for
Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman
Both great books.
Start with why is good to understand how marketing and branding works, and how to do it better.
Thinking Fast and Slow is a great take on being conscious of your own cognition. It explains how to know whether we are making decisions with the correct thinking mode.
A lot of the time we rely on past experience and gut feel - the fast thinking mode. We do this in situations where actually the slow thinking mode might be better.
It's important to understand and be self aware of which one you are relying on, and strike the right balance.
Also a great book on how to get things right is the Checklist manifesto by Atul Gawande.
It's a fantastic story, of how the humble checklist can improve workflow quality tremendously. From pilots running pre-flight checks to avoid plane failures. To surgeons performing pre-surgery checks, vastly improving patient outcome and surgery success statistics.
We use checklists in our company to ensure we are building high quality products, and our customer support is to a high standard and uniform.
I would recommend all three.
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds.
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman A modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds.
Remembrance of Earth's Past by Cixin Liu It is hard to explain how deep my love for this series is. My all time favorite science fiction but what it is is just page after page of ideas that get more and more fantastical. Can't recommend this enough
The Three Body Problem (PartI) The Dark Forest (Part II) Death's End (Part III)
The humour is subversive, the illustration is lovely, and these ("This is not my hat" is another) are great books for younger children. My child loved it, and the people I've given this to have gone on to buy other books by the writer or illustrator.
"Mr Birdsnest and the House Next Door": https://www.amazon.co.uk/Birdsnest-House-Next-Door-Little/dp...
Little Gems are a set of books printed on reduced contrast paper, with a large clear font. They're short, simple, but fun. They're good for younger readers or for slightly older reluctant readers. My child enjoyed reading this book, and loved the illustration. The other child I gave this to took out other books in the Little Gems series from the library, and bought other Julia Donaldson books with her pocket money.
"Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Sof... I had a friend who knew a lot about the software, and knew a lot about hardware but their hardware knowledge was a bit patchy. Code helped solidify their knowledge. If I could have afforded it I would have given them The Art of Electronics and the companion Student Manual. (This was in the 1990s. I haven't read the new version and I don't know how well it works today.)
"Bomber Command" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Command-Pan-Military-Classic... I liked this book because it describes how we (the UK) went into world war 2 with ethical notions around not bombing civilian populations and ended up fire-bombing several heavily populated German cities. It's also eye-opening about the scale of this part of the war, and the cost in lives of aircrew.