Amazon.com updates its list of bestselling business books hourly. Here is a snapshot of what books people are buying on Monday, April 21.
1. The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris. According to the author, the astronomical leverage at investment banks and their hedge fund and private equity clients virtually guarantees massive disruption in global markets. The crash, when it comes, will have no firebreaks. A quarter century of free-market zealotry that extolled asset stripping, abusive lending, and hedge fund secrecy will come crashing down with it. The book explains how we got here, and what is about to happen.
2. Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance by Marcus Buckingham. Research data show that most people do not come close to making full use of their assets at work — in fact, only 17 percent of the workforce believe they use all of their strengths on the job. This book aims to change that through a six-step, six-week experience that will reveal the hidden dimensions of your strengths.
3. Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips. Phillips describes the consequences of our misguided economic policies, our mounting debt, our collapsing housing market, our threatened oil, and the end of American domination of world markets.
4. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely. According to Ariely, our understanding of economics, now based on the assumption of a rational subject, should, in fact, be based on our systematic, unsurprising irrationality. He argues that greater understanding of previously ignored or misunderstood forces (emotions, relativity and social norms) that influence our economic behavior brings a variety of opportunities for reexamining individual motivation and consumer choice, as well as economic and educational policy.
5. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss.
6. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. In today’s world, yesterday’s methods just don’t work. Veteran coach and management consultant Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. His premise is simple: Our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential.
7. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In business and government, major money is spent on prediction. Uselessly, according to Taleb, who administers a severe thrashing to MBA- and Nobel Prize-credentialed experts who make their living from economic forecasting. A financial trader and current rebel with a cause, Taleb is mathematically oriented and alludes to statistical concepts that underlie models of prediction, while his expressive energy is expended on roller-coaster passages, bordering on gleeful diatribes, on why experts are wrong.
8. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins. In what Collins terms a prequel to the bestseller Built to Last he wrote with Jerry Porras, this worthwhile effort explores the way good organizations can be turned into ones that produce great, sustained results.
9. StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths. To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced StrengthsFinder in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. In StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular online assessment.
10. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The authors provides a crash course on how and why humans are prone to make bad choices, and what we can do about it. Through dozens of eye-opening examples, they demonstrate how “choice architecture”–a fancy term for the particular scenario or context in which we are asked to make a decision–can actually nudge us toward making better decisions.