Recent Read: Working in the UnOffice

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From Amazon: When bootstrapped entrepreneurs or independent professionals head to work, it’s usually to a makeshift office– either a cramped corner at home, a rented cubicle, or a table in a coffee shop. But an increasing number of people are considering a different workspace altogether: The coworking space.

Where you work matters, and coworking spaces are challenging conventional notions of where innovation and creativity come from. People are increasingly finding that great ideas flourish in the churn and activity of working alongside others. Across the country, collaborative workspaces like Affinity Lab, Indy Hall, Gangplank, NextSpace, and The Hub are prompting the rise of a new generation of entrepreneurs. From a practical perspective, coworking seems perfect for independents: save money, beat the doldrums of isolation, and meet other organizations and startups. And it’s the promise of innovation and community that makes it most appealing.

But with so many coworking spaces popping up– it can be difficult to make the right choices. Working in the UnOffice: A Guide to Coworking for Indie Workers, Small Businesses, and Nonprofits is one of the first all-around guidebooks to coworking. This packed edition chronicles the rise of coworking and the social and economic trends making it possible.

  • Readers learn how to find and select the perfect space and master the art of adjusting to collaborative environments.
  • Includes candid conversations and extensive interviews with 33 entrepreneurs and independents and 19 coworking space founders.
  • Discover the secrets to “accelerated serendipity” as members and founders recount their experiences of how coworking became a driving force behind critical business decisions and breakthroughs.

Recent Read: Startup Communities

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From Amazon: An essential guide to building supportive entrepreneurial communities “Startup communities” are popping up everywhere, from cities like Boulder to Boston and even in countries such as Iceland. These types of entrepreneurial ecosystems are driving innovation and small business energy. Startup Communities documents the buzz, strategy, long-term perspective, and dynamics of building communities of entrepreneurs who can feed off of each other’s talent, creativity, and support.

Based on more than twenty years of Boulder-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist Brad Feld’s experience in the field?as well as contributions from other innovative startup communities?this reliable resource skillfully explores what it takes to create an entrepreneurial community in any city, at any time. Along the way, it offers valuable insights into increasing the breadth and depth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem by multiplying connections among entrepreneurs and mentors, improving access to entrepreneurial education, and much more.

  • Details the four critical principles needed to form a sustainable startup community
  • Perfect for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists seeking fresh ideas and new opportunities
  • Written by Brad Feld, a thought-leader in this field who has been an early-stage investor and successful entrepreneur for more than twenty years

Engaging and informative, this practical guide not only shows you how startup communities work, but it also shows you how to make them work anywhere in the world.

Recent Read: The Lean Startup

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From Amazon: Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable.  The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively.  Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs – in companies of all sizes – a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Recent Read: Monstress (Vol 1)

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From Amazon & Comixology: Set in an alternate matriarchal 1900’s Asia, in a richly imagined world of art deco-inflected steam punk, MONSTRESS tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war, and who shares a mysterious psychic link with a monster of tremendous power, a connection that will transform them both and make them the target of both human and otherworldly powers.

About the Creators: New York Times bestselling and award-winning writer Marjorie Liu is best known for her fiction and comic books. She teaches comic book writing at MIT, and leads a class on Popular Fiction at the Voices of Our Nation (VONA) workshop. Ms. Liu’s extensive work includes the bestselling “Astonishing X-Men” for Marvel Comics, which featured the gay wedding of X-Man Northstar and was subsequently nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for outstanding media images of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Prior to writing full-time, Liu was a lawyer. She currently resides in Boston.

Sana Takeda is an illustrator and comic book artist who was born in Niigata, and now resides in Tokyo, Japan. At age 20 she started out as a 3D CGI designer for SEGA, a Japanese video game company, and became a freelance artist when she was 25. She is still an artist, and has worked on titles such as “X-23” and “Ms. Marvel” for Marvel Comics, and is an illustrator for trading card games in Japan.

Recent Read: Saga (Volumes 1-6)

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From Amazon & Comixology: “It’s easy to run out of accolades for this superb series… The dialogue is smart, arch and always rings true, and the visuals, rendered digitally, are alluring and inventive. The Stalk, an eight-eyed, eight-limbed female bounty hunter, remains a creepy favorite.” -The New York Times

Written by Eisner Award-winning “Best Writer” Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, The Private Eye) and drawn by Harvey Award-winning “Best Artist” Fiona Staples (Mystery Society, North 40) Saga is the Hugo Award Winning story of Hazel, a child born to star-crossed parents from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war. Now, Hazel’s fugitive family must risk everything to find a peaceful future in a harsh universe that values destruction over creation.

Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie and Matthew Wilson return with an Eisner Award-nominated modern fantasy where gods are the ultimate pop stars and pop stars are the ultimate gods.

Recent Read: Start With Why

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From Amazon: In 2009, Simon Sinek started a movement to help people become more inspired at work, and in turn inspire their colleagues and customers. Since then, millions have been touched by the power of his ideas, including more than 28 million who’ve watched his TED Talk based on START WITH WHY — the third most popular TED video of all time.

Sinek starts with a fundamental question: Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?

People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers had little in common, but they all started with WHY. They realized that people won’t truly buy into a product, service, movement, or idea until they understand the WHY behind it.

START WITH WHY shows that the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world all think, act, and communicate the same way — and it’s the opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.

Reading: Free to Make

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From Amazon: Dale Dougherty, creator of MAKE: magazine and the Maker Faire, provides a guided tour of the international phenomenon known as the Maker Movement, a social revolution that is changing what gets made, how it’s made, where it’s made, and who makes it. Free to Make is a call to join what Dougherty calls the “renaissance of making,” an invitation to see ourselves as creators and shapers of the world around us. As the internet thrives and world-changing technologies—like 3D printers and tiny microcontrollers—become increasingly affordable, people around the world are moving away from the passivity of one-size-fits-all consumption and command-and-control models of education and business. Free to Make explores how making revives abandoned and neglected urban areas, reinvigorates community spaces like libraries and museums, and even impacts our personal and social development—fostering a mindset that is engaged, playful, and resourceful. Free to Make asks us to imagine a world where making is an everyday occurrence in our schools, workplaces, and local communities, grounding us in the physical world and empowering us to solve the challenges we face.

Reading: Wired to Create

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From Amazon: Is it possible to make sense of something as elusive as creativity? Based on psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s groundbreaking research and Carolyn Gregoire’s popular article in the Huffington Post, Wired to Create offers a glimpse inside the “messy minds” of highly creative people. Revealing the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology, along with engaging examples of artists and innovators throughout history, the book shines a light on the practices and habits of mind that promote creative thinking. Kaufman and Gregoire untangle a series of paradoxes— like mindfulness and daydreaming, seriousness and play, openness and sensitivity, and solitude and collaboration – to show that it is by embracing our own contradictions that we are able to tap into our deepest creativity. Each chapter explores one of the ten attributes and habits of highly creative people:

Imaginative Play * Passion * Daydreaming * Solitude * Intuition * Openness to Experience * Mindfulness * Sensitivity * Turning Adversity into Advantage * Thinking Differently

With insights from the work and lives of Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Proust, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Edison, Josephine Baker, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, musician Thom Yorke, chess champion Josh Waitzkin, video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and many other creative luminaries, Wired to Create helps us better understand creativity – and shows us how to enrich this essential aspect of our lives.