Top Techies Share Their Summer Reading Lists

Katrina Lane

Senior vice president and chief technology officer
Harrah's Entertainment Inc., Las Vegas

Vacation plans: I am very much looking forward to several long weekends, including one in San Diego and another in Phoenix to see various family members. I'm still in the process of planning trips to see friends.

Reading wish list: Based on a recommendation from a colleague, I plan to read The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team With Positive Energy by Jon Gordon. Also, Changes (Dresden Files, Book 12) by Jim Butcher, because every brain needs some candy, and sci-fi/fantasy helps broaden the view of what one considers possible.

Text-delivery medium of choice: Paper for now. Most of my reading is done at the gym, and paperback books can better survive getting knocked off the elliptical. But I got a Kindle as a gift and plan to load it up soon so I can carry many books at once.

Book you'd most recommend to IT colleagues: I recently read The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande and thought it was a great example of extending an idea used in some industr

Anthony Murabito

CIO
Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Lexington, Mass.

Vacation plans: We have a week planned at Saratoga in August and a week at the beach in New Jersey in early September.

Reading wish list: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. While I think his tone is somewhat north of bombastic, many of his previous views have come into crystal reality. I, too, believe the IT organization of 2020 will be a small, loosely coupled team that works in a matrix with business technologists throughout their organization.

Also, The Spy by Clive Cussler. I read everything that Cussler and Harlan Coben write. I read Coben's Caught in two days, right after it was released.

Finally, my birthday gift from my son -- Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern. I will leave that one without any comment.

Text-delivery medium of choice: I own an iPad and a Kindle, but I still tend to read the majority of my books the old-fashioned way. I still have a bookcase to fill.

Book you'd most recommend to IT colleagues: Adrian Slywotzky's Value Migration: How to Think Several Moves Ahead of the Competition , because it teaches you to constantly assess where your value points are within an organization and how to relocate them when you lose them.

And my bible: Managing Information Strategically by James McGee. I learned much about the value and importance of information from this book. For a book written in 1993, it still rings loud and clear with my beliefs and principles on running an IT organization.