Nilofer Merchant

Reshaping the canon of innovation by #ONLYNESS: that distinct insight, experience, vision EACH of us has. 3xAuthor. Ranked #22 @thinkers50. Speaker @tedtalks.

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Book Recommendations:

NM

Recommended by Nilofer Merchant

If you're into co-creation/platforms/innovation stuff, one of my favorite profs has a new book out. https://t.co/NCCQWW85RC (from X)

Strategies and practices for growing ecosystems are increasingly important in shaping industries and markets. Sustaining productive innovation is not just about you. It depends on others as well as your willingness and ability to collaborate effectively. This book is about how to use, as well as develop, a co-innovation platform to accelerate innovation and sustain ecosystem growth. It will show how you, your team and your organization can create and foster collaborative innovation among a diverse set of organizations that are located outside of your company’s hierarchy. A co-innovation platform provides an environment where firms can combine or recombine ideas to generate novel solutions. A distinctive feature of the co-innovation platform is its resource-open and hands-on approach to innovation. For many organizations, resource limitations, organizational obstacles and/or time constraints kill an idea before it takes shape. By providing access to demand-side and supply-side resources and capabilities to facilitate co-innovation, the platform solves this problem and shapes the ecosystem’s innovation trajectory from the ground up. This book provides strategic and practical guidance for orchestrating collaborative problem solving and ecosystem growth.

NM

Recommended by Nilofer Merchant

Um @TheEconomist, you seriously need to read Angela Saini’s book Superior. She writes for the guardian, has been recognized as writing one of the best science books by @npr and smithsonian and could have saved you from this mess. https://t.co/mdRYs7E82H (from X)

A powerful look at the non-scientific history of "race science," and the assumptions, prejudices, and incentives that have allowed it to reemerge in contemporary science Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in WWII, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of unrepentant eugenicists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Hernstein's and Charles Murray's 1994 title, The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas, and considered race a social construct, it was still an idea that managed to somehow make its way into the research into the human genome that began in earnest in the mid-1990s and continues today. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Saini shows us how, again and again, science is retrofitted to accommodate race. Even as our understanding of highly complex traits like intelligence, and the complicated effect of environmental influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between "races"--to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores or to justify cultural assumptions--stubbornly persists. At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a powerful reminder that biologically, we are all far more alike than different.

NM

Recommended by Nilofer Merchant

An interesting analysis/ essay re Gladwell’s latest book —> https://t.co/5Ey1maNRyI (from X)

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers—and why they often go wrong. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

NM

Recommended by Nilofer Merchant

Quite often (understatement)... gender thinkers/writers focus on women. As if women are the ones to be "fixed". What I like about @feministabulous new book is how men play an active role in gender equality. Get it: https://t.co/2rsfQV5JMY (from X)

A nonfiction investigation into masculinity, For The Love of Men provides actionable steps for how to be a man in the modern world, while also exploring how being a man in the world has evolved. In 2019, traditional masculinity is both rewarded and sanctioned. Men grow up being told that boys don’t cry and dolls are for girls (a newer phenomenon than you might realize―gendered toys came back in vogue as recently as the 80s). They learn they must hide their feelings and anxieties, that their masculinity must constantly be proven. They must be the breadwinners, they must be the romantic pursuers. This hasn’t been good for the culture at large: 99% of school shooters are male; men in fraternities are 300% (!) more likely to commit rape; a woman serving in uniform has a higher likelihood of being assaulted by a fellow soldier than to be killed by enemy fire. In For the Love of Men, Liz offers a smart, insightful, and deeply-researched guide for what we're all going to do about toxic masculinity. For both women looking to guide the men in their lives and men who want to do better and just don’t know how, For the Love of Men will lead the conversation on men's issues in a society where so much is changing, but gender roles have remained strangely stagnant. What are we going to do about men? Liz Plank has the answer. And it has the possibility to change the world for men and women alike.