Recommendations: Read and Listen

New and Interesting Inputs

New ideas require new ideas. We all need inputs to push our thinking and create new insights. As we near summer, here are some things we are reading and listening to, and recommend:

The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida

A fascinating and thought-provoking look at the rise of the “Creative Class.” Thick but worth it if you’re interested in creativity, value drivers, and systems thinking:

“This Creative Class is made up of engineers and managers, academics and musicians, researchers, designers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, poets, and programmers, whose work turns on the creation of new forms. Increasingly, Florida observes, this Creative Class determines how workplaces are organized, which companies prosper or go bankrupt, and which cities thrive, stagnate or decline. Florida…examines its global impact and explores the factors that shape “quality of place” in our changing cities and suburbs.”

How I Built This with Guy Raz: Therabody with Jason Wersland

This podcast tells the story of Therabody, but it’s also a story of an individual’s path to find purpose; it’s a story of pursuit — the pursuit of passions, the human want to make a positive impact in the world, and the role chance or serendipity can play in how events transpire.

Dark Wire by Joseph Cox

“The inside story of the largest law-enforcement sting operation ever, in which the FBI made its own tech start-up to wiretap the world, shows how cunning both the authorities and drug traffickers have become, with privacy implications for everyone.”

If you’re not one for reading, you can listen to a great podcast with the author, on Decoder with Nilay Patel: How the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld

Enjoy!