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To survive, you need facts and information. Never had information been available so easily. To grow your professional career and do your job better, you need knowledge. The new medium of Internet has made it far efficient and convenient to acquire skills and knowledge. But to become a leader, you need to have a well-rounded perspective. That comes through discovery and introspection. For ages, books have been the most trusted and effective aid in doing that.
“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski,” writes Nicholas Carr, the leading writer on technology and culture, in an article Is Google making us stupid? Carr’s book on the subject The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller.
The cognitive impact of Internet is a much deeper discussion. What we want to point here is that books, especially books that help you reflect and contemplate, are as much a need for developing perspectives now, as they were 100 years back. All that we have done here is to create a list of such books published in 2017 we think will help you build a perspective.
Why 2017? Elementary. We do not think we are qualified to make a list of all time books. We are trying to do what we are committed to: reporting and analyzing to make the knowledge a little more accessible; we are clearly not into advising. We are primarily reporting, extensively flipping through many books, not even trying to read them cover to cover. The idea is not to review them; but to decide if it is worth reading.
That probably tells you a bit more about the reading list. The books are not necessarily the books that will help you in your everyday jobs or to develop some leadership skills. That is the reason we call it the not-so-essential reading list. You can just ignore this list. It will not impact ou next promotion or next assignment even slightly. However, we have kept the books relevant to your work so that you can identify with the content; not books on fine arts of films delivering similar messages.
It is not exactly ironic—though neither was it intentional—that the list starts with World Without Mind, by Franklin Foer, a book that dwells on the same subject of how Internet is making us duller; but unlike Carr, Foer’s villain is not the medium per se but the corporations controlling them—Facebook, Google, and Amazon, in particular. You do not have to agree with him, but he does provide a line of thought that is worth following.
The books are classified into four categories— Big Picture, Business/Management, Technology and Self Improvement. By the way, we did the classification after creating the complete list. The purpose is to make the list slightly more usable—and nothing more. You may even ignore the classification. Some of the books are very much your everyday business guides. But they are there because they either make a new point or do ‘the connecting the
dots’ a lot better. The information about the books are taken from Amazon.in. You may find different editions outside India.
Happy Reading.
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