Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Steve Jobs was an asshole. He was brutally honest, took credit for other people's work, and believed ordinary rules didn't apply to him. (My "favorite" example of this last attribute is that he never put a license plate on his car and always parked it in a handicap spot.) For someone that is renowned as an artist and visionary, he ironically saw the world in black and white: everything was either "genius" or "bullshit." Despite all this, he changed the world in a profound way that hasn't been seen since Thomas Edison.

Isaacson does an excellent job of describing this mercurial and complicated person. Jobs comes across as temperamental and unsympathetic, but his passion for his work shined through allowing his friends and employees to forgive a lot of his behavior. He had the uncanny knack of seeing to the heart of a problem, but still allowed himself to be swayed by psychics, herbal therapies and natural healers, and bizarre diets and cleanses. He raged against Microsoft and Google, often accusing them of stealing his work, when in reality he himself stole virtually everything unique about the Macintosh from Xerox. Isaacson takes the difficult task of describing an unlikable man and achieves something amazing: at the end I found myself admiring Steve Jobs.

First Sentence:

When Paul Jobs mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates.

Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out, by Josh Noel

This is more than just the history of Goose Island Beer Company; this is the history of how Anheuser-Busch went from ignoring craft beer to trying to kill craft beer to (somewhat) embracing craft beer.

Goose Island was founded in 1988 and fairly quickly established themselves as a solid brewer in Chicago. In 1992 they basically invented the bourbon barrel-aged movement with their Bourbon County Stout and placed themselves among the leaders of the growing craft beer movement. Around this same time the explosive growth in craft beer started cutting into the profits of Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors so they did what any near-monopoly does: they tried to kill their competitors. This cold war between large and small brewers continues through today, but in 2011 a major shift happened: AB InBev bought Goose Island outright. This was seen as traitorous by the craft industry and the Brewers Association which governs craft reacted by officially defining craft beer as "small, independent, and traditional" which meant that Goose Island went from a leader in the industry to an outsider overnight.

Noel does a good job of telling the story and showing the logic behind the decisions of the major players. He is fairly even-handed (if anything, he may have underplayed the outrage and sense of betrayal that occurred when the purchase occurred) and accurately noted that the craft beer community breaks down into two camps: people that care about how the beer tastes and people that care about who profits from the sales. (Personally I feel more of a kinship with the first group, but certainly understand the animosity towards "big beer" and their bully pulpit.) This is a fascinating and entertaining narrative, and Noel describes it well. His conclusion is spot-on, capturing the bittersweet result of the war. "Craft beer won: it forced the biggest beer company in the world to change. Craft beer lost: it had been commandeered by the biggest beer company in the world."

First Sentence:

On a Thursday evening in 1986, as a spring storm pounded the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, John Hall sat in an airplane on the rain-glazed tarmac and did something he would recount for the rest of his life.

Company Man, by Joseph Finder

This is a mediocre thriller about a small-town CEO, Nicholas Conover, caught in a cover-up for killing his stalker. The plot is fairly predictable, until we get to the surprisingly optimistic ending which seems massively unrealistic. Coupled with one-note characters (the misunderstood executive, the religious cop, the shifty security chief, the troubled son, etc.) this is a wholly unsatisfying book.

First Sentence:

The office of the chief executive officer of the Stratton Corporation wasn't really an office at all.

Beer School, by Steve Hindy & Tom Potter

The two founders of the Brooklyn Brewery wrote Beer School so I was expecting a straightforward corporate history describing how a couple of home brewers hit it big. Instead, I found a thoughtful look at entrepreneurship and business partnerships.

The chapters are written by one of the two founders, with the other weighing in at the conclusion often with a different point of view. Neither of these guys had ever started a business before; one was a foreign correspondent for the AP and the other was a middle-tier banker. They cover how they decided to go into partnership, writing their business plan, collecting funding, publicity, managing a staff and performance reviews, and deciding when to cash out among other things. It is an honest portrayal, covering mistakes as well as successes, and refreshingly the pair doesn't always agree.

The writing is uneven, with the styles of Hindy and Potter being quite different. Hindy is the better author (not surprising as he was a reporter); Potter's chapter on raising money was especially repetitive: "venture funding" is defined three times in four pages. Potter also has some odd ideas about management. "People who read lots of resumes, just like people who read lots of resumes, aren't looking for a creative format. They want something familiar and comprehensible." As someone that has been a people manager for over a decade I can't disagree more. I love when I see an original CV; even if it is terrible I appreciate that someone tried something different and the break from monotony it brings. When Potter discusses writing a business plan and mission statement, though, he comes off much more polished. Clearly when the topics skew closer to his comfort zone his writing improves.

