Feel Good Productivity
by Ali Abdaal
Celedon Books
If you’ve been on YouTube for 30 seconds, you’re probably familiar with Ali Abdaal, the affable doctor- turned-entrepreneur who, as a hobbyist health and productivity connoisseur, turned his avocation into a hugely successful vocation with over 6 million subscribers worldwide. He also mentors would-be YouTubers via online videos and articles and through his YouTube Academy. His first book, Feel Good Productivity posits that if you can make your work feel good, then productivity takes care of itself. Given the glut of productivity books on the market, this volume stands apart for the author’s shameless premise that work shouldn’t feel like work, seriousness is overrated, and it’s OK to veer from a grinding hustle culture to explore the ways in which positive emotions are the “fuel which drives the engine of human flourishing.” From practical tips to tame procrastination and reduce friction to scientifically-based reflections on how people become motivated to do hard things, it’s a breezy, earnest and refreshing change from the usual business-centric self-help fare.
Making With Data: Physical Design and Craft In a Data-Driven World
by Samuel Huron,
Till Nagel, Lora Oehlberg, Wesley Willett
CRC Press
Data has become our daily driver. In a world besieged by spreadsheets, dashboards and legions of business intelligence tools, this gorgeously illustrated volume asks: How can we give data physical form? And how might those creations change the ways we experience data and the stories it can tell? In the first major book to present such diversified physical representations of data, the authors adopt a multidisciplinary approach, taking perspectives from computer science, data science, graphic design, art, craft and architecture. There’s a stunning and functional sculpture-like cabinet based on snowpack measurements recorded in the Sierra Nevada from 1980 to 2010, an origami pattern designed to encode data, and a fascinating visualization of community-generated data that uses robotic versions of familiar pie and bar charts. Beautiful and inspiring.
Workforce Ecosystems: Reaching Strategic Goals With People, Partners, and Technologies
by Elizabeth J. Altman,
David Kiron, Jeff Schwartz, Robin Jones
MIT Press
On the MIT Sloan Management Review website there’s a fun and interactive report that can help you benchmark your organization’s readiness to adopt a workforce ecosystem approach to management. But just what is a workforce ecosystem and why is it considered one of the biggest ideas in the business universe? This engaging, must-read book explains all. Given a growing, contemporary workforce consisting of traditional employees as well as external contributors like contractors, service providers, app developers and gig workers who are often located in different regions, it’s a strategic approach to the future of work that challenges companies to consider a different mindset and to “manage their complex, interconnected workforces in a more intentional way” so that the disparate parts can fluidly operate as one. Hands-down one of the best business books we’ve read in a long time.
