Your Inspirations?

[successgold]

Hi Everyone,

I’d just like to ask you all which people or books have inspired you most in your business? They can be business specific people/books or people/books from different areas, fact or fiction. Who and what has really inspired you to get where you are today?

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Joe Beaven

[edited by: Drastic at 3:58 pm (utc) on Aug. 7, 2003]
[edit reason] no sigs please [/edit]

[pmkpmk]

Hi,

I don't know whether they got me where I am, but a constant for many, many years now is a mixture of phantasy and fiction and fact:

Fiction:

- all of Terry Pratchett (The Discword stuff)
- all of Douglas Adams (The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy etc.)
- most of Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park is a far better book than a movie, and as a teenager I was deeply impressed with the movie based on "The Andromeda Strain")
- all of William Gibson (Neuromancer et.al.)
- most of Jack McDevitt (a contemporary S/F writer with a GREAT style - check out "Ancient Shores")
- Stanislav Lem
- Hans Dominik, a pretty unknown German S/F writer of the late 30's has influenced me very much as a kid
- Trash-S/F suitable for transatalntic flights: quite a lot of it by Robert Doherty
- everything by Shakespeare

Non-fiction:

- "Stupid White Men" by Michael Moore
- "A brief history of time" by Steven Hawking
- everything by Douglas Hofstadter (hard stuff though)

Makes me pretty NERDy, eh?

[ritualcoffee]

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt - great book about operations management. Inspired me to look elsewhere in my life for ideas on solving business problems.

Plato, Hume, Spinoza etc. - keeps me focused and objective about my ambitions.

History books on the middle ages politics - and you think this business is cut throat! ;)

[killroy]

All of the above and anything By Koza and Holland. they allways had the power to light up my head and glue me to the keyboard for hours until I spat out some functional piece of AI.

SN