The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz

    Here’s how you build and run a start-up, according to Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz: First, prepare for failure—it's inevitable. Building a viable product is hard. Things won't go as planned. Second, take care of your employees. Train them. Invest in them. Give them responsibility. Third, be mindful. Managing a business is, in part, managing your instincts and emotions. (Read more from Fortune on Horowitz here.)

    《难中之难：打造一家企业无捷径可循》(The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)，作者：本•霍洛维茨

    在安德森•霍洛维茨风投公司(Andreessen Horowitz)联合创始人本•霍洛维茨看来，你应该这样构建和运营一家初创公司：首先，请做好遭遇失败的准备——失败是不可避免的。打造一款成功产品绝非易事。总有些事情不会按计划进行。其次，照顾好你的员工。培训他们。投资于他们。让他们担起责任。第三，要警觉。在某种程度上，管理一家企业就是管理自己的本能和情绪。  

 Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, by Ed Catmull& Amy Wallace

    Creativity is a constant tug of war between originality and appeal, novelty and sales. Ed Catmull writes about how Pixar flourished during the 1990s while Disney floundered. At Disney, “The pressure to create—and quickly!—became the order of the day.” Pixar, by contrast, cherished the creative process. Early mock-ups of Pixar films are “ugly babies”—awkward, inconsistent, and incomplete drafts desperate for nurturing. They required time, patience and thousands of edits. “Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal,” Catmull writes. “Making something great is the goal.”

    《创意公司：克服阻拦灵感的隐形力量》(Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration) 作者：埃德•卡特莫尔和艾米•华莱士

    创意是一场持续发生在原创性、吸引力、新颖性和销售之间的拉锯战。埃德•卡特莫尔阐述了1990年代皮克斯公司(Pixar)如何蓬勃发展而迪斯尼公司(Disney)如何乱作一团的故事。在迪斯尼，“迅速拿出创作成果是无时无刻不存在的压力。”相比之下，皮克斯公司则极其珍惜创作过程。皮克斯电影的早期模型是“丑儿”——这些笨拙、前后矛盾和不完整的草稿亟需进一步打磨。它们需要时间、耐心和数以千计次的编辑。“让这个过程变得更好、更容易、更便宜是一个重要的愿望，我们不断地改善这方面的工作，但它本身不是目的，”卡特莫尔写道。“创造出伟大的作品才是终极目标。”

    Money: The Unauthorized Biography, by Felix Martin

    Economic historians argue that money emerged as an alternative to barter. The story goes: We traded fish or corn or tools (all our goods, both perishable and permanent), until money came along. It was a more efficient and stable commodity — a medium of exchange that lubricated the markets. For Martin, this view is deeply flawed. It is a history that only relies on what survived. Coinage, he says, is not essential to a monetary system. Witness some cultures where wealth was measured by giant, immovable boulders, or today, where it consists of a series of ones and zeros in a computer network. It’s the misunderstanding of money as something real, rather than a political concept, that led to our unequal modern financial system and it will take serious reform (Martin thinks we should break up the banks) to make it just.

  《货币外传》(Money: The Unauthorized Biography)，作者：费利克斯•马丁

    经济史学家认为，货币是作为以货易货的替代方案涌现出来的。这个故事据说是这样的：我们交换鱼、玉米或工具（我们所有的物品，包括易腐和能永久存放的东西），直至货币横空出世。它是一种更高效、更稳定的商品——一种润滑市场的交易媒介。在马丁看来，这种观点存在严重缺陷。这是一种仅仅基于幸存物来描述的历史。他说，对于货币系统来说，硬币其实并没有那么重要。比如，一些文化中是用不可移动的巨石来衡量财富的，再比如，在如今的计算机网络世界中，财富可以由一系列1和0组成。正是这种误以为货币是一种实物，而不是一个政治概念的思想，促成了不平等的现代金融体系，亟需深度改革才能变得公正合理（马丁认为我们应该解散银行）。

    Left Brain, Right Stuff: How Leaders Make Winning Decisions, by Phil Rosenzweig

    Rosenzweigdistinguishes between a few human tendencies: overprecision (the tendency to "believe that our estimates or projections are more accurate than they turn out to be”), overestimation (a "belief that I can do something better, or maybe faster, than I really can") and overplacement (the "belief we are better than others"). These sound bad, but for manager, a little overconfidence can go a long way. While we should avoid overprecision so that our estimates can be clearheaded, overestimation can prompt leaders to aim higher. Says Rosenzweig: “Believing you can run a bit faster than you’ve ever gone before can help you do better.”

