Fortunately, these is no accounting for people’s taste or curiosity, so we offer this selection in good faith but with every conceivable caveat.
To learn about jazz:
- Read Rob Austin and Carl’s HBS case Miles Davis: Kind of Blue, about Davis’s groundbreaking album and management approach
- Then listen to the album, on Spotify, Amazon, or iTunes. The “legacy” edition includes additional tracks from the recording sessions. These will make a lot of sense if you read the case first.
- Watch the Ken Burns documentary series Jazz, from PBS
Performance drivers in the emerging, post-industrial economy:
- Atlantic Monthly (Linda Stone): Machines Can’t Flow. And if you want to read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal work referred to, a newish version is here.
- Ron Heifetz: Leadership Without Easy Answers.
- Susan Cain: Quiet.
- Peter Senge: The Fifth Discipline (rev 2010)
Other stuff that we keep talking about
- The movie Margin Call, directed by J.C. Chandor, because of the way very complicated problems get simplified so as to become actionable. Jeremy Irons’s character is especially compelling (though not necessarily in a good way).
- Edward Tufte: Envisioning Information, or any of his other books.
- George Gopen and Judith Swan: The Science of Scientific Writing, on how to structure sentences correctly.