Reccommended Reading
Film Making
The DV Rebel’s Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap by: Stu Maschwitz
Written by Stu Maschwitz, co-founder of the Orphanage (the legendary guerrilla visual effects studio responsible for amazing and award-winning effects in such movies as Sin City, The Day After Tomorrow, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), this book is a must-have for all those budding filmmakers and students who want to produce action movies with visual effects but don’t have Hollywood budgets. The Orphanage was created by three twenty-something visual effects veterans who wanted to make their own feature films and discovered they could do this by utilizing home computers, off the shelf software, and approaching things artistically. This guide details exactly how to do this: from planning and selecting the necessary cameras, software, and equipment, to creating specific special effects (including gunfire, Kung Fu fighting, car chases, dismemberment, and more) to editing and mixing sound and music. Its mantra is that the best, low-budget action moviemakers must visualize the end product first in order to reverse-engineer the least expensive way to get there. Readers will learn how to integrate visual effects into every aspect of filmmaking–before filming, during filming and with “in camera” shots, and with computers in postproduction.
In the Blink of an Eye Revised 2nd Edition by Walter Murch
In the Blink of an Eye is celebrated film editor Walter Murch’s vivid, multifaceted, thought-provoking essay on film editing. Starting with what might be the most basic editing question – Why do cuts work? – Murch treats the reader to a wonderful ride through the aesthetics and practical concerns of cutting film. Along the way, he offers his unique insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and reality; criteria for a good cut; the blink of the eye as an emotional cue; digital editing; and much more. In this second edition, Murch reconsiders and completely revises his popular first edition’s lengthy meditation on digital editing (which accounts for a third of the book’s pages) in light of the technological changes that have taken place in the six years since its publication.
Finance
The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower–and middle–class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking.
Michael Lewis creates a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 bestseller Liar’s Poker. Out of a handful of unlikely–really unlikely–heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our time.
The #1 New York Times bestseller: “It is the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game. And it’s essential reading.”—Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair
Statistics
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everythingby: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How much do parents really matter?
These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head.
Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more.
Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.
Enviornment
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by: Elizabeth Kolbert
Long known for her insightful and thought-provoking political journalism, author Elizabeth Kolbert now tackles the controversial and increasingly urgent subject of global warming. In what began as groundbreaking three-part series in the New Yorker, for which she won a National Magazine Award in 2006, Kolbert cuts through the competing rhetoric and political agendas to elucidate for Americans what is really going on with the global environment and asks what, if anything, can be done to save our planet. Now updated and with a new afterword, Field Notes from a Catastrophe is the book to read on the defining issue and greatest challenge of our times.
Medicine
Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by: Atul Gawande
The struggle to perform well is universal: each of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives may be on the line with any decision.
Atul Gawande, the New York Times bestselling author of Complications, examines, in riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, how success is achieved in this complex and risk-filled profession. At once unflinching and compassionate, Better is an exhilarating journey, narrated by “arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around” (Salon.com).
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by: Atul Gawande
In his latest bestseller, Atul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives and how we can deal with it.
The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry—in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail. Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument that we can do better, using the simplest of methods: the checklist. In riveting stories, he reveals what checklists can do, what they can’t, and how they could bring about striking improvements in a variety of fields, from medicine and disaster recovery to professions and businesses of all kinds. And the insights are making a difference. Already, a simple surgical checklist from the World Health Organization designed by following the ideas described here has been adopted in more than twenty countries as a standard for care and has been heralded as “the biggest clinical invention in thirty years” (The Independent).
Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by: Atul Gawande
In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel’s edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is—uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human.
Networking
Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends by: Tim Sanders
Is love really all you need? Tim Sanders, director of Yahoo’s in-house think tank, believes love is the crucial element in the search for personal and professional success. In Love Is the Killer App he explains why. Sander’s advice is to be a “lovecat,” which despite the cutesy moniker is his sincere and surprisingly practical prescription for advancement both inside and outside the office. Sanders offers concrete suggestions, from compiling a super list of contacts to ensuring all are regularly stored in an always-accessible format. And he concludes by advocating a true mindset of compassion, which he says involves sharing this knowledge with those contacts and ultimately helping anyone who in one way or another may ultimately help you. –Howard Rothman
The Likeability Factor : How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life’s Dreams by: Tim Sanders
“Conventional wisdom insists that it’s more important to be respected than liked. In this book Tim Sanders challenges that notion and reveals the awesome power of likeability. He shows us that if we want to garner support from our associates, earn the loyalty of our employees, lead our followers to a better future, be healthy, and finally achieve our life’s dreams, we must first be liked. In this important and necessary book, Sanders tells us why our likeability is the foundation of our success, and shows us how we can increase our own.” —Marcus Buckingham
Never Eat Alone : And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by: Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz
The youngest partner in Deloitte Consulting’s history and founder of the consulting company Ferrazzi Greenlight, the author quickly aims in this useful volume to distinguish his networking techniques from generic handshakes and business cards tossed like confetti. At conferences, Ferrazzi practices what he calls the “deep bump” – a “fast and meaningful” slice of intimacy that reveals his uniqueness to interlocutors and quickly forges the kind of emotional connection through which trust, and lots of business, can soon follow. That bump distinguishes this book from so many others that stress networking; writing with Fortune Small Business editor Raz, Ferrazzi creates a real relationship with readers.
