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I recently left a large corporation to work for a small startup. I was at my previous employer for 17 years, so the switch has been both a significant change and an interesting adventure for me. I now have more responsibilities in my current role, while getting paid much, much less for fulfilling them. Why did I decide to make such a switch? Mostly for the sake of my sanity. Big Corporate Culture finally got to me with its bureaucracy, politics, and pathological practices - all symptoms of deeper disorders. However, startups also have their own share of neurotic behaviors, which may be why most of them fail. Eric Ries provides entrepreneurs with a saner and more methodical approach towards business development and innovation. Like Lean Logic, Ries draws inspiration from Ohno's Lean Manufacturing.

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I love dictionaries. And I love to collect them. Earlier this year, my wife and I spent a weekend in Victoria. We had about an hour before we had to board our seaplane, so we took a stroll nearby the terminal. By chance, we came upon a used bookstore, and there I found and purchased a beautiful nineteenth century volume of Barclay's Universal English Dictionary. It was a hefty book, and there was a very strict weight limit for the luggage on the seaplane.  As we prepared to board, I was filled with quite a bit of anxiety (and images of having to choose between keeping my wonderful impulse buy or missing our flight). Fortunately, we did not exceed the limit (whew!).

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The moral virtue of frugality seems to take on an unsettling meaning when scaled out to a global level. At least that's what I took away from reading Christien Meindertsma's book. Meindertsma is an artist and designer who decided to research all of the different products made from one pig (#05049). The products range from the expected (hamburger) to the downright surprising (ammunition). I learned about the book from watching her TED talk, which had been sitting in my queue of iTunes podcasts, since last year. I knew I had to get the book when I saw the yellow ear tag attached to it (another reason why I hope books never go completely digital).

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Paula Scher is a partner at the prestigious Pentagram. She built her reputation mainly from her early graphic designs, which includes the iconic Boston album cover (for those of you old enough to have experienced that musical era) and the Citigroup logo. The book is an entertaining account of one female designer's rise through what was (and arguably still is) a male-dominated business, and culminating in her current role at Pentagram. There are tons of examples of her work in the book, as well as the insightful - and often humorous - stories behind them. She offers some great thoughts on how to work with clients and through corporate politics. Scher relies heavily on her intuition when designing, but understands that her clients ultimately want articulate rationales for the designs (how else can they judge whether or not the work is any good?). She thinks it's tragic that a lot of talented designers lack the skills to explain their work to others in this manner, to persuade clients of the merits of their designs. So more often than not, this results in their work remaining invisible to the world at large. It reminds me of Rogers's claim that innovation is not a technological phenomenon but a social phenomenon.

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This is a magazine published by the people at McSweeney's. The articles and essays feel fresh and quirky (the latest issue covers Bulgaria's street necrologues and the Barkley Marathons); the reviews are concise and insightful; the poetry accessible. Grab an issue and give it a try.

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Multiple-Nobel-Prize-winner Linus Pauling once said that the way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away. Steven M. Johnson is someone who has a lot of ideas. A lot of them. His inventions take me back to my youth, when I would see those crazy gadgets in issues of Mad Magazine. This book is no longer in print, but you may still be able to pick up a used copy somewhere. Bruce Nussbaum believes Design Thinking is dead and that Creative Intelligence is the next thing. If that's true, then Steven Johnson is a good place to start developing your CI. Allison Arieff wrote about Johnson in The New York Times and has an interview with him in Design Mind. If you're not familiar with Johnson, these articles can give you a taste of what you're missing and may even get your own creative juices flowing.

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Ronald Reagan has been quoted as saying, "I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future."

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I've been reading the essays of Ivan Illich lately and, for some reason, I was reminded of Lin Yutang. It's been years since I last read his words, but his philosophy is still relevant to our contemporary society (maybe even more so). My first encounter with Lin Yutang was in 1990, while I was living in Taiwan, and a friend gave me a photocopied version of this book (from the Lin Yutang Memorial Library) as a parting gift.

"This is a personal testimony," Mr. Lin writes, "a testimony of my own experiences of thought and life. It is not intended to be objective and makes no claim to establish eternal truths. In fact I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing."

I feel like the Art of Living is gradually being replaced by the Science of Living. Much in the way that Michael Pollan writes how ". . . over the last several decades, mom lost much of her authority over the dinner menu, ceding it to scientists and food marketers . . ." I feel the same thing is happening with our overall approach to life. And, like Pollan, I'm not convinced that it's a good thing.

You've got to appreciate a book which chapter (sub)titles include "On Growing Old Gracefully", "On Lying in Bed", and "The Importance of Loafing". Reading this book will prompt you to question whether or not you're really living.