    《左脑右物：领导者如何做出致胜决策》(Left Brain, Right Stuff: How Leaders Make Winning Decisions)，作者：菲尔•罗森茨维格

    罗森茨维格详细区分了人类的几种倾向：过度精准（“相信我们的估计或预测比事实更加准确”）；过高估计（“坚信我能够更好，或者更快地做某件事，但自己其实并不具备这种能力”）；过高定位（“坚信我们比其他人更优秀”）。这些倾向听起来很糟糕，但对于一位管理者来说，有点过度自信或许大有裨益。一方面，我们应该避免过度精准，这样我们就能够做出更加清醒的估计。另一方面，过高估计可以驱使领导者致力于更高的目标。罗森茨维格说：“相信自己能够比从前跑得更快一些，可以帮助你做得更好。”

    Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion, by David Zweig

    We live in an era driven by celebrity and ego; everyone wants not just attention but admiration and praise. And yet, the better “Invisibles” do their jobs, the less you notice their contributions. Zweig identifies three traits that Invisibles embody: Ambivalence Toward Recognition, Meticulousness, and Savoring of Responsibility. It’s people like these that run the world and power its best businesses, not that you’d know it.     

    《隐形人：在自我推销盛行的时代匿名工作的力量》(Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion)，作者：崔大伟

    我们生活在一个由名人和自我意识驱动的时代；每个人不仅希望获得关注，还想赢得钦佩和赞扬。“隐形人”的工作做得越好，你就越难发现他们的贡献。崔大伟确定了隐形人体现的三个特征：对受到认可的矛盾心理；谨小慎微；乐于承担责任。你所不知道的是，正是这些人在运营这个世界，执掌最好的企业。

Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind, by Biz Stone

    Stone, a Twitter co-founder, lays out a brief history of the network, sprinkled with a few insights on the creative process, leadership and management. Here’s one: “As a company, instead of talking about how great our technology was, we simply started celebrating that amazing things people were doing with it. It was an odd reversal."

    《一只小小鸟告诉我的事情：一个创意头脑的自白》(Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind)，作者：比兹•斯通

    Twitter公司联合创始人斯通勾画出这家社交网络的简史，其间穿插了一些关于创新流程、领导力和管理的观点。其中一个观点是：“作为一家公司，我们并没有宣扬我们的技术有多么牛，只是开始庆贺人们正在采用这些技术做出令人惊叹的事。这是一个奇怪的逆转。”

  Think Like a Freak, by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

    The third installment from Freakonomics team Levitt-Dubner. This edition is the most actionable and prescriptive yet. If you want to “think like a freak,” you’ve got to know how to use incentives to your advantage. For example, the charity Smile Train told people it would stop sending them solicitations if they donated just once -- it worked. Other gems: Think like a child (have fun and don’t be afraid to ask silly questions), sort out bad actors early (Zappos self-selects for culture-fit by giving employees $2,000 to leave), and quit your job (data attests: people who make the jump end up happier).

    《像魔鬼那样思考》(Think Like a Freak)，作者：史蒂芬•莱维特和史蒂芬•杜伯纳

    这是《魔鬼经济学》二人组的第三部作品，也是迄今为止最具操作性和规范性的版本。如果你想“像魔鬼一样思考”，你就必须知道如何以对你有利的方式使用激励策略。比如，慈善组织“微笑列车”(Smile Train)告诉人们，如果他们只捐赠一次，该组织就将停止给他们发送捐赠函——这招果然奏效。其他精彩观点包括：像孩子一样思考（活得开心些，不要害怕问愚蠢的问题），早一步清理不良行为者（购鞋网站Zappos给主动离职的员工赠送2,000美元，通过这种方式选择契合公司文化的员工），辞掉你的工作（数据证明：跳出这一步的人最终过得更幸福）。

    Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science, by Alex Pentland

    It really is about who you know. Network researchers debate the importance of two components: the strength of connections and the diversity of connections. Pentland, on the other hand, argues for the importance of what he terms “idea flow,” the propagation of behaviors and beliefs through a social network—such as a business. The implication is that a business has a “collective intelligence” that is not the sum of individual IQs but of the structure of its internal social networks.

    《社交物理学：好思想如何传播——来自一门新科学的教益》(Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science)，作者：亚历克斯•彭特兰

    这真的跟你认识谁有关。社交网络研究者一直在争辩两个部分的重要性：即关系强度和人脉多样性。而彭特兰则认为，“思想流”，也就是行为和理念在一家社交网络（比如一家企业）的传播非常重要。它意味着，一家企业拥有一种“集体智慧”，它不是个体智商的总和，而是其内部社交网络结构的总和。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