DCU Business School staff Christmas reading list

Looking for some literary inspiration during your downtime over the Christmas holidays? DCU Business School staff tell us what they’re reading at the minute and what’s next on the list.

It’s not all the latest in business books either – plenty of fiction to help you unwind over Christmas. Enjoy!

If after this you still need further reading inspiration, read this article on Bill Gates (who reads 50 books per year!)

Dr Pierangelo Rosati (Assistant Professor in Business Analytics)

Dr Peter Robbins  (Assistant Professor in Innovation)

While speaking to a packed room on Saturday Open Day a couple of weeks ago.  I couldn’t help noticing that a woman who took her seat in the front row, glanced back to catch her son’s eye.  He was sitting towards the back of the room.  As soon as I started speaking: delivering what I believed to be a stirring and motivating talk about the merits of MInT; I could see the woman in the front row had reached into her bag and retrieved a paperback.  She was reading it with unusual intensity for the full 40 minutes of the talk and didn’t raise her eyes from its pages during the Q&A either.  My curiosity was piqued. I had to ask her what she was reading.  It turned out to be Stephen Hawking’s ‘Brief Answers to the Big Questions’.  On the way home I bought a copy and started reading it. When reading a work of this type I am always struck by how fortunate we are in society to have people who are animated and motivated by the big questions.  Stephen Hawking has been thinking, all his life, about whether there are any boundaries to the universe -does it end in a brick wall at some extremity of space and time.  He’s been musing about the first great singularity of space and time.  While people like me stumble through life thinking merely about what’s for lunch.  This is a densely written book that demands and rewards high levels of concentration.

Over Christmas I have Peter Thiel, Pay-pal co-founder, entrepreneur and venture capitalist’s, Zero to One. This has been on my reading list for quite a while and I am looking forward to his treatise on how competition and capitalism are mutually antagonistic.  He is an eminently quotable author and has a track record that suggests he is worth taking seriously in the entrepreneurship space.

Dr Marta Rocchi  (Assistant Professor of Governance and Ethics) is reading Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle.

“If you happen to be on a bus where everyone is on their headphones, or if you look at people in restaurants sit at the same table and some of them are using their mobiles instead of talking to the others, you realize that “Reclaiming Conversation” can be a useful reading for different contexts – family, friends, colleagues, and also for the conversations between college lecturers and students.”

 

Dr Brian Harney (Associate Professor in HRM)

I am currently reading‘Nine Lies About Work’ by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall which speaks directly to work I am doing on fallacies. Closer to the coffee table over the break will be the ‘Future of Work’ report recently launched by my colleagues David Collings and John McMackin and my staple Christmas read ‘The Economist: the World in 2020’ (a sad existence I know). On my desk for 2020 is ‘Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work’ by Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau who I was fortunate to meet at the University of Southern California during my sabbatical visit there.

Dr Siobhain McGovern  (Associate Professor in Economics)

I just finished reading Sarah Perry’s Melmoth – a modern gothic novel centred around the Faustian pact, so atmospheric I felt I should be reading it in candlelight! 

Professor David Collings (Professor in HRM) is reading Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. Human Compatible by Stuart Russell is next on the list.

And finally, one of our colleagues who’s feeling a bit shy says  “I have a book I bought in the US called First Ladies of America Fact Book by Bill Harris and  is available from blackdogandleventhal.com. There is another book I saw written up in the Irish Times which is a fascinating tale about what a person who is tired of life in Ireland can do!! It tells the true story of a widow who has raised 4 kids, run an interior design business and then took off to the surprise of her family to Italy, a country she always loved. She bought a house and went to and met the man of her dreams- an American whom she married  within a year and now runs an olive farm with, in Puglia!! It’s called The Blonde in the Gondola by Orna O Reilly. A Must for all romantics, like me!! “