Summer is a great time to catch up on reading, whatever your plans, relaxing on the beach, taking a road trip, going hiking or a flying overseas to build a snowman in the southern hemisphere. Reading helps your brain process, inspire passions to refocus your priorities and goals and enables you to stay on top of trends. Successful people in every field generally read more than the average person. Like Bill Gates, who is no exception to this rule, and says he tackles roughly one book a week, or 50 titles a year.

The best kind of summer reading is a book that is both informative and entertaining, books that make you feel smarter without making you fall asleep by the poolside, but they are not always easy to find. At VIP Apps Consulting, we have polled the team to create a list of recommendations that cover conversations happening in business today. An eclectic list of books accompanied with articles from our blog, offering distinctive opportunities to explore new ideas, spark curiosity, motivate and inspire. A few of the selected titles have been around for a while, which you will have probably been meaning to read. Others are well known best sellers. All of them are outstanding books that will help you become a better leader, new skills, boost your career and also tittles that bring value to your personal life. Don’t be surprised if you devour more than one in a single vacation week and return to the office brimming with new ideas.  

The list is based on our team’s suggestions according to their personal interests, and the link to the book retailer is only meant to facilitate purchase.

Business, Innovation and Change

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan: The way we work is broken. It takes forever to get anything done. Meetings and emails are incessant. Bureaucracy stifles talent and creativity. Is this really the best we can do? Aaron Dignan teaches companies how to eliminate red tape, tap into collective intelligence, and rethink long-held traditions that no longer make sense. In Brave New Work, he shows you how to revolutionize the way you, your team and your company works forever

How to Drive Effective Change: Today, for companies to stay competitive, they need to innovate continuously. Transformation programs are triggered across all industries to meet new customers’ expectations, improve products, implement new technology and create agile organisation ready to adopt the innovation. Leading change initiatives is hard. In this post, we present the key areas you need to consider for developing more effective change management strategies rethinking traditional change processes and shifting mindsets that will get employees on board and solve the mystery behind conquering the human side of change programs

Technology Innovation

Digital Human: The Fourth Revolution of Humanity Includes Everyone by Chris Skinner: Digital Human offers an exploration of how the digital age is affecting human and business relationships and offers guidance that shows how companies of all sizes can adapt to become forward-thinking digital businesses. The book explores the implications of the digitalisation for humanity, trade, commerce and our future.

Doing Business with the Blockchain by Enrico Talin: A guide that reveals how to make your company more competitive and grow your business using the Blockchain. The book looks to provide answers from what is a Blockchain and what business problems it can solve, how to manage business processes on this technology or how , to creating a digital corporate identity.

ERP Systems and Blockchain, a Frictionless Ecosystem?: In this article, we look at how blockchain technology is being augmented with ERP systems to open up enterprise boundaries and reduce inefficiencies and security risks between businesses, their suppliers and consumers.

Personal Growth

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World Future of Work by Cal Newport: the bestselling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives. Drawing on a diverse array of real-life examples, the author identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and the ideas that underpin them. Technology is intrinsically neither good nor bad. The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you. This book shows the way.

No Bullsh*t Leadership: Why the World Needs More Everyday Leaders and Why That Leader Is You by Chris Hirst: Leadership is what we all try to do every day. Based on the author’s experience, the  book delivers a step-by-step working manual on how to lead Principles and actionable steps apply to every field, from businesses to community initiatives, you will have clear understanding of culture and its importance, of how to confidently make decisions, and how to create teams that outperform the competition. We can all be leaders; we just need to get on with it.

7 Tips to Succeed in a Multi-Country Business Transformation Project: Any given project represents a significant challenge for many reasons, But if that project takes place in multiple countries and different languages are spoken, finding a common language of communication always ranks high on the list of priorities. In this article our consultants, present seven tips that will help you succeed in your next multi-country business transformation project.

Diversity and Gender Equality

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates: For the last twenty years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down.

Diversity in the Workplace Drives Business Innovation and Financial Performance: Today diversity and gender equality in the workplace are under increasing scrutiny. Companies are focusing efforts on issues like how to increase and manage a diverse workforce and encourage sensitivity to it. Recent reports support the correlation between diversity, financial performance and business innovation. In this article we discusse what organisations can do to tackle it.

What books are you reading this summer? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and leave us your recommendations.

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VIP Apps Consulting provide business process management and technology consulting services. We develop and implement unique solutions to enable organisations to address their challenges and become high-performance businesses, creating value through innovation and process optimisation. We operate in the intersection of technology and business, combining deep business and industry insight with the understanding of how technology and innovation impact the industry and business models.