Thanks Mudit Narain and Nivedita for looping me in. I have had a special relationship with books since I was very young. Hailing from a small town, I used to go to Lucknow every 6 months and buy 25-50 books on a wide range of topics in one go ;) Overtime, i built up my own personal library. Over the past few years I have mainly read non-fiction and some of the great ones that have influenced me and can highly recommend are: 1) Execution: The discipline of getting things done. By Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy. Ram Charan is one of the greatest business legends of our time. He has been the confidante and personal advisor to the some of the most successful CEOs of our times (at orgs like GE, Dupont, Bank of America, Tata Group) over the past 35 years. In this book he has distilled the time tested principles of how to get stuff done. Ram doesnt owns a home anywhere in the world. He has lived in hotels for the past 35 years ;) 2) Thinking Fast and Slow: by Daniel Kahnemann. This masterpiece from a Nobel Prize winner is the culmination of a lifetime of research on how the human mind works and how we make decisions (rational and irrational). A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact . You might want to watch Steve Jobs product launch videos after reading this :P 3) India Unbound: by Gurcharan Das. Chronicles the social and economic transformation of India post Independence. Gurcharan Das quit as the highly successful CEO of P&G India at the peak of his career for his scholarly pursuits.Thanks Yogesh for introducing me to this book :) India Grows at Night and The difficulty of being good are some other brilliant works of Das. 4) When Genius Failed: The rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management. by Roger Lowenstein, is the story of the first big hedge fund which imploded in the late 90s (and was the pre-cursor to a fed bailout orchestrated in collaboration with big banks). More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the making of a new elite. By Sebastian Mallaby is an excellent read as well. Too big to fail and The smartest guys in the room are some other great books in this category. Hedge Funds have been rewriting the rules of capitalism since the early 70s. As they say, the future of finance lies in the history of hedge funds :) 5) Gunahon ka Devta: by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. Some of Dinkars best works. If you want to experience what Veer Ras is and what a fiery role our poets played in our Independence Struggle, do read this. Although all of Dinkars works are Ojpoorn (hindi word), he has also written Urvashi. The most fiery are also the most romantic at hearts ;) 6) The Art of the Start: By Guy Kawasaki. The name says it all ;) Best books on Entrepreneurship I have read till date. 7) Power: Why some people have it and other people dont. by Jeffrey Pfeffer This is a life changing book. Insights on why just top performance is never enough and what you can do about it. Jeffrey is a legendary professor at Stanford. 8) Never Eat Alone: And other secrets to success one relationship at a time. by Keith Ferrazzi. Everything in this world is about people :) 9) Crucial Conversations: tools for talking when stakes are high. by Kerry Patterson. I finished this book day before yesterday ahead of a life changing conversation I was going to have ;) This book came out of the decade/s long Negotiation Project at HBS and Harvard Law School. Most successful people in the world are those who are able to handle difficult conversations, when emotions are running high and channel them towards a positive outcome. 10) The Pleasures of Counting: by T.W. Korner. One of the most fascinating books on mathematics. I remember one of my gurus - Rakesh Gaur Sir told me once Mathematics in the language God chose to write the Universe. Cant agree more. A similar book was: OOP Programming with C++. by Robert Lafore: Made me fall in love with Computer Science :) (This was class 7th).
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 15:56:41 +0000