I greatly enjoyed The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem, which covers 9 stories of crises and how leaders approached them. The Man Who Discovered Quality by Andrea Gabor is an interesting story of W. Edwards Deming, the American who revolutionized post-WWII Japanese manufacturing with statistical approaches to reducing variance. Issac Newton by James Gleick conveys what it was like for Newton to essentially invent modern physical science in a pre-scientific world. Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg is a good counterpoint to inspiring tech origin stories: legendary coders coming together to build an amazing product and… basically failing.
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