Best business and technology books of 2006

Last week, I reported what retailers were saying about what the hot gifts this year, as well as some ideas of my own. Giving the gift of a good read is a great option for family and friends, but particularly for colleagues who you have to think with every day.

The thing about a book is that you don't even have to agree with the arguments it makes, as long as it gets you thinking. This year's crop of business books, as usual, included a lot of me-too titles that were easily put down and forgotten after a few pages or chapters, because they contained little new, nothing thought-provoking. Downright crazy ideas are better than none, and challenges to the status quo invaluable, so don't shy away from shaking your colleagues' mental trees with a good book.

Here are a few of the books from the past year that stood out for me this year:

• Naked Conversations, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. No one in business believes blogs are irrelevant to their company anymore, and many came to that conclusion after reading Scoble and Shel Israel's book. It's hard to believe the hardcover came out in January, because it is cited so frequently in conversations, partly because of the effective marketing of the book through the blog on which it was publicly written, which only reinforces the message that a blog can shape a market.
  
• World Changing, edited by Alex Steffen and authored by many friends. Need an idea? About virtually anything from carbon credits to increasing transparency in government and markets? This is your book. A Whole Earth Catalog for the new century, World Changing is packed with informative thinking. Turn to any page and learn. Did you know that there are companies building lighting that channels natural sunlight through buildings using fiber optics to replace electric light during the day? I didn't. Ever wonder how to build a no-energy, carbon-neutral home? The answer, and many more, are here.
  
• The Elements of Influence, by Alan Kelly. I've spent several years thinking about and building technology for identifying and measuring influence. The question remains, now that we can measure it, what about a strategy for managing influence marketing efforts? Alan Kelly's book came across my radar a couple months ago, just before it was published. It presents a kind of playbook, drawing on historical strategies from politics and marketing, combining it with a systematic approach to taking stock of challenges and opportunities in conversational markets. I'd like to send a copy to every customer of BuzzLogic, because this is a book that can help translate metrics into successful marketing.
  
• The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson. There are a lot of opinions about the representativeness of data and rigor of the analysis presented by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, but one thing is for sure: Everyone is hoping to wag the funding dog by the long tail. One can hardly pass a day without hearing this phrase several times, and the notion that the economics of scarcity have passed into history has redefined many people's thinking. Whether you end up agreeing with it or not, the long tail concept has become a definitive element of the conversation.
  
• Small Is The New Big, by Seth Godin. You've read this book before, because it all comes from Seth Godin's influential blog. Seeing these ideas, some of them just nuggets of an idea and others longish essays, in the covers of a book gives them new weight, precisely because they have been given away before. Honesty, frankness and a dedication to creating value are the soul of the "new marketing" Godin is helping pioneer.
  
• The Ghost Map, by Stephen Johnson. We've only begun to understand the flow of human action. People only discovered the basic tools to undertake an analysis of their actions in the last century, when John Snow mapped the spread of a cholera outbreak in London (click here for a 5.6 MB PDF of the famous map). Patterns emerge when we can collect and analyze information. Snow created modern epidemiology and showed that cholera was a water-borne illness even though it would be another 40-some years before anyone acknowledged that the bacteria that causes the disease had actually been glimpsed through a microscope by an Italian scientist during Snow's lifetime. The invisible was made literally visible through analysis of data. The resulting changes for public health policy in London changed the course of the history of cities. What will we take for granted about our impact on public knowledge in a hundred years?
  
• The Singularity Is Near, by Ray Kurzweil. Here's a book I genuinely disagree with on many counts, but constantly find myself revisiting. I think the philosophical and logical foundations of this book are deeply flawed, but Kurzweil also illustrates how dangerous monopolies on information can become in an age of rapid scientific advancement. We're not going to mind-meld with our computers any time soon, but we're going to be talking about it from now until that day comes, if it ever does (which I doubt will result in anything very good for the average person). The book, when it came out in hardback in 2005, was dauntingly large—the paperpack comes in about 50 pages shorter despite much smaller page dimensions, which makes it much easier to carry and far less intimidating to pick up.
  
• Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte. Because you need to think through your next Powerpoint presentation, and whether it's the best idea to use Powerpoint in the first place. Tufte will get you thinking about the meaning of words and images, their juxtaposition and how it creates and modifies meaning, not to mention your ability to tell the truth and promote untruths. And it is a beautiful book.
  
• Against The Day, by Thomas Pynchon. Okay, it's not a business book, but it is a great read about the consequences of human action, human technology and the supreme unkowableness of everything that lies just beyond the waking life. From (Tom) Swiftian aeronauts who knock down famous landmarks and dispense incredibly bad advice to folks messing with the components of reality to mathematical debates about the nature of time or, rather, the unnatural source of time in human history, this is a book that will make you laugh, think and marvel all at once. A good read doesn't have to be serious and all business.
  
• The Immortal Game, by David Shenk. I ran across this excellent history of chess and explanation of the basics of strategy and chess theory in a recent posting by Brad Feld. With everything I've talked about above, from influence analysis to epidemiology and the consequences of our actions, The Immortal Game is an ideal capstone on a year's worth of reading, because it is precisely about thinking and play and sociability and conflict and how humans mull their next move. It reawakened a dormant interest in chess for me, but more importantly it linked the exercise of studying chess to other fields in a way I simply hadn't recognized before.

But don't let me have the last word. Which of these books do you recommend? The polling tool does not allow multiple choices, unfortunately, but do speak up!

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