HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER
Title: Business Best Sellers
Competency: self-development,
Who benefits: people who like to read as part of their development
Consultant Usage: background material
What’s it about? Points I will concede up front about today’s posting: (1) Professional Blogs are not supposed to be mushy; (2) I am over-the-top in sentimentality; (3) Nostalgia “ain’t†what it used to be.
With all that out of the way, as Valentine’s Day approaches I can’t help reminisce about my first true love and college girl friend, Marlene Turner … (Hi Marlene, if you are out there). We had some great moments. My favorite memory is Sunday mornings. We would go out and get coffee, juice, pastries, The New York Times and the Washington Post. We would return to the house I shared with 5 other guys and we would take over either the living room or the dining room table and for the remainder of the morning and early afternoon we totally escaped into the world as presented by those two newspapers. Â
Both of us loved the book sections of the two papers. Fortunately we had two papers and thus two book sections so we could both begin with our favorite part of the Sunday papers.Â
There has been a lot of change over the ensuing years. Joyfully, one can still purchase the New York Times Book Section as part of the Sunday Times or in some places, as a standalone. And of course in these “modern timesâ€, one can also look at most of it online. Reading online loses something emotionally for those of us raised in an earlier time. Still, it is most convenient. It just doesn’t feel the same, but I suppose one can still get coffee, juice, pastries on Sunday morning and sit on the floor with that special someone. Only difference is no messy newspapers, just laptops.
Less joyfully, or more precisely, sadly this Valentine’s Day marks the last publication of Book World, the Washington Post’s Sunday Book Section. I suppose if there is to be a silver lining, the online version will continue. And books will still be reviewed in the paper, just not as many and not in one convenient location.
If you are inclined to find the best selling NY Times list of business books, you would find on their latest list books like (1) Superfreakeconomics (the Freakeconomics sequel); (4) The Four-Hour Workweek (a personal growth book); and (9) How The Mighty Fall (Jim Collins tells how companies fail in stages, and how their decline can be detected and reversed).
The WP Book World does not have a section for business books. One just has to scroll down recent reviews to see if there is anything of interest. In the old days we would call it serendipitous or moments of whimsy. Today we would call it “stumbleâ€. But the good news was that in my investigative research regarding the future of book reviews, I stumbled on a review of Your Flying Car Awaits, a serendipitous discovery about a whimsical book of future predictions that never happened – and a few outrageous predictions that did. I am for sure ordering the book and perhaps I shall review it here … sometime in the future.
Meanwhile, don’t forget Valentine’s Day … and maybe give a loved one a great book!
Catch you later.
[tags]New York Times, New York Times book review, New York Times best sellers, Washington Post, Washington Post Book World, business best sellers, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]
Bill Bradley
Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.