The insights into starting a business were enlightening, and being set against the rise of the craft brewing industry in America over the past 25 years made this a surprisingly difficult book to put down. Much like beer itself!

First Sentence:

My head was thumping and I was drenched in sweat when I was jolted awake on a fresh sunny morning in May 1984 by the blasts of two mortar shells in the parking lot outside my second-floor room at the Alexander Hotel in East Beirut.

Vacation Rental Success, by Joel Rasmussen

I recently started a new job working for HomeAway, a marketplace for the vacation rental industry. Other than staying in a gorgeous rental last year I really don't know much about the business of short term rentals. Asking around the office for books that would help educate me, several people suggested Vacation Rental Success so I picked it up. Turns out the author lives here in Austin as well and is very friendly with HomeAway, mentioning the company several times and having our CEO write the forward. So not too surprising it was recommended, but it was enlightening regardless.

The book is quite readable; I was expecting a dry manual talking about rental agreements, legal documents, and tax ramifications but instead found a thoughtful guide on how to get into the game and become successful. Rasmussen touches on a broad range of topics, but doesn't go into great detail on many of them. Where he lacks in detail, though, he makes up for by mentioning several companies that he uses to run his business, such as HomeAway, FlipKey, VacationRentalDesk.com, CSA Travel Protection, the Short Term Rental Advocacy Center, and (most interesting to me as I'm fascinated by home automation) Nexia Home Intelligence. At just over 100 pages this is a short but sweet introduction to the industry that now employs me. It is clear that I'm not interested in being an owner—Rasmussen makes it clear that to be successful you need to be an extroverted "people person" and that is not me—but I look forward to my next stay as a traveler!

First Sentence:

If you're tossing around the idea of making a go at renting a second property, you might think that money considerations are your top priority.

Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew B. Crawford

Matthew Crawford is clearly a Marxist. A very funny Marxist that writes and debates well, but a Marxist nonetheless. While normally I roll my eyes at those that expound on the battle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, Crawford takes a particular approach that not only fascinates, but is widely appealing. Shop Class as Soulcraft is a treatise on how the ongoing abstraction of life and the loss of individual tangible skills is leading towards a world where very few actually maintain mastery of anything, and how that is bad for everyone.

In our society children are increasingly pushed to go to college, regardless of their natural bent. If you don't have a degree you are considered to be not quite smart enough to be promoted or even obtain a white collar job. I believe this is utterly ridiculous, but still find myself somewhat propagating the myth with my kids. While I do have a degree, other than the checkbox that gets ticked for certain job applications it didn't really do much to advance me in my chosen field of software development. I'm quite proud of my degree (and I love my Longhorns!) because it was the first thing I'd earned that was due to my effort—nobody forced me to go to class or called my parents if I failed a test; I truly earned the degree because I wanted it. That said, virtually nothing I was taught about computers actually applied to the real world; I wasn't interested in academia and developing software for a living was nothing like the often silly assignments done in class. I did take a "software engineering" course, but the professor was easily the worst one I encountered during my tenure (although I quite liked and respected her husband) and the closest thing to relevance we learned was COCOMO, an even then somewhat outdated estimation model. But I digress. Some of the most talented and successful people I've encountered in my career don't have college degrees. Others that have been influential in my professional development have degrees in subjects other than software, such as film. Interestingly, some (but not all!) of the least impressive people with whom I've ever worked have degrees from MIT, to the point where I actually consider a degree from there a point against someone rather than a point in favor. Of course this isn't to say that a college degree is meaningless for everyone not interested in staying inside academia, but with our culture pushing everyone to a university, what do you tell a high school student in today's world? Crawford says, "if you have a natural bent for scholarship ... go to college. ... But if this is not the case; if the thought of sitting in a classroom makes your skin crawl, the good news is that you don't have to go through the motions ... for the sake of making a decent living. Even if you do go to college, learn a trade in the summers. You're likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems." I certainly don't consider college "damaging" and truly do treasure the wide variety of people and views to which I was exposed during my university years, but I do somewhat prefer this advice to what my son's high school counselors seem to espouse. After all, what do you do with a B.A. in English?

