Marc Sirkin's Mindnumbing Thoughts

I've been devouring business books for ages, I can't seem to get enough. The latest book I picked up is "What Would Google Do" by Jeff Jarvis. I'm about halfway through and will hopefully do a blog post on the book when I'm done if I can find the time. What hit me as I was reading it is that this book is clearly going to be my "new bible" - I even tweeted that it was already. Thinking back and looking through my old web site and my bookshelf in my office, I was curious what some of my old "bibles" have been - remember these beauties? The Innovators Dilemma - Clayton Christenson Mavericks at Work - Bill Taylor Rules for Revolutionaries - Guy Kawasaki Don't Make Me Think - Krug Cluetrain Manifesto - Searls/Weinberger - as relevant as ever, what were those guy smoking when they wrote this? Purple Cow - Seth Godin Going way back, I seem to remember a book called "Blur" that I obsessed over, as well as the one that got it all star...

I just finished reading Rick Pitino's latest book " Rebound Rules ." I was looking for some inspiration in both my professional and coaching life and found it here. This is a breezy read for those of us who read a lot of self help books, much of what Pitino talks about is well-tread in other books. That said, I especially liked some of what he has to say about managing young players. Granted, the difference between the type of coaching he does is a galaxy away from the type of coaching I do! What I loved most about the book however is how Pitino recounts his Celtics failure and how he rediscovered himself and his passions. His "PHD" (Passion, Hunger, Drive) framework is something that I will be using personally as I begin to plan for 2009. One other phrase that I really liked was the "darkness of doubt." I've had some recent failures myself in my professional life and realized that the doubt I felt was natural, but something that I simply need to m...

I heard Jonathan Zittrain speak at a CIO Magazine event about 9 months ago in Boston and had his book "The Future of the Internet" in a big pile up until about a month ago. The subtitle "and how to stop it" put me off a bit and in my usual way, I judged the book by it's cover, thinking that this was yet another explanation about how the Internet is about to collapse, sending us back to the dark ages. The thrust of the book however is all about "generativity" - the ability of certain technologies which allow users to create new and unexpected things from humble, typically underground or misunderstood beginnings (think... the Internet itself!). The PC as a generative platform however is probably the biggest and most effective example, it being at the very core of some of the concepts Zittrain tackles. The book uses some terrific (and recent) examples but ultimately leans on Wikipedia a bit too much. Have you noticed that many, many recent books lean on W...

I just finished reading a neat little book called " Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership through Storytelling " on a colleagues recommendation and really loved it. In short, it's a neat little fable about a Squirrel with a great idea on how to save her company, Squirrel, Inc. She thinks the company needs to stop burying nuts and start storing them! It's a quckie read but I took some key lessons in storytelling with me. How do you persuade people to change? How do you get people working together? How do you share knowledge? How do you tame the grapevine? How do you communicate who you are? How do you transmit values? How do you lead people into the future? Each chapter takes our hero through a different type of storytelling, each one optimized for the desired effects. It's a fun, quickie read that will leave you wanting to tell more stories!

With all my recent travels, I've had a chance to read some great stuff lately including " Sea of Monsters ," " Infected " by the sick and twisted Scott Siglar and most recently, " Little Brother " by the astoundingly terrific Cory Doctorow. I was prompted to post about Little Brother after reading a book review on Sci-fi.com who gave the book an A-. It's also got 4 stars on Amazon (23 reviews). I'd give it a solid A- as well, the imagination and use of current technologies really blew me away. I also have to throw in the fact that Doctorow uses the XBox as main character and plot device (I work at Microsoft) which I found hysterical, and totally plausible. If you are a geek, this book will have you nodding all the way through - from the ARG references and the fact that the characters end up LARPing their way to a terrific ending. If you aren't a geek (or if you are older than 30 and are curious), you'll be amazed at how emerging tech c...

Yes, I had to do it... I'm reading Ekhart Tolle's A New Earth and doing Oprah's web master class to boot. I'm very much enjoying it and learning a lot about myself and my ego. I will try to blog more about A New Earth later, but wanted to connect the dots to my current golfing obsession with a quote from a golf book I just finished. Bob Rotella's Golf is a Game of Confidence is a terrific book (read more here on my golf blog). I read it while on a trip to Seattle while I was finishing up the Rotella book. In a chapter about how Byron Nelson won eleven straight tournaments, Byron told Rotella that he never knew how he had scored until after his round. "He felt as if he played in a trance." The book goes on however, and startlingly hits one of Tolle's key concepts right on the head. "I would come in and I'd have to go hole by hole on my scorecard, carefully, to realize what I'd shot. I didn't ever know if I was five under, three over,...

Randomly picked up the graphic novel Glacial Period off the shelf at the library and was pleased to have stumbled onto a neat book. The first of a series, this book shows what archaeologists thousands of years from now might think of our culture (or at least a portion of it). This is a neat read and certainly got me thinking about how temporary things really are... a continuation of my mind numbing thoughts around the Singularity and society in general.

Cory Doctorow , one of my favorite authors has a new short story collection out . One of the stories, Printcrime even has it's own self-assembled comic. Download it , share it and print it now!