New Title: I’m Feeling Lucky

Title: I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

 

Author:  Douglas Edwards 

• Hardcover:432 pages
• Publisher:Allen Lane (28 July 2011)
• ISBN-10:1846145120
• ISBN-13:978-1846145124
• Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.6 x 4 cm

Product Description

Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to a wheelbarrow. No academic analysis or bystander’s account can capture it. Now Douglas Edwards, Employee Number 59, takes readers inside the Googleplex for the closest look you can get without an ID card, giving readers a chance to fully experience the potent mix of camaraderie and competition that makes up the company that changed the world. Edwards, Google’s first director of marketing and brand management, describes it as it happened. From the first, pioneering steps of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s young, idiosyncratic partners to the evolution of the company’s famously nonhierarchical structure (where every employee finds a problem to tackle or a feature to create and works independently), through the physical endurance feats of the company’s engineers (both on and off the roller-hockey field) to its ethos to always hire someone smarter than yourself, I’m Feeling Lucky captures for the first time the unique, self-invented, culture of the world’s most transformative corporation. Welcome to the “Google Experience”.

About the Author

Douglas Edwards was director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google from 1999 to 2005 and was responsible for setting the tone and direction of the company’s communications with its users.

 

Great Book : Small Is Beautiful

Title: Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered

 

Author:  E F Schumacher

 

Paperback:288 pages

• Publisher:Vintage; New Ed edition (18 Aug 2011)
• LanguageEnglish
• ISBN-10:0099225611
• ISBN-13:978-0099225614
• Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.4 x 2.2 cm

Product Description

Small is Beautiful is E. F. Schumacher’s stimulating and controversial study of economics and its purpose. This remarkable book examines our modern economic system – its use of resources and impact on how we live – questioning whether they reflect what we truly care about. The revolutionary ideas are as pertinent, inspirational and thought-provoking today as when they were first published in 1973.

About the Author

Before the publication of Small is Beautiful, his bestselling reappraisal of Western economic attitudes, Dr E. F. Schumacher was already well known as an economist, journalist and progressive entrepreneur. He was Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970, and was also the originator of the concept of Intermediate Technology for developing countries and Founder and Chairman of the Intermediate Technology Development Group Ltd (now Practical Action). He also served as President of the Soil Association (Britains largest organic farming organisation, founded thirty years ago) and as Director of the Scott-Bader Company (pathfinders in polymer chemistry and common ownership). 

Born in Germany, he first came to England in 1930 as a Rhodes Scholar to study economics at New College, Oxford. Later, at the age of twenty-two, he taught economics at New College, Oxford. Later, at the age of twenty-two, he taught economics at Columbia University, New York. As he found theorising without practical experience unsatisfying, he then went into business, farming and journalism. He resumed the academic life for a period at Oxford during the war, afterwards serving as Economic Adviser to the British Control Commission in Germany from 1946 to 1950. In later years, his advice on problems of rural development was sought by many overseas governments. 

Dr Schumacher was awarded the CBE in 1974. He died in 1977.

Book Recommendation: The Social Animal

Title: The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens

Author:  David Brooks

• Paperback:430 pages
• Publisher:Short Books Ltd (5 May 2011)
• LanguageEnglish
• ISBN-10:1907595449
• ISBN-13:978-1907595448
• Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 15.2 x 3.4 cm

Product Description

How do we achieve success? Are some people more likely than others to end up in a good relationship? With a happy family life? A rewarding career?

Forget everything you thought you knew about happiness and fulfilment. Let David Brooks take you on a journey – an adventure in the unconscious. It will change the way you see yourself, and the world.

In the past 30 years we have learnt more about the human brain than in the previous 3000 – a scientific revolution has occurred. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind – the place where the majority of the brain’s work gets done, where our most important life decisions are made, where character is formed and the seeds of accomplishment grow.

In this illuminating and compelling book, David Brooks weaves a vast array of new research into the lives of two fictional characters, Harold and Erica, following them from infancy to old age. In so doing, he reveals a fundamental new understanding of human nature. He outlines a new definition of success, highlighting what economists call non-cognitive skills – those hidden qualities that can’t be easily counted or measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfilment.

The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure. Impossible to put down, it is an essential book for our time – one that will have a broad social impact and change the way we see ourselves and the world.

About the Author

David Brooks has millions of readers worldwide for his New York Times column. His influence has only grown since the publication of his book Bobos In Paradise. New York Magazine called him the essential columnist of our time in a recent profile. He lives in Washington D.C.