Summer Reads From Harvard Business School

Summer is wrapping up and many b-school students are looking to make the most of their limited free time.

Business Insider recently released a list of summer books that Harvard Business School professors are reading and recommend for students.

Check out some highlights from the list below.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger

In the internet age, an idea can go from being relatively unknown to being spread like wildfire. All in a matter of minutes. In this book, Wharton professor Jonah Berger delves into his research on why certain products or ideas go viral.

For any entrepreneur looking to fast track their idea, Berger offers six steps that make products or ideas catch on.

“If you’ve wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content,” the book recommendation site Goodreads explains. “This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread – for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share.”

Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization by Reinhard Bendix

According to Business Insider, in Work and Authority in Industry, Berkeley sociologist Reinhard Bendix explains how the entrepreneurial class took on the challenge of creating and managing an industrial workforce in countries like the US, England, and Russia.

In a review for the book, the American Sociological Review says, “Bendix makes a major contribution to sociology in two of its fields which need such a contribution most—the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of work relations… sociological research of the first rank.”

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity In a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

In The Second Machine Age, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explore the impact of digital technologies on our work and our lives.

“As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives,” according to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.—the book’s publisher. “Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds―from lawyers to truck drivers―will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.”

See the full list at Business Insider.

Sources: Business Insider, Goodreads, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.