Thursday, April 14, 2011

17 Books for L&D Folks...

My bookshelf...
More than 6 months back, in the September of 2010, I wrote the post: 27 Books for L&D Folks... It's time for part 2 of the post. Since then, I have acquired a Kindle and, very recently, an iPad. Kindle has reshaped my reading dramatically--making it social and part of a larger whole, connecting me to a set of folks similarly impassioned. Reading moved from being solitary to social. I became a part of a worldwide reading club. Somehow, and social psychologists will understand this--the ability to share and connect motivated me to read more, taking me beyond my domain, making me exploratory. I thought I would share my reading list of the last 6 months here...It's a random assortment but each one has expanded my thought-process in some way. Not all are related to learning or the workplace...This time, I came up with a list of 17.

  1. The New Learning Architect by Clive Shepherd 
  2. The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today by Jeanner Meister
  3. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt 
  4. The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) by Jono Bacon 
  5. The Agile Samurai: How Agile Masters Deliver Great Software by Jonathan Rasmusson 
  6. The Knowledge Evolution: Expanding Organizational Intelligence by Verna Allee  
  7. Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block 
  8. If You Want To Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda Ueland 
  9. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
  10. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies by Scott Page
  11. Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman  
  12. Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used by Peter Block
  13. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire  
  14. Crucial Confrontations by Kerry Patterson 
  15. Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich 
  16. The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan  
  17. Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement by Ruth Clark

Organizations as Communities — Part 2

Yesterday, in a Twitter conversation with Rachel Happe regarding the need for organizations to function as communities, I wrote the follow...