Punished by Rewards

Advice to Founders and CEOs - Dear Founder (Maynard Webb) - The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman) - The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman) - The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk) - Build (Tony Fadell) - Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest) - The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary) Finance - Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w... (https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting]%28https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting%29) - How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai) - Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight) Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting) - The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham) Legal - Acceleration (Ryan Roberts) - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy) Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit) - Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore) - Zone to Win (Geoff Moore)…

Franz de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics". It's nominally about the social relationships of a chimp colony in a Dutch zoo. But it made me see the extent to which humans are just another great ape, and a lot of human dynamics are really primate dynamics, especially around social power. Johnstone's "Impro". It's about improvisational theater, and mainly meant for people learning improv. But the section on status transactions helped me see a lot about how we express those primate dominance dynamics. There's also great material on the nature of creativity. "Getting to Yes" is a great book about business negotiation, but is lessons about shifting discussions from zero-sum to positive-sum are things I use a lot. Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" is a way of thinking about psychology (and our inference of mind) by examining imaginary robots. "The Toyota Way" and other books on Lean Manufacturing are about running extremely effective manufacturing operations. But they have deeply changed how I think about systems of making software and running businesses. Other great books in this category include "Toyota Kata" and "Principles of Product Development Flow".…

+1 on "Nonviolent Communication" - if anyone is interested I have some directive like notes from the book here https://blog.abuiles.com/reading-feed/nonviolent-communicati... (https://blog.abuiles.com/reading-feed/nonviolent-communication/) -- going through the book is important for the context but this can give you a quick overview of what it is about. Other books in my list are: - Punished by rewards by Alfie Kohn - On the shortness of life by Seneca

Impro by Keith Johnstone The Inner Game of Tennis A Guide to Better Movement: The Science and Practice of Moving with More Skill and Less Pain Punished by Rewards Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution by Bowles

I only read non-fiction that's counterintuitive. I figure, hey, I'm pretty smart, so if it's intuitive then I can probably figure it out on my own. A list of stuff I cite most often: No Contest & Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton PG's essays & ITConversations interviews The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto The Singularity is Near by Kurzweil This graph: http://alexkrupp.com/picture_library/plot.jpg Dee Hock's essay on leadership A handful of blog posts by Mark Cuban All Marketers are Liars & Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. All of the books that Seth recommends are also worth reading. Bruce Schneier's interview on ITConversations Magic Ink, an essay by Bret Victor War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges The Cluetrain Manifesto (the book) I'm sure there's a lot more, but that's what comes to mind right now.

No Contest / Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn) The Underground History of American Education (John Taylor Gatto)