Books recently cited on this blog

Ideas for how to manage a law department better come from many sources. For me, as I read I note in the margins what I think of as “blog ideas” and later I go back and write those that still appeal to me. During the nine months since December 2010 the following 21 books that I read stimulated blog ideas that saw bloglight, so to speak. Most of them get credit for multiple posts.

1. John D. Barrow, 100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know: Math Explains Your World (Norton 2008) (See my post of April 15, 2011: a way to detect manufactured time records.).

2. Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation (O’Reilly 2010) (See my post of Dec. 27, 2010: eight myths of innovation.).

3. Amar Bhidé, The Venturesome Economy: how innovation sustains prosperity in a more connected world (Princeton Univ. 2008) (See my post of July 30, 2011: no patent, no fee.).

4. Len Fisher, The Perfect Swarm: The science of complexity in everyday life (Basic Books 2009) (See my post of May 20, 2011: stop unproductive processes.).

5. Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Clever: Leading your smartest, most creative people (Harv. Bus. Press 2009) (See my post of March 11, 2011: boundaries versus bureaucracies.).

6. Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A short book about Darwin, Lincoln and modern life (Knopf 2009) (See my post of July 20, 2011: be more than fair with opposing arguments.).

7. Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010) (See my post of March 24, 2011: hire the firm, the lawyer, or both.).

8. Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) (See my post of Feb. 8, 2011: five creativity techniques.).

9. Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links (Norton 2010) (See my post of Dec. 31, 2010: the strength of weak ties.).

10. John Lukacs, The Future of History (Yale 2011) (See my post of Aug. 8, 2011: aristocratic tales of law departments.).

11. Robert Matthews, 25 Big Ideas: The Science That’s Changing Our World (MJF Books 2005) (See my post of March 30, 2011: Extreme Value Theory.).

12. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die (Yale Univ. 2011) (See my post of July 30, 2011: the Central Limit Theory.).

13. Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History: the great speculators from Vico to Freud (Harper & Row 1966) (See my post of July 26, 2011: logical positivism.).

14. Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Univ. Chic. 2010) (See my post of March 10, 2011: Gemeinschaft compared to Gesellschaft.).

15. Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (Yale Univ. 2009) (See my post of Feb. 18, 2011: teleology and the recreation of memories.).

16. Henry Petroski, Success through Failure: the paradox of design (Princeton 2006) (See my post of July 6, 2011: PowerPoint in law departments.).

17. Eduardo Porter, The Price of Everything: Solving the mystery of why we pay what we do (Portfolio/Penguin 2011) (See my post of March 16, 2011: prestige and neuroscience.).

18. Peter Sims, Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries (Free Press 2011) (See my post of April 11, 2011: take small steps.).

19. James Stein How Math Explains the World: A Guide to the Power of Numbers, from Car Repair to Modern Physics (HarperCollins 2008) (See my post of Feb. 8, 2011: digraphs.).

20. Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) (See my post of May 14, 2010: the egocentric bias.).

21. Hugh Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment (Yale Univ. 2010) (See my post of March 30, 2011: philosophical management.).

22. Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose Of The Past (Penguin 2008) (See my post of April 14, 2011: micro-history and ethnography.).

23. Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf 2010) (See my post of Feb. 14, 2011: the Kronos effect.).