Not sure where that college rant came from, I clearly have some unresolved issues there! Regardless, there are many other topics in Shop Class as Soulcraft worth discussing. Crawford covers subjects from outsourcing ("You can't hammer a nail over the Internet.") to modern management techniques. His lament that blue-collar work has devolved from a "craft" molded by tradition and experience to a "process" where anyone can perform complex tasks with minimal training simply by following instructions is particularly heartfelt. Quite a bit of this resonated with me, but at the same time I think he is missing the boat entirely. Crawford believes that a pride of accomplishment is largely absent from corporate America; we are all cogs in a larger machine with the people at the top completely out-of-touch with what is actually built and the people at the bottom unclear on the larger picture. If I'd spent my entire career at IBM, Hewlett-Packard, or BMC I might be able to believe that. These organizations innovate and create by acquiring other, smaller companies and rarely build anything interesting on their own. However, to say pride is absent in those acquired start-up companies where new ideas become reality and everyone from accountants to developers are passionate about what they are doing and aligned on the eventual goal is downright silly.

Clearly this book pushed several buttons for me and I quite enjoyed reading it. As with most treatises it is fairly biased and presents its opinion as "right" and the current social norm as "wrong" which is entirely too one-sided. I believe someone can find job satisfaction sitting in a cube, or pulling wire at a construction site, or patrolling a border in a hostile country. Corporate America isn't necessarily unethical or soul-crushing, but neither is tradecraft necessarily a good choice for everyone. As someone that sometimes struggles when asked the seemingly simple question, "What did you do today?" (or the much harder "Why do you change jobs so often?") I found this an intriguing—and somewhat disturbing—read.

First Sentence:

Tom Hull teaches welding, machine shop, auto shop, sheet metal work, and computer-aided drafting at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay, Oregon.

The Local, by Paul Jennings

My good friends the PubGuys mentioned this book in one of their daily updates and I thought it looked interesting. It certainly was, although it was typically British—dry, dry, dry. Jennings traces the history of the English pub from the 1700’s to today. A heavy emphasis on statistics makes some passages a bit difficult to slog through; a typical example reads, “A parliamentary return of 1839 showed that 43 per cent of beerhouses were rated at under £10, including 10.1 per cent under £5, and 23.8 per cent at over £15. By 1853 whereas 21.1 per cent were now rated at under £10, 54.7 per cent were now at or above £15.” As dry as the text was, the pictures and illustrations were fantastic! In fact, I dearly wanted to see more. Floor plans of drinking establishments through the centuries were the most fascinating, showing the gradual change from separate rooms for the bar and taps and dining to the more gradual communal space we recognize now.

I was amazed to find that before the World Wars, the temperance movement and government licensing nearly killed the pub, an establishment I’ve always considered idiosyncratic to the British lifestyle. “Having begun the war as the supreme threat to the nation’s survival, drink ended it as a support to morale whose supplies government was keen to maintain.” That said, the conclusion was somewhat surprising to me: “the pub today has a smaller role [in society] that it ever did.” The acceptance of women into pubs starting with the late nineteenth century has offset the rise of drinking at home, but the scene is fragmenting with the rise of food and music establishments and corporate ownership. Older and rural pubs are closing as well; in 1991 in only 205 pubs in the entire UK were found to have historical importance—a staggering difference when compared to churches and other English institutions.

While the pub may be flagging overseas, I’m very glad to report that I at least am doing what I can to keep my locals, places like The Dig Pub and B. B. Rovers (not your typical pretentious American bars) going strongly!

First Sentence:

What is a pub?

The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam

I first came across a pre-programmed whiteboard process as a tool at Borland; the sales department there had a start-to-finish agenda that took a customer through the value proposition of the product line. While the tools weren’t great, the pitch itself was very effective. The Back of the Napkin shows not only how effective visual storytelling can be, but describes a framework for creating your own show-and-tell projects.

The basic tenet of the book is that any problem can be made clearer with a picture. “The real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible—not by making it simple.” Roam then proceeds to prove his thesis, demonstrate how to distill ideas into a simple set of pictures, show how different types of pictures are effective for different types of questions, and how to bring it all together into an effective persuasive pitch. Early on there is a short quiz to help determine if you are already a visual person or not (I’m in the middle) and then suggestions about in what order to read the book accordingly. “If you’re a Red Pen person (not visual) and not convinced of the analytic power of pictures, you might want to start with part III )The Visual Thinking MBA) in order to see pictures at work in solving a business problem. If you’re a Yellow Pen person...” I quite liked this as it recognizes that different people learn in different ways, which also happens to echo the lessons in creating a visual framework as well.

