Paul Kalanithi seemingly had a successful life all lined up before him. He is soon to complete a rigorous neurosurgery residency and has plans to assume a prestigious career as a surgeon-scientist. He’s married, albeit with some challenges. All the hard work, the sacrifices, and the grunt work were about to open a sustainable life filled with honors and impact. Then came a sudden lung cancer diagnosis. Initially, treatment seemed to succeed. The genetics were…
Because AI is such a new field, most good books about it are grounded only in experience. Higher reflection, grounded in academic theory, is left to the AI engineers, and organizations and individual workers are left to flounder in how to use this transformative software. However, in this book, Gleb Tsipursky attempts to ground his experiences consulting with companies about AI into rigorous psychology. He seeks to show how organizations can position themselves so that…
Marcellus, an octopus, opens the book complaining about his captivity in an aquarium north of Seattle. One of his caretakers is a lady named Tova. Tova, a widow, is relatively alone since only son died when he was eighteen years old. Marcellus is generally cynical about humanity but loves Tova, who talks to him regularly. A third storyline then opens up about Cameron, who lives in California. He is trying – and failing – to…
The days of a lone genius pioneering world-changing ideas are behind us (the so-called Great Man theory); most new discoveries today come from working in teams. Therefore, fostering healthy collaborative environments and attracting top-line colleagues have become essential skills for today’s organizational leaders. That topic is worthy of a deep dive. In this book, Authors Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman combine to look at several use cases to extract key principles of what make…
In the 1980s and 1990s, Japan’s and the United States’ work cultures clashed with a competition of values. The Japanese were deemed more innovative while the Americans were deemed more interested in taking advantage of the status quo. Both authors, rooted in Japanese culture yet educated in America, noted that implicit knowledge drove Japanese innovation while explicit knowledge drove American business. In this book, they describe what happens when these two paradigms unite in creative…
The topic of brain surgery impresses the general public, but specific knowledge about the brain remains weak among the same public. That shortcoming will likely change in coming decades as twenty-first-century science penetrates neuroscience as a frontier, much as physics was explained in the twentieth century. In this book, neurosurgeon Theodore Schwartz explains the past, present, and future of brain surgery in this well-written history of the medical specialty. Henry Cushing stands as the father…
First, the good: This book lives up to the cover’s hype. Its ten chapters take a deep look at the character of everyday leaders. What’s true in 1989 remains true in 2009, at the time of the text’s republishing, and it remains true in 2026, at the time of my writing. The word “classic” is not hyperbole. Warren Bennis provides a script and a set of principles to build everyday leaders. A clinical psychologist by…
I’m a newbie to the grant-writing process who wants to see how to formulate a proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). When I looked for books to help, this one, in its third edition, seemed to be the seminal text in this domain. Its rigor and comprehensiveness did not disappoint. It took the grant-writing process seriously enough to convey challenges with gravity, yet it was approachable enough to make the entire process seem…
Doctors graduating medical school during the Vietnam War had several options. Most went to serve medically in the war theater. A few went into other smaller niches like the Public Health Service. A select few were drafted into a program to train in research at the NIH; these were subsequently known as “yellow berets” – an epithet turned point-of-pride among its recipients. Over the years, those who trained in this Clinical Associates program ended up…
Consulting is a business built around bettering the client’s business. Many work in large consulting firms to market their expertise, but in this book, Alan Weiss instead shows how to run a solo firm or a smaller firm to achieve the main good. The goal is to direct more money into one’s own pockets while maintaining more independence that can lead to better quality of life. This book teaches about running the business of a…