On the night stand - Books - business consultant describes the books he is currently reading - Brief Article

T+D, May, 2002 by Sivasailam Thiagarajan

My wife doesn't permit me to stack books more than 9 inches high on the nightstand, so I have to be choosy. My current stack includes two books intended to jolt me from conventional thinking about change management: Locating the Energy for Change, by Charles Elliott, and Survival Is Not Enough, by Seth Godin. Elliot presents an excellent introduction to appreciative inquiry--an optimistic alternative to the gloomy paradigm that focuses on the pain of change, and Godin explains how to zoom through organizational evolution by eliminating hard-wired, anti-change reflex and by accepting constant flux as a stable equilibrium.

I frequently flip through the next two books: Digital Game-Based Learning by Marc Prensky, which explores training techniques for the twitch-speed generation, and Training to Imagine by Kat Koppett, which is a collection of improvisational theater techniques.

Next are true classics that reflect my cultural heritage: Kural, in the original Tamil, is a secular classic by the sage Tiruvalluvar. Its 133 chapters deal with such universal and timeless topics as ethics, integrity, leadership, learning, family values, and love. At the bottom of the stack, the Kama Sutra. My copy is the first unabridged modern translation of the Indian text by Alain Danielou. Kama Sutra constantly reminds me that my career of writing how-to books is perhaps the second oldest profession.

Sivasailam Thiagarajan is the resident mad scientist at QB International, a performance-improvement organization that helps people achieve speed, low-cost, and quality--all at the same time; thiagi@thiagi.com.

Thiagi, once a street-corner magician in India, advises, "Trust in yourself."