Showing posts with label 2013. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2013. Show all posts

Jan 1, 2014

Top 5 Books I read Year 2013

As I've been blogging so much about books lately, I thought it would be valuable to share the best books I read 2013. From these books only one was published this year, so it's not a review of best books of 2013, but what I read year 2013. All of these are books I'm really happy I read. All of those changed my world and view of the world. Here the list and few words why I think those were so important. I highly recommend all of those.

1. Thinking in Systems: A Primer


I've been familiar to systems thinking before the book, but this was the book that fully opened my eyes. This book works bit like the famous "red pill vs blue pill" scene from Matrix which promises to show the world as it is. Systems thinking should become a mandatory subject to school, it's so important.



2. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development


I'm mainly sad that I didn't read this book earlier. This is a book everyone in SW industry should try to understand. It's not easy to read and it's even harder to understand. It gave me so many new ideas how to improve SW development organizations. I'm sure it had good thoughts for everyone else too.



3. Green Illusions


Green Illusions opens eyes about the state of the world currently. There are many controversial thoughts in the book and I didn't believe everything as such, but that doesn't matter. I believed the main point, world has a consumption problem. To fix consumption problem we should put much more focus to different things that
we are currently doing. Today's economy is based on consumption and supporting cheap energy. How should we change this? Read the book and think yourself.



4. Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100


This book I enjoyed the most in the whole year. It's the first book over 400 pages that I wouldn't have liked to finish. It is packed with so much information about current technology and future predictions, that I bet all the tech freaks will love the book. The author is very familiar how hard it is to try to guess the future, but him if anyone in the world have information and sources to make good guesses. If there would be more books like this existing, I would read many of those in a row.


5. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others


To Sell Is Human was an excellent book. It goes through some of the same topics Daniel Pink has been writing already previously. Dan Pink writes good stories and every book from him is a fun to read. Also the books are filled with really important information. I'm still honest to myself, this book got to the list because Daniel Pink is my favorite author. I've read almost everything he has written and his writing doesn't light me up as they used to. I still own him so much. His books have been the ones that got me back to reading again. I hope this book could do the same for someone else.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Dec 31, 2013

Wordle 2013

Here's this years wordle about from my blog posts. This is tradition to me and here are my previous wordles (2010, 2011 & 2012). Word cloud reveals what has been obvious to me the whole year, I've been mainly writing about books.

Because book stole so much from my words, I decided to do another wordle without the word book on it. I also took some other obvious words away from the cloud to see what really have been the subjects in books and other posts that have been raised up.

I was gladly surprised to see that people, business, development and world raised to be such a popular words. Also there were words like ideas, systems, thinking, training etc mentioned so many times. It is fun to see in this format what I really have been writing.

Happy new year to everybody.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen