EXECUTIVE DECISION

David Nicandri

What book should every businessperson be reading right now?

Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, by Felipe Fernandez- Armesto (Norton, $17.95). "There are more insights in the first two dozen pages of this work than most books contain in their entirety. ... The author takes both a long and elevated view of human history, arguing that there are just two 'big' stories worth considering. The long story, one that took 150,000 years to transact, was how a single nascent human culture in East Africa diversified by spreading throughout the globe. The second story, what most people consider to be history, is the last 10,000 years, which is how the many diversified cultures have been converging back into a single culture. ... The common factor throughout both stories has been climate change, including, most 'recently' (starting 20,000 years ago), the current warming cycle."

-David Nicandri, director, Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma

It's Not About the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks

By Howard Behar with Janet Goldstein (Portfolio, $19.95)

"'We're all human' is the mantra that says it all to me," writes Behar, a former president of Starbucks International, in this small but thoughtful work about valuable leadership techniques. "None of us are really customers, or employees, or managers, or bosses. We're people. We're human beings."

Structuring the book around 10 basic guidelines to get the most out of workers and execs both ("Do It Because It's Right, Not Because It's Right for Your Resume," for example), Behar ? who joined Starbucks in 1989 and retired in 2003 ? presents here a prescription for management excellence that emphasizes mutual appreciation above the overt exercise of power.

A look at the contents shows that Behar takes a no-nonsense approach to his advice:

• Know Who You Are: Wear One Hat
• Know Why You're Here: Do It Because It's Right, Not Because It's Right for Your Resume
• Think Independently: The Person Who Sweeps the Floor Should Choose the Broom
• Build Trust: Care, Like You Really Mean It
• Listen to the Truth: The Walls Talk
• Be Accountable: Only the Truth Sounds Like the Truth
• Take Action: Think Like a Person of Action, and Act Like a Person of Thought
• Face Challenge: We Are Human Beings First
• Practice Leadership: The Big Noise and the Still, Small Voice
• Dare to Dream: Say Yes, the Most Powerful Word in the World Behar neatly sums up his philosophy in a section called "When Did Caring Become a Dirty Word?"

The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World

By John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan (Harvard Business Press, $27.50)

If leadership is gauged, in part, by one's willingness to try something different, to shrug off the shackles of tradition, then the entrepreneurs profiled here are leaders in the best sense of the word. Each is confronting immense challenges ? war, poverty, plagues, climate change ? by means that defy conventional business models, and is showing success. That's true whether the subject is Wangari Maathai, who's planting millions of trees across Kenya to prevent soil erosion; Bangladesh-based Waste Concern, which runs a for-profit business in waste management and sustainable energy, in tandem with a nonprofit arm that experiments with clean energy and recycling programs; or Delaware's One Laptop per Child program, which is using millions of donated dollars to supply children outside the developed world with otherwise unavailable teaching technologies. The authors explain that many of the entrepreneurs cited here have been dubbed "crazy," yet "a large slice of the future may hinge on their success in spreading their apparently unhinged ideas and business models." A rousing treatise that defines down the meaning of "impossible."