How to Win Friends & Influence People by: Dale Carnegie
This grandfather of all people-skills books was first published in 1937. It was an overnight hit, eventually selling 15 million copies. How to Win Friends and Influence People is just
as useful today as it was when it was first published, because Dale Carnegie had an understanding of human nature that will never be outdated. Financial success, Carnegie
believed, is due 15 percent to professional knowledge and 85 percent to “the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people.”
Business Operations
Money-Smart Secrets for the Self-Employed (Home Office Computing Small Business Library) By Linda Stern
Can you have fiscal stability while growing a business? Money-Smart Secrets for the Self-Employed, by financial journalist Linda Stern, clearly outlines a series of logical, easy-to-apply techniques and practices designed to ensure just that. It addresses all of the major economic issues faced by a solo enterprise today–including taxes, expenses, record-keeping, loans, insurance, and hiring–and details, in very readable fashion, the myriad legal ins-and-outs that can keep cash flowing even during uncertain fiscal times.
The Business Side of Creativity: The Complete Guide for Running a Graphic Design or Communications Business by Cameron S. Foote
The issues most important to beginners . . . are covered exhaustively. Foote’s discussion of fees, estimates, and billable time are right on the mark. This alone justifies the cover
price.
Inside the Business of Graphic Design: 60 Leaders Share Their Secrets of Success by: Catharine Fishel
Share the insights of today’s most legendary graphic designers as they reveal the best kept secrets (and failures) of their business lives. Based on one-on-one interviews with over 60 graphic design business owners, Inside the Business of Graphic Design casts a precise and realistic light on the risks, requirements, and rewards of running a creative and successful design business.
The Graphic Designer’s Guide to Clients: How to Make Clients Happy and Do Great Work by: Ellen Shapiro
Here is the perfect volume for graphic designers who want real-life advice for long-term success. Renowned designer Ellen Shapiro reveals time-tested tricks of the trade-for making sure the clients you want to work with know about you, become your clients, and work with you productively. Then, in a series of one-on-one interviews, leading designers such as Milton Glaser, April Greiman, Mike Weymouth, Drew Hodges, Marc Gobé, and partners in Pentagram reveal their personal experiences and insights on how to uphold creative standards while fulfilling clients’ needs. The Creative Business Guide to Running a Graphic Design Business by: Cameron S. Foote This is the graphic design industry’s go-to guide for operating a successful business. The four sections cover organization, marketing, personnel, and operations, and provide the necessary tools unique to the specific management styles and operation agendas of a design firm. A complete appendix of business forms is also included.
Business
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by: Stephen Covey
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change was a groundbreaker when it was first published in 1990, and it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 10 million copies sold. Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. His anecdotes are as frequently from family situations as from business challenges.
Crucial Confrontations by: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler
Behind the problems that routinely plague organizations and families, you’ll find individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises. Others have broken rules, missed deadlines, failed to live up to commitments, or just plain behaved badly–and nobody steps up to the issue. Or they do, but do a lousy job and create a whole new set of problems. Accountability suffers and new problems spring up. New research demonstrates that these disappointments aren’t just irritating; they’re costly– sapping organizational performance by twenty to fifty percent and accounting for up to ninety percent of divorces.
The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Profitable Decision Making by: Thomas Nagle and Reed Holden
Practical in focus and lively in style, this text provides a comprehensive, managerially focused guide to formulating pricing strategy.
Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High! by: Jeff Thull
If you specialize in complex sales, the business-to-business transactions that involve multiple decisions made by multiple people from multiple perspectives, this is the book for you! It presents The Prime Process—a diagnostic, customer-centered approach that clearly sets you apart from your competition and positions you with respect and credibility as a valued and trusted advisor. If the stakes are high and you’re expected to win, this book will give you the edge you’ve been looking for.
Change
Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life by: Spencer Johnson, M.D.
