The Best Books of 2015

We, at Horizon Point, love a good book or two. Here are our recommendations for you to consider for your 2016 reading list and/or ideas as gifts to give this holiday season:

Mary Ila’s recommendations:

For help shaping your New Year’s resolution:

Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith. Goldsmith, one of the best executive coaches in the world, helps you understand that most of self-improvement isn’t necessarily about starting something, it is about stopping something. He gives a simple method for analyzing and measuring our daily behavior in order to see positive habits form which lead to results.We use this process in our leadership coaching often now.

The 2020 Workplace. This isn’t your run of the mill, what should I do with millennials in the workplace read. Instead, it focuses on creating competitive advantage through people practices based on the desires of all workers, regardless of generation, and the technology and practices that will allow an organization to meet these desires.

The opening story in this book creates a visual image of the norms we can expect in just a few years in the workplace, in particular the ones that will make a company competitive through its talent. This quote in the book says it all,

“The organizations that create a competitive advantage in the 2020 workplace will do so by instituting innovative human resource practices- by first defining an authentic core set of organizational values and then augmenting these by leveraging the latest tools to reimagine learning and development, talent management, and leadership practices.”

All the Light We Cannot See. The best novel I’ve read this year. Set in World War II Europe, it captures how seemingly alike we all are even when the world portrays us as so different.

As a close second in the novel category, check out The Girl on the Train. I didn’t see what happened in that one coming! If you love a good suspense, get it.

Mere Christianity. I read this one again and found it to be much more valuable than the first time I read it in high school. Whether you’re looking for a good faith shaping read or not, I’d suggest you pull out something in 2016 that you’ve read before that was impactful the first time around and read it again. You’ll be surprised how much new insight you might glean from a re-read.

Also, giving a book that has had an impact on you is a great gift idea.

And a new favorite author- Jen Hatmaker. She is the author of several books that cater to the mom trying to live a life that is unconforming to the world and teach her kids to do the same. And she’s hilarious!I devoured Out of the Spin Cycle (a devotional) and Seven and look forward to reading her latest, For the Love, in 2016.

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Author

Mary Ila Ward