions that the benefits of new technologies will accrue only to small sections of society while the risks will be more widely distributed. Similarly, innovations that threaten to alter cultural identities tend to generate intense social concern. As such, societies that exhibit great economic and political inequities are likely to experience heightened technological controversies.
Price :  $28.45


8.

For the Love of Money: A Memoir Hardcover – July 19, 2016 by Sam Polk 
Review : 
In 2014, a former hedge fund trader’s New York Times Sunday Review front page article about wealth addicition instantly went viral. This is his unflinching memoir about coming of age on Wall Street, fighting to overcome the ghosts of his past—and the radical new way he now defines success.
At just thirty years old, Sam Polk was a senior trader for one of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street, on the verge of making it to the very top. When he was offered an annual bonus of $3.75 million, he grew angry because it was not enough. In that moment he knew he had lost himself in his obsessive pursuit of money. And he had come to loathe the culture—the shallowness, the sexism, the crude machismo—and Wall Street’s use of wealth as the sole measure of a person’s worth. He decided to walk away from it all.

Price : $16.02

9.

The Effective Manager Hardcover – July 5, 2016 by Mark Horstman
Review :  The how-to guide for exceptional management from the bottom up
The Effective Manager is a hands-on practical guide to great management at every level. Written by the man behind Manager Tools, the world's number-one business podcast, this book distills the author's 25 years of management training expertise into clear, actionable steps to start taking today. First, you'll identify what "effective management" actually looks like: can you get the job done at a high level? Do you attract and retain top talent without burning them out? Then you'll dig into the four critical behaviors that make a manager great, and learn how to adjust your own behavior to be the leader your team needs. You'll learn the four major tools that should be a part of every manager's repertoire, how to use them, and even how to introduce them to the team in a productive, non-disruptive way.
 Price : $18.81

10.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman
Review : 
Why did the New York Stock Exchange suspend trading without warning on July 8, 2015? Why did certain Toyota vehicles accelerate uncontrollably against the will of their drivers? Why does the programming inside our airplanes occasionally surprise its creators? 
After a thorough analysis by the top experts, the answers still elude us. 
You don’t understand the software running your car or your iPhone. But here’s a secret: neither do the geniuses at Apple or the Ph.D.’s at Toyota—not perfectly, anyway. No one, not lawyers, doctors, accountants, or policy makers, fully grasps the rules governing your tax return, your retirement account, or your hospital’s medical machinery. The same technological advances that have simplified our lives have made the systems governing our lives incomprehensible, unpredictable, and overcomplicated. 
Price :  $10.41



Please visit www.amazon.com to get your copies.

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