Quick Read

Saving the World at Work: What Companies and Individuals Can Do to Go Beyond Making a Profit to Making a Difference By Tim Sanders
Former Yahoo executive Sanders won't be mistaken for Lenin (he lacks a beard, for starters), but he shares a taste for revolt. While nobody gets shot in the corporate-responsibility overhaul he envisions, he does suggest companies that don't embrace his ideas of citizenship will suffer. Citing examples that range from Wal-Mart to Whole Foods, Sanders shows how socially aware policies can yield good will from consumers, shareholders and employees. Some of his turns of phrase may put off those not ready to enlist as "Saver Soldiers" at work, but as revolutionary ideas go, Sanders's manifesto isn't bad.

Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know By Randall Stross
This story of the college start-up that grew into an 800-pound gorilla would be worthwhile for its fly-on-the-wall perspective alone. But New York Times columnist and academic Stross does more than get close to CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He limns the company's ambitions to become the keeper and manager of "all the world's information." Stross is suitably impressed by his subject's technological prowess and deft moves into areas far removed from its origins, but he also acknowledges a rising backlash over its trampling of copyrights, its cozying up to China's Web censors and its sheer bigness. In Stross's telling, Google's metamorphosis from humble search-engine maker into nascent Big Brotherly behemoth is simultaneously inspiring and a touch ominous.

The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future By T. Boone Pickens
Reading oil-tycoon-cum-shareholder-activist-cum-hedge-fund-manager Pickens's tale of his rise, fall and rebound is enough to convince anyone that things really are bigger in Texas. Whether the subject is the size of the disastrous bets he made on natural-gas prices, the messiness of his divorce or the boldness of his ideas for curing America's oil addiction, his is an outsize life where the highs are higher— and the lows are lower.