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Brand, S. (1999). The clock of the long now: Time and responsibility. New York: Basic Books. Amazon

What that we do today will matter in 10 years, 100 years, and 1000 years? Brand says think long-term—a liberating ideal, indeed. About The Long Now Foundation.

Burke, D. & Morrison, A. (2001). Business @ the Speed of Stupid: Building Smarter Companies after the Technology Shakeout. Cambridge, MA: Persues Publishing. Amazon

Examples of cross-functional teams that fail because of poor project management and inadequate focus on user needs and wants. Draws, particularly, on examples from the dot.com movement.

Farrell, W. ( 1997). How Hits Happen: Forecasting Predictability in a Chaotic Marketplace.  New York: Harper Business.  Amazon

Using the domains of Genetics and Journalism this book explores the challenges of doing good work, work that is meaningful, ethical and satisfying.

Garfinkel, S. (2000).  Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century.  Boston, MA: Cambridge. Amazon

How the datasphere is capturing our personal information and how others are exploiting it.

Gladwell, M. (2000).  The Tipping Point:  How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.  Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.  Amazon

An account of how viral marketing can work with connectors, mavens, and salesman.

Gleick, J. (2000). Faster: The acceleration of just about everything. New York: Vintage Books. Amazon

When you use a microwave, do you type 2:22 to approximate two minutes? Why? Because it save a little time. Gleick documents how the speed of life and work is accelerating as we speak right now.

Hafner, K. (2001). The Well:  A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community. New York: Carroll & Graf. Amazon

A short summary of the personalities and evolution of the Well, an early online community, beginning in 1985 and ending in 1999 when salon.com purchased it.  Warts and all.

Kawakami, K. & Papia, D. (2000). 101 Unuseless Japannese Inventions:  The Art of Chindogu. Norton W. W. & Company.  Amazon

An art form? Not really. Just a wild collection of totally useless inventions and prototypes. For example, why not attach a fan to your chopsticks so that your noodles cool quickly. Yes, dear reader, someone built a prototype —see noodle fan • www.chindogu.com.

Kelly, K. (1998). New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Readical Strategies fro the a Connected World. New York: Viking. Amazon

Lewis, M. (2001). Next: The Future Just Happened. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Amazon

With wave after wave of technology coming ashore, children have a tremendous advantage because they are not unduly influenced by older technology. In this book, Lewis presents stories of some remarkable kids. Take Marcus Arnold, a fifteen year old boy who became know as a very competent lawyer on AskMe.com, without studying law much beyond court TV. Or, take Jonathan Lebed, a teenager who made a killing in the stock market by feeding (accurate) information to greedy people on message boards. Lewis shows how kids are learning to operate on the Net in very innovative, powerful ways that go beyond what many of us adults can invision.

Oram, A. (2001). Peer-to-Perr:  Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. Cambridge: O'Reilly. Amazon

A summary of how to cooperate through sharing computer resources and media from technical, system and social perspectives

Resnick, M. (2000). Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

How do people understand decentralized behavior? Resnick answers with "not very well and certainly not naturally". More natural is to seek a central controlling influence. In this book, Resnick prompts high school students to solve problems of a decentralized nature with a programming language that provides abstractions for specifying parallism. By seeking to understand the solutions and the approaches to solving the problems, Resnick iluminates our cognitive limits to grasp certain kinds of complexity.

Rohlfs, J. H. (2001). Bandwagon Effects in High-Technology Industries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Amazon

The VCR is a bandwagon effect. The more VCRs, the more that people who own a VCR benefit. Rohlfs examines the market conditions that determine and influence products that become bandwagons.

Shuman, J., Twombly, J. & Rottenberg, D. (2001). Collaborative Communities: Partnering for Profit in the Networked Economy. Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing. Amazon

Sutton, R.I. (2002). Weird Ideas that Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation. New York: The Free Press. Amazon

Ideas for promoting effective collaboration and coordination within teams.

Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster. Amazon

An account of social disengagement over the last 30 years and what to do about it.

Underhill, P. (1999). Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. New York: Touchstone.

The obvious is not always apparent, so says Paco Underhill. In this book Underhill discusses the importance of context in understanding the how shoppers take action and make decisions. To understand how and why people buy, careful observation and rich description are the keys. Website traffic logs, even when complemented with usability evaluations, do not remotely approach the richness of description of shopping behavior as described in this book. For this reason, anticipating and shaping user needs on Websites is not easy.