1. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. About learning to accept change to foster a happy workplace and happy workers. A perennial best-seller since its debut in 1998.
2. The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley and Andrews McMeel. Pop psychology on millionaires, arguing they tend to be tenacious, personable, and cheap, rather than brilliant. From the Amazon review: “Stanley’s book booms with human-potential pep talk and bristles with anecdotes — for example, about a bus driver who made $3 million…and a loser scholar in the bottom 10 percent on six GRE tests who grew up to be Martin Luther King Jr. Read it and you’ll feel like a million bucks.”
3. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. More pop psychology — this time, about how trends spread like epidemics.
4. The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. Describes the entrepreneurial culture that defined Silicon Valley during the tech bubble, which burst the following year.
5. First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. Great managers. Do they all follow the same rules? Nope. They break all the rules. Or something.
6. The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. A piece of technological evangelism, promoting 95 theses about using that new internet thingy to your business’ advantage.
7. When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein. Inside the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the mega hedge fund that brought down several Asian economies with it.
8. Gung Ho! by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. “Here is an invaluable management tool that outlines foolproof ways to increase productivity by fostering excellent morale in the workplace. It is a must-read for everyone who wants to stay on top in today’s ultra-competitive business world.”
9. The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman. More pop psychology, though practical. The book argues that you need to get right with yourself before you can get right with your wallet.
10. Fish! by Stephen C. Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen. “Mary Jane Ramirez, recently widowed and [a] mother of two, is asked to engineer a turnaround of her company’s troubled operations department… a ‘toxic energy dump.’ Most reasonable heads would cut their losses and move on. Why bother with this bunch of losers? But the authors don’t make it so easy for Mary Jane. Instead, she’s left to sort out this mess with the help of head fishmonger Lonnie…Fish! aims to help employees find their way to a fun and happy workplace.”

What surprised me? The lack of books on trading and day-trading, for one, given the boom ongoing at the time. I also found it interesting that five of the books centered on how to foster a happier and more efficient workforce. In 2000, employers were competing for workers, rather than workers just competing for jobs. (In Dec. 2000, there were 1.1 workers per job opening, the best recorded ratio.) Perhaps that means that businesses and managers focused on self-improvement to retain employees? Also, plus ça change…. Familiar names — Suze Orman, Roger Lowenstein, Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell — dominate the list.

When did this Republican love for extended recounts start? Sometime after the 2000 elections, probably. Back then Republicans were universal in their desire for Al Gore to do the right thing and concede. Here’s current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) appearing on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer on Dec. 4, 2000:

Al Gore at this rate, is going to become — will be remembered as the Tonya Harding of American presidential history, unwilling to accept the results after we’ve had a count, a recount, and a selected hand recount in overwhelmingly Democratic areas.

McConnell on Larry King Live, Dec. 6, 2000:

I think at this rate Al Gore is going to become the Tonya Harding of presidential politics. You know, he will contest this until he runs out of lawyers, and there are lots of lawyers down in Florida.

Coleman wasn’t vocal about the Florida recount, but he did make a statement on election night in 2000 that suggests his affinity for close elections has waned over time.

“Every day that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were in Minnesota, they weren’t in Florida,” Coleman told cheering Republicans at the Radisson Riverfront Hotel in downtown St. Paul around 1:30 a.m. “You brought them here. We helped make this work.”

In Coleman’s defense, he was sort of wrong—Ralph Nader’s vanity campaign in Oregon, Minnesota, Washington and Wisconsin made those states less blue than they would have been otherwise, which meant more Gore trips to those states that, as you can say of so many things in 2000, cost him the election.

But Justice Paul Anderson cut him off and retorted, “This is not Florida. I’m just not terribly receptive to you telling us this is Florida.”

Roger Magnuson, Coleman’s lawyer, represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore in 2000, but it appears that references to that case will not serve him well.

The judges “gave no indication of when they may issue a ruling,” reports the MinnIndy.