Reading list
(This page is very much a work in progress.)
Books that fundamentally changed how I looked at the world:
Who Really Matters: 
The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success by Art Kleiner. Discusses how every organization has an internal caste system, the pros/cons of being an insider vs an outsider, and how the negative effects of this dynamic can be mitigated.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. How seemingly unimportant actions and environmental factors can have a big impact on people’s perceptions and opinions.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and Fooled By Randomness:The Hidden Role of Change in Life and in the Markets, both by Nassim Taleb. Both brilliant books.
Why Men Are The Way They Are by Warren Farrell. A bit dated now, but still a great introduction to the experience of growing up male in America. Should be required reading for women.
The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do by Clotaire Rapaille. Why Americans believe trees are alive and cheese is dead, and the French believe the opposite.
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. The classic inspiration for patterns work in many disciplines.
More great books: less transformative perhaps than the ones above, but often more practical / useful /actionable.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burke. I personally believe that hands-on ability to get things done is an often underappreciated skill in business (where top execs seem to think all too often that Big Ideas are what’s hard, and implementation is trivial and left to underlings) . This book gives sound advice on the down-to-earth work of making business work.
Busier Than Ever! Why American Families Can’t Slow Down by Charles Darrah, James Freeman, J.A. English-Lueck. A nuanced ethnographic study of how families’ hectic lives are impacted by both their own choices and the opportunities and demands of the outside world.