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I love all of Leonard Koren's books. I think the last book he published was The Flower Shop, several years ago, a book I still return to occasionally to remind me that business and being human are not mutually exclusive. Koren's latest book tackles the subject of "aesthetics." I put quotation marks around that word (and so does Koren) because it can mean different things to different people in different contexts. The author has attempted to provide ten definitions for this word, in hopes of clearing the confusion that can occur when encountering it. As with all of his books, this slim volume is pleasing to the eye, hands, and mind. You can read it in one sitting, while pondering upon its words during those quiet times in your life.

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I usually don't read self-help books, but I got this one after reading a blogpost from The School of Life. The sentence that caught my eye was this one: We usually view our emotions as reactions to the outside world, overlooking the fact that our internal dialogue shapes and mis-shapes the world according to how we feel about ourselves. 

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It's getting harder to find the words "helpfulness", "thrift", "humbleness", and "simplicity" in the business lexicon. Hubris and arrogance seem to be the guiding principles of too many modern enterprises. Kamprad was asked, "What is fundamental in leadership?" He said, "Love." You can roll your eyes if you want, but I wholeheartedly believe in that principle. Kamprad has always viewed his company as an extension of his family. When you treat people as family, I believe you get their best effort. Growing up on a farm can teach you that.

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I've kept an issue of Time magazine that's over 18 years old because it has a short article on Peter Matthiessen. In the article, Matthiessen is described as "an environmentalist before the term was fashionable - just as he was a 'searcher' before it became a 60's job description, and an apostle of 'male wildness' before Robert Bly got out his drums. . . . For what other Zen-minded patriarch can claim to be a founding editor of the Paris Review? How many other American novelists have written whole books in Caribbean patois that were influenced by the principles of classical Japanese art? How many other New Yorker writers have taken part-Cheyenne mercenaries for their alter egos? And which other scion of America's Eastern ruling class has devoted 628 pages and seven years of libel suits to defending the name of a young Native American charged with murder?"

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An assertion of the Owner's Manifesto is "If you can't open it, you don't own it." In some ways, I think this is similar to the hacker ethic. And this ethic is becoming more mainstream in practices like IKEA hacking and retail hacking. In addition to the useful technical tidbits, I enjoy the magazine's essays and letters from readers (and the publisher's responses). In fact, quite a bit of the magazine is devoted to these conversations, which I find refreshing and consistent with the hacker ethic of sharing and open dialogue.

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Near the beginning of George Steiner's Errata, he writes about his experience with a pictorial guide to coats of arms, and how it overwhelmed him with "a sense of the numberless specificity" and how he "grew possessed by an intuition of the particular, of diversities so numerous that no labor of classification and enumeration could exhaust them."

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Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, among other books. He also gave an engaging TED talk a while back, where he shared a story about one farmer's practice that I found very eye-opening and gives me hope about the future of our food. He's also, unsurprisingly, an admirer of Wendell Berry. In Food Rules, Mr. Pollan gives us a wonderfully simple guide for what and how we should eat: Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much. He then gives a set of short rules to help you follow each of these guidelines (64 in total). What I like about it is that it treats the practice of eating holistically. Unlike your health and diet books, this treats eating as a very human endeavor that isn't simply about just filling up your tank.

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If I were to have any idols, Wendell Berry would be one of the few at the top of my list. I have collected his essays over the many years, and they are a regular source of personal re-centering for me. This past year produced two collections from Berry. This volume and Imagination in Place, which I intend to read in the next few months. The theme for What Matters? is the economy - or, in Berry's mind, the lack of one. Berry asserts that “our economy has become an anti-economy, a financial system without a sound economic basis and without economic virtues.” We have seen evidence of this in our lifetime - the Internet bubble, Japan's bubble economy, Wall Street and the financial crisis. Our belief in unlimited economic growth is something Berry calls “Faustian Economics”, the title of one of his essays. I think it was Dirty Harry who said, “A man's got to know his limitations.” I recently read a Wired article on algorithms and flash trading. I find it somewhat disconcerting that computer-aided high-frequency trading accounts for 70 percent of total trade volume, using algorithms that result in complex systems we do not comprehend and cannot predict. But that doesn't seem to stop us from using them. During Christmas, I got The Twilight Zone: The Complete Definitive Collection and have been watching a lot of episodes, one of which was “Valley of the Shadow” (and looks to be on YouTube). If you get a chance, watch the episode. I regard it as a nice parable and commentary on how we often regard technology - and, perhaps, economics.

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