From 'The Island of Missing Trees' by Elif Shafak to 'Build' by Tony Fadell, here are some of the favourite reads of the Forbes India team in 2022
" title="Forbes India Rewind 2022: Best books we read this year"class="img-responsive" alt="Forbes India Rewind 2022: Best books we read this year" title="Forbes India Rewind 2022: Best books we read this year"src="https://images.forbesindia.com/media/images/2022/Dec/img_199867_books-900x600.jpg" style="width: 100%;">Top row: The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak, Build by Tony Fadell, The Dismantling of India: In 35 Portraits by TJS George, The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki; Bottom row: Nasty, Brutish, Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids by Scott Hershovitz, The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Nine Lives of Pakistan by Declan Walsh
I am no sucker for ‘improve-your-work-life’ books, but when an anecdote from the initial pages springs out with an ‘it happened to me’ vibe, you know this one’s going to be a breezy read. To make his case that the disappearance of common sense “is at epidemic levels in companies everywhere”, Martin Lindstrom, a global branding consultant, sets it up with his purchase of a set of fancy headphones at an airport. The problem? “No matter what I did and no matter what my angle of attack was, the plastic encasement simply wouldn’t bend, dent, or move”.
That took me back to when I was headed to interview a New Delhi billionaire and bought one of those fancy pens with a chrome trim at an airport store. Only to realise—minutes before the meeting could commence—the difficulty in extracting the pen from the plastic packaging it was ensconced in.
The parallel with my tryst with pen-in-plastic did the trick. The following 240-odd pages made for a rollicking ride in a world devoid of common sense and abundant with absurdities. Lindstrom resorts to objects and situations most of us encounter in work and life. Like the complex hotel TV remote that “looked like it could launch a rocket ship,” which reflects the internal miscommunications and power struggles inside a silo-wracked telecom company.
Lindstrom’s solution to his client organisations is to establish a Ministry of Common Sense devoted to overturning hurdles that bosses and managers don’t even know exist. Politics, he reckons, is the enemy of common sense; and results in online meetings in which banal euphemisms rule the roost—from ‘pushback’ and ‘blowback’ to ‘send me a deck!’ and ‘let’s park that idea.’