I'm gonna get dressed for success...
© Roxette
I have a credit card now, I have registered for GMAT and I can order books from Amazon. So it’s time to talk about books :)
I’m a books worm – I love reading. Commuting to work for about 2 hours a day, I have time to read (what else to do in a tube?) – and I use this time :) I also read books before going to bed (not now, now I read GMAT textbooks and do GMAT problems…)
I read both in English and in Russian (cannot say I read in German, because it was just one book so far). I like fiction and I also like good business books – the latter I’m going to talk about.
I’m not going to tell you about books in UI-design and eXtremeProgramming – if you are an IT-professional, you may know more than I do. If not – then it won't be interesting to you.
I’d like to talk about finance books, project management books and the like. Any comments about these are welcomed – I’m going to spend some money at Amazon ;) Pre-MBA reading lists are also welcomed.
Let’s get it started… yeah…
Project Management
- Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, Peopleware – is a definitely ‘must read’ book.
- Ed Sullivan, Under Pressure – is about project management in small and medium IT-company.
- Edward Yourdon, Death March – great book. And I read exactly at the time of participating in some kind of ‘dead’ project. You will get to know how to survive in them without this book (you'll have to), but this book gives all the necessary guidelines in painless way.
General books (just for a start and if you think of becoming an entrepreneur one day)
- Bill Gates, Business @ the speed of thought – this is a kind of book, that tells you: "What, you are still sitting on you a**? Go and grab that opportunity NOW!"
- Jim Collins, From good to great – another good book about why ordinary companies become great and why others don’t
- Jonas Ridderstrale & Kjell Nordström, Funky Business and Karaoke Capitalism – both books are short and extremely motivating
Finance books
I was advised to read David Bach, Smart Couples Finish Rich and Suze Orman, The Laws of Money, The Lessons of Life, so this is where I’m going to start.
Fiction, but business-related
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged - I wrote a post dedicated to this book here.
- Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, Deadline - a president of some country decides to make a great experiment: he launches a number of software projects to create rival products to software bestsellers. He also asks the manager to try different approaches with different teams (3 teams are working on one project in parallel) and see which one is better.
- Eliyahu Goldratt & Jeff Cox, The Goal - This is a theory of constraints described in a captivating way. A manager of a plant tries to make his plant work. He has 3 months to make it profitable. Day-by-day, week-by-week... will he succeed?
- Michael Ridpath, Final venture - this thriller combines four areas I am keen on: the hero is an MBA grad, works in a VC on the high tech and healthcare start-ups. Someone has killed his father-in-law and he needs to find the killer quickly or else the police is going to accuse him.