Change can be a blessing or a curse, depending on your perspective. The message of Who Moved My Cheese? is that all can come to see it as a blessing, if they understand the nature of cheese and the role it plays in their lives. Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable that takes place in a maze. Four beings live in that maze: Sniff and Scurry are mice–nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, they just want cheese and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. Hem and Haw are “littlepeople,” mouse-size humans who have an entirely different relationship with cheese. It’s not just sustenance to them; it’s their self-image. Their lives and belief systems are built around the cheese they’ve found. Most of us reading the story will see the cheese as something related to our livelihoods– our jobs, our career paths, the industries we work in–although it can stand for anything, from health to relationships. The point of the story is that we have to be alert to changes in the cheese, and be prepared to go running off in search of new sources of cheese
when the cheese we have runs out.
Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea by: Seth Godin
According to marketing maven and Purple Cow author Seth Godin, the “Television Industrial Complex”–and its nasty habit of interrupting people with advertisements for things they don’t want–is dead. Innovation is cheaper than advertising, advises Godin who defines the “free prize” with diverse examples including swatch watches, frequent flyer miles, dog bakeries, Tupperware parties and portable shredding trucks. He explains “Design matters, style matters, extras matter.”
Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by: Seth Godin
The world is changing ever more rapidly, and the rules of marketing are no different, writes Godin, the field’s reigning guru. The old ways-run-of-the-mill TV commercials, ads in the Wall Street Journal and so on-don’t work like they used to, because such messages are so plentiful that consumers have tuned them out. This means you have to toss out everything you know and do something “remarkable” to have any effect at all, writes Godin.
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by: Thomas Friedman
By “flat” Friedman means “connected”: the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. This in itself should not be news to anyone. But the news that Friedman has to deliver is that just when we stopped paying attention to these developments–when the dot-com bust turned interest away from the business and technology pages and when 9/11 and the Iraq War turned all eyes toward the Middle East–is when they actually began to accelerate. Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is driven not by major corporations or giant trade organizations like the World Bank, but by individuals: desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world (but especially in India and China) who can compete–and win–not just for low-wage manufacturing and information labor but, increasingly, for the highest-end research and design work as well. –Tom Nissley
Creativity and Inspiration
Art & Fear by: David Bayles and Ted Orland
An artist’s survival guide, written by and for working artists. The authors explore the way art gets made, the reasons it doesn’t get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way.
Thinking Creatively: New ways to unlock your visual imagination by Robin Landa
Turn knowledge into power, unlock your imagination, and get a firm grasp on creative visual thinking. This book reveals dozens of idea-generating techniques from top designers – along with insight on how they apply creative visual thinking to real-world projects. Through 44 visual thinking exercises, you’ll learn to better communicate your own ideas and feelings … to increase your creative potential and the number of successful designs in your portfolio.
How to Get Ideas by: Jack Foster
If I had money enough to buy only one book, it would be Jack Foster’s How to Get Ideas. It is a quick read for a quick start, a motivator to make you more productive and more secure. This book should be re-read every four or five months as food for the rest of your life.
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by: Twyla Tharp
Perhaps the leading choreographer of her generation, Tharp offers a thesis on creativity that is more complex than its self-help title suggests. To be sure, an array of prescriptions and exercises should do much to help those who feel some pent-up inventiveness to find a system for turning idea into product, whether that is a story, a painting or a song. This free-wheeling interest across various creative forms is one of the main points that sets this book apart and leads to its success.
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by: Steven Pressfield
Dubbing itself a cross between Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War and Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Pressfield’s book aims to help readers “overcome resistance” so that they may achieve “the unlived life within.” Whether one wishes to embark on a diet, a program of spiritual advancement or an entrepreneurial venture, it’s most often resistance that blocks the way. To kick resistance, Pressfield stresses loving what one does, having patience and acting in the face of fear.
Viral Marketing
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by: Malcolm Gladwell
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking–the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of “thin slices” of behavior. The key is to rely on our “adaptive unconscious”–a 24/7 mental valet–that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by: Malcolm Gladwell
“The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any
number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life,” writes Malcolm Gladwell, “is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and
behaviors spread just like viruses do.” Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has quite a few
interesting twists on the subject.
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by: Al Ries and Jack Trout
Positioning, a concept developed by the authors, has changed the way people advertise. The reason? It’s the first concept to deal with the problems of communicating in an over communicated society. With this approach, a company creates a ‘position’ in the prospect’s mind, one that reflects the company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors. Witty and fast-paced, this book spells out how to position a leader so that it gets into the mind and stays there, position a follower in a way that finds a ‘hole’ not occupied by the leader, and avoid the pitfalls of letting a second product ride on the coattails of an established one.
