Resources & Suggested Reading

The following lists of books are those that I highly recommend, and often find myself referring to colleagues, students, and friends. As much as I hate to break books out categorically,* I’ve applied some categorization here as a map of sorts to various domains of thought that you may specifically be interested in. The exception to this is the first list, which are books that I think everyone should read as a means to understanding our world (including history of civilization and culture, politics, industry and economics, society and philosophy, and technology) and the role we individually and collectively play in it. These books are not listed in any particular order. All links are affiliate links, but please check with your local independent book store before giving your money to the big guy.

*I believe all knowledge is connected, and insights from any domain can be applied to any other. Expertise and the plague of indexicality often undermines our ability to identify novel and previously unconsidered possibilities. It’s important to apply a post-disciplinary epistemology to all learning and creative endeavors.

General Knowledge / Emergent Contextual Awareness

• Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things

• Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay

• William Appleman Williams, Contours of American History

• Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

• Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity

• David Graeber, Debt

• David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

• Thomas Picketty, Capital and Ideology

• Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

• Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters

• Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists

• Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend

• Fareed Zakaria, The Post American World

• Steven Sloman & Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion

• Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe

• Neil deGrasse Tyson & Donald Goldsmith, Origins

• Matt Taibbi & Molly Crabapple, The Divide

• Umair Haque, Betterness

• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

• Tim Urban, What’s our Problem?

Work Theory, Org Design, Value Creation

• Frederic LaLoux, Reinventing Organizations

• Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini, Humanocracy

• David Frayne, The Refusal of Work

• Andrea Komlosy, Work: The Last 1000 Years

• Richard Donkin, The History of Work

• David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

• David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

• Jeffrey Pfeffer, Dying for a Paycheck

• Aaron Dignan, Brave New Work

• Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

• William Whyte & Joseph Nocera, The Organization Man

• Amy Webb, The Signals are Talking

• Peter Thiel, Zero to One

• Umair Haque, Betterness

• Gemma Hartley, Fed Up

• Kate Raworth, Donut Economics

• Jaron Lanier, Who Owns The Future

• Additional resources on the Reinventing Work website

Creativity & Design

• Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World

• Frederick Brooks Jr, The Design of Design

• Scott Page, The Difference

• Elliot Samuel Paul & Scott Barry Kaufman, The Philosophy of Creativity

• Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything

• Jessica Helfand, Design: The Invention of Desire

• Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question

• Roger Martin, The Opposable Mind

• Sam Leith, Words Like Loaded Pistols

• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

• James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

• Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create

• Brian McDonald, Invisible Ink

• Thomas Wendt, Design for Dasein

• Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

• Kenya Hara, Designing Design

Design (research & strategy) Tools & Methods

• Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot & Jessica Hoffman Davis, The Art & Science of Portraiture

• Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy

• Thomas Lockwood, Design Thinking

• IDEO, Design Research Ethics

• Robert Curedale, Experience Maps

• Marc Stickdorn & Jakob Schneider, This is Service Design Thinking

• Vijay Kumar, 101 Design Methods

• IDEO, Human Centered Design Toolkit

• Bella Martin & Bruce Hanington, Universal Methods of Design

• Hugh Dubberly, How do you Design? [PDF]

• Patrick Newberry & Kevin Farnham, Experience Design

• Don Koberg & Jim Bagnall, The Universal Traveler

Futures Theory & Practice

• Amy Webb, The Signals are Talking

• Scott Smith & Madeline Ashby, How to Future

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

• Ytasha L. Womack, Afrofuturism

• Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

• Elliot Montgomery & Chris Woebken, Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual

• Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking

• Peter Frase, Four Futures

• Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures

• R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

• Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic, Global Catastrophic Risks

• Ted Chu, Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential

Philosophy & Spirituality

• Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve

• Karen Armstrong, A History of God

• Rob Bell, Love Wins

• Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

• Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

• Merold Westphal, Suspicion & Faith

• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

• Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought

• George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

• Umberto Eco, Semiotics & the Philosophy of Language

• John Caputo, Hermeneutics

• John Caputo, The Folly of God

• Esther Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

• Esther Meek, Loving to Know

• Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ

• Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

• Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity

• Sam Harris, Waking Up

• Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

• Erik Wielenberg, Robust Ethics

• Steve Hagen, Buddhism Plain and Simple

• Rob Bell, What We Talk About When We Talk About God

• David Chapman, Meaningness (metablog)

• James Hollis, Living an Examined Life

• David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Education, Learning, & Parenting

• Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School (start here)

• Julie Bogart, The Brave Learner

• Deborah MacNamara & Gordon Neufeld, Rest, Play, Grow

• Peter Gray, Free to Learn

• Sir Ken Robinson, Creative Schools

• Ainsley Arment, Call of the Wild and Free

• John Gatto, Dumbing Us Down

• John Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction

• Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind

• Tony Wagner, Creating Innovators

• Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question

• Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

• Dan Seigel & Tina Bryson, The Whole Brain Child

• Dan Seigel & Tina Bryson, No Drama Discipline

• Linda K. Murphy, Declarative Language Handbook

• Elaine N. Aron Ph.D., The Highly Sensitive Child