Book Review 2024.18: Grit, Why Passion and resilience are the secrets to success, Angela Duckworth, Paperback, 2016 -December 21, 2024 This is a very essential book at the current phase of my life, where in the last two years I have started more projects and given up midway without completing it than in the last four decades of my life combined. The appeal of this book is in its ability to educate the reader in an engaging mode on Grit, …
Category: Spectrum -My Book reviews
Book Review 2024.17: What I Learnt About Investing From Darwin, Pulak Prasad, 298 pages, Hardbound, 2023 -December 9, 2024 A sublime blend of Animal Planet, National Geography, and the CNBC, this book fuses the distinct expertise required in each one of these fields to make it an extremely insightful, readable, and engaging read on investment. The author’s personal investing experience adds a distinct color to the narration making it a practical lesson for anyone interested in equity markets. The investment …
Book Review 2024.16: Good Strategy Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt, 298 pages, Paperback, 2011 -December 2, 2024 Strategy as a concept always interested me, for I believe that if we have to accomplish anything ambitious beyond our existing abilities and available resources, we need to do something unique or different that leverages what we have to help us achieve our goals, which is my definition of the word strategy. I picked up this book after seeing very good reviews and to …
Book Review 2024.15: Originals, Adam Grant, 254 pages, Paperback, 2016 Picked up this book during my routine quarterly visits to Blossoms book shop on Church Street, Bangalore earlier this month. I was quickly hooked on to this book while browsing through it the Metro ride back home. I finished this book in two weeks, much longer than I expected, which is a result of the numerous triggers in the book that led me explore new concepts and topics in the …
Book Review 2024.14: Hooked, How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Nir Eyal, 214 pages, Paperback, 2019 -November 11, 2024 This is a short and insightful book, that is invaluable for anyone interested in digital products design. How I wish I had read this book a decade earlier when our team was designing a digital portal to automate corporate law compliances for Indian corporates secretarial automation. The utility of this book is not only in the crip framework it prescribes, but also …
Book Review 2024.13: 50 Philosophical Classics, Tom Butler-Bowdon, 317 pages, Paperback, 2022 -November 2, 2024 A book to be savored, to be read at leisure and when required reread more than once, as it offers new insights to reevaluate our views on issues that appeared crystal clear like democracy, meritocracy and scientific method, in addition to revealing new lights on feminism and the impact of social media. I read this book on influential western philosophers in over three months, in …
Book Review 2024.12: The Forty Rules of Love, Elif Shafak, 350 pages, Paperback, 2011 Reading a blog on Sufism I came across a reference to this book that was highly recommended for its engaging narration of the life of Rumi, the Sufi poet. As an ardent lover of Sufi qawwalis it was impossible for me not to order this book. This book lay in my library for more than a month, before I picked it up three days ago and …
Book Review 2024.11: EGO is the Enemy, The Fight to Master our Greatest Opponent, 159 pages, Paperback, 2016 The title, its bright red cover and its small size, in that order attracted me to this book. Under the mistaken belief that I can read it in a couple of days I picked it up, only to take a couple of weeks to finish it. Designed as a self-help book, the author blends a strong portion of philosophy and interesting …
The Age of Stagnation, Why Perpetual Growth is Unattainable and the Global Economy is in Peril, by Satyajit Das, Tranquebar Press, 2015, Pages 346, February 2016 Review for Business World by Shankar Jaganathan, Founder & Chief Executive, CimplyFive Corporate Secretarial Services P Ltd, and by passion an economic historian and Author This is not a book for the one who wants to be reassured about the bright prospects of our global economy. Neither is it for the optimist who believes …
The Social Life of Money, by Nigel Dodd, Princeton University Press, 2014, Pages 394 Review for Business World by Shankar Jaganathan, Author & by passion an Economic Historian, March 2015 Like cricket in India, money is the subject of discussion in both professional and amateur groups across the world. These discussions often get heated, and their circles expand in the context of prominent headline hogging events. In these debates, we often see a visible and pronounced bias linked to origin. …
The Son Also Rises, Surnames and the history of Social Mobility, by Gregory Clark Princeton University Press, 2014, Pages 317 Review for Business World by Shankar Jaganathan, Author & by passion an Economic Historian, April 2014 Written by economic historian Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises is a longitudinal study of social mobility. Studying multi-generational social mobility covering a span extending to seven hundred years across the geographies of Asia, Europe and America this book cannot be ignored by anyone …
Book Review 2023.01: Inside-Out Leadership by Rajiv Vij, Penguin Viking, 2021, 2023, 219 pages, Hard bound, ₹699 Gifted this book last Friday afternoon, I completed reading it in the next four days. It is a testimony to the quality of this book rather than my reading abilities, for flipping though it on the commute back home on the metro got me hooked to completing it in one go. Contrary to leadership books that are anectodical and biographic in nature, this …
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