Although these essays were originally written as commentaries on books that were distributed to members of the CBI Network, it would be unfair to call them book reviews.  They take the books they
discuss as starting points, but then they go off in their own directions.  Their common theme is that they all have something to say about business.


A Brief Regression into Statistics

The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century, by David Salsburg


Consciousness, Awareness, Emotion, and the Self

The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, by Antonio R. Damasio


The Democratic Disruptiveness of Peer-to-Peer Computing

Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, by Andy Oram


Designing Computers So They Don’t Waste Our Time

The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems, by Jef Raskin


The Epidemiology of Ideas, Viruses, and Sneezing

Unleashing the Ideavirus, by Seth Godin


The Global Economy: All Connected, but Nobody in Charge

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, by Thomas L. Friedman


Helping Global Capitalism to Work

Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, by George Soros


How to Burn Through $130 Million in 18 Months

boo hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe, by Ernst Malmsten, Erik Portanger, and Charles Drazin


The Invisible Heart that Keeps the Economy Alive

The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, by Nancy Folbre


Learning from Nature (or Not)

Cat’s Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People, by Steven Vogel


Life Sciences and the Survival of the Fittest (Countries)

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth, by Juan Enriquez


The Natural Adaptive Complexity of Business

The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprises, by John Henry Clippinger, III, ed.


Only by Forgetting Can We Remember Anything

The Sevens Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, by Daniel L. Schacter


Poetry Workshops and Performance Reviews

Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry…, by Richard P. Gabriel


Problems, Predicaments, and Paradox

Management of the Absurd, by Richard Farson


Property Rights and Economic Development

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, by Hernando de Soto


The Psychopathologies of CEOs

The Leadership Mystique: A User’s Manual for the Human Enterprise, by Manfred Kets de Vries


Putting a Price Tag on Natural Resources

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins


Reading the Comics

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud


Rebuilding Economics from the Bottom Up

Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, by Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell


Reengineering MIT

Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change, by Rosalind Williams


Seeing the Story through a Science Photographer’s Eyes

Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image, by Felice Frankel


The Smell of Something Overlooked

Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Sense of Smell, by Lyall Watson


Stupid Robots are a Smart Idea

Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, by Rodney A. Brooks


Taking the Long View of the Future

The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, by Stewart Brand


They Shoot Engineers, Don't They?

The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union, by Loren R. Graham


The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, by Lawrence Lessig


Where Did I Leave All That Knowledge I Was Managing?

The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid


You Can Observe A Lot by Watching

Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, by Paco Underhill

 

Essays