EMBA的小眼睛

The patina of books and the magic thrill of a new idea

Show me your bookcase, the ideas that you've collected one by one over the years, the changes you've made in the way you see the world. Not your browser history, but the books you were willing to buy and hold and read and store and share.

Every bookshelf tells a story. You can't build one in a day or even a week... it's a lifetime of collected changes. On the shelf over there I see an Isaac Asimov collection I bought when I was 12, right next to a yet-to-be-published galley by a friend of mine. Each of them changed my life.

It's thrilling to juxtapose this look backwards with the feeling I get when a great new book arrives. It hasn't been read yet (at least not by me) and it it offers unlimited promise, new possibilities and perhaps the chance to share it with someone else after I'm done.

This week, Portfolio is publishing four new editions of books I wrote or helped publish. These are books that your friends and colleagues and competitors may have seen already, and they each offer a chance to leap, an open door to change that matters:

Anything You Want is a business book like no other. Derek Sivers built a business a different way, a human way. He did it with no investment and a series of apparently crazy principles. And they work. They worked for him and they might work for you. A brilliant book.

Read This Before Our Next Meeting was a massive success when it first came out, with more than 100,000 copies in print. It has changed the way people go to work at companies around the world.

Poke the Box is my most condensed manifesto. I wrote this book to share, and it has been shared, making it one of the most successful books Amazon ever published.

We Are All Weird is the fourth of the series, the fastest, shortest, most powerful marketing book you'll read this week. Except it's not a marketing book. It's a book about changing the world, or at least part of it. (Look for a quick Twitter contest on this book in the next few days).

These books are now available in fine bookstores. You can also find them online. I hope you'll buy a few, share them and put one or two on your bookshelf.

You can see the four new covers and get a discounted bundle right here.

What does your bookshelf say about you?