Vacation plans: My son wants to go to San Diego and Los Angeles during his summer vacation, so we'll do that.
Reading wish list: Apart from my regular technology magazines and books, I am planning to read The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. I read portions of Pausch's lecture at Carnegie Mellon on the Web and was really inspired by some of his views on how life is a race against time and how one should manage it to make the best out of it.
Being part of company that implements solutions to give people who are less fortunate in life access to the benefits that they deserve, my job almost always is a race against time. So I strongly believe I can find a lot of relevance in this book and can learn a lot from it.
Text-delivery medium of choice: Although I use my iPhone to read various stuff, I was not able to get an electronic version of this book, so I'll read the paperback.
Book you'd most recommend to IT colleagues:Connect the Dots by Rashmi Bansal. This is a book that presents success stories of 20 entrepreneurs who had no formal MBA degrees and didn't hail from successful business families but defied all odds to become some of the most successful entrepreneurs. There is a lot to learn for IT people from this book, because technology would not have been where it stands today if innovators like the people profiled didn't dare to try to bridge the gap between vision and reality. This is what every person in IT needs to do.
"It's not that [members] aren't reading, it's that they're not reading very diversely, so we want to encourage that," he says. "We're trying to get people to become readers."
The RLF list includes 35 books, mostly nonfiction works focused on management, leadership and technology. Rouse notes, however, that there are some fiction pieces in there too. "We throw in some novels just to break up the pace, which is something that [most participants] aren't used to," he says.
Whether fiction or non, Rouse says the selected books are chosen to impart management and business lessons as well as encourage readers to take a wider view of their work and the world.
Here's RLF's current reading list:
Brain Rules by John Medina
Creating the Good Life by James O'Toole
Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler and Stephen R. Covey
The Extreme Future by James Canton
First Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
Gandhi (the movie)
The Heart Aroused (CD) by David Whyte
Heart of Change by John P. Kotter
How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson
Leadership Is an Art by Max DePree
The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem and Warren Bennis
Leadership Passages by David L. Dotlich, James L. Noel and Norman Walker
A Leader's Legacy by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Managing Transitions by William Bridges and Susan Bridges
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Nibble Theory by Kaleel Jamison
Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon Mackenzie
Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
Penguin State-of-the-World Atlas by Dan Smith
The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
The Prince by Machiavelli
Speed Lead by Kevan Hall
Synchronicity by Joseph Jarowski
The Theft of the Spirit by Carl A. Hammerschlag
True North by Bill George
Two Old Women by Velma Wallis
Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
The Zen of Listening by Rebecca Z. Shafir
Mary K. Pratt is a Computerworld contributing writer. Contact her at marykpratt@verizon.net.
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