The most valuable lesson for me was discovering the template for focusing an idea: SQVID. SQVID stands for Simple, Quality, Vision, Individual attributes, and Delta (change). Dividing a problem into these areas and creating a simple set of sketches for each category helps “force your mind’s eye to look at your idea from many sides in a structured and repeatable way.” I’ve used this a few times since finding this book and it is extremely useful. This idea of forced focus reminds me a lot of Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, a technique I use in many agile retrospectives, which is probably why it resonated so strongly.

Simple to follow and easy to read, The Back of the Napkin is an effective book that does an excellent job not only explaining why visual thinking is so powerful, but how it can be used in everyday life.

First Sentence:

What’s the most daunting business problem you can picture?

The History of Beer in America, by Bill Yenne

I love beer. Apparently, so does Yenne! He does a good job of capturing the general history of brewing in America, concentrating on the larger companies. The story was interesting, but the writing felt oddly amateurish or rushed. Paragraphs ramble a bit, especially when describing the many, many mergers the industry experienced. Fun anecdotes are started, but not entirely finished; for instance, the mystery surrounding the meaning of the “33” found on Rolling Rock labels is mentioned, but not the resolution. The physical dimensions of the book were a bit annoying as well; over 13" wide (and only 8" tall!) made it close to a yard wide when opened, which was clumsy to hold and read. The large area was, however, excellent for displaying the fantastic collection of photos of breweries, taverns, labels, and memorabilia through the years. The pictures alone are well worth your time, and more than made up for the other, minor imperfections. So crack open a cold Shiner Bock, Dead Guy Ale, Arrogant Bastard, or Palo Santo Marron and spend an afternoon exploring an important facet of our history.

First Sentence:

Americans have been brewing and enjoying beer for centuries.

Linchpin, by Seth Godin

Seth Godin truly believes in what he espouses. The passion for his beliefs is evident in nearly every word; this makes Linchpin an entertaining read even if you don’t share the same ideas or aren’t convinced of the value of Godin’s. The basic thought here is that the key to job security is making yourself indispensable, a linchpin. This means that uniqueness and originality are more valuable traits than predictability and rule-following. That meeting goals is more important than how they are met. That the end justifies the means. An interesting and admirable point-of-view, but I don’t think as many corporations in our CYA, SLA, Sarbanes-Oxley world will reward these behaviors as Godin seems to believe. Or I’m not picking the right employers, anyway...

Godin writes, “Shipping something out the door, doing it regularly, without hassle, emergency, or fear—this is a rare skill, something that makes you indispensable.” I am a firm believer of a regular (and short) release cycle, but was asked to leave one job in part because I was doing this; ironically, I was told later that having regular releases wasn’t considered agile enough! It was obvious at this point that I wasn’t going to be successful in that company anyway, but according to Godin I should have been lauded, not let go. I don’t think this obviates the linchpin theory, but it does at least add a corollary about organizational acceptance of such methods. If you are in a conservative, hide-bound chain-of-command, getting labeled as a rebel rather than a rule-follower isn’t necessarily a key to job security.

Whether you drink Godin’s Kool-Aid or not, this is an enjoyable book. His sense of humor is sly and pervasive and he is unapologetic for his personal beliefs. In a discussion about business revolutions, Godin says shopping at Wal-Mart is okay because “you can get a jar of pickles the size of a Volkswagen for three dollars.” Pundits who try and convince people that shopping at Wal-Mart is somehow wrong “have been brainwashed into believing that the old version of the American Dream was a right.” I like both the humor and his political viewpoint here!

His personality is also on display in one of the passages towards the close of the book. The style of Linchpin is chapters, divided into smaller titled sections. One of these sections is composed of a single word, “Yes.” Of course, the title of this section is, “Wait! Are You Saying That I Have to Stop Following Instructions and Start Being an Artist? Someone Who Dreams Up New Ideas and Makes Them Real? Someone Who Finds New Ways to Interact, New Pathways to Deliver Emotion, New Ways to Connect? Someone Who Acts Like a Human, Not a Cog? Me?” Considering the titles are all in a heavy bold typeface, his point is well made.

The last bit of whimsy I’ll leave you with is the following diagram:

First Sentence:

The problem is that the bureaucrats, note takes, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees are in pain.

In Search of Stupidity, by Merrill R. Chapman

I love this book. On the surface it is a humorous look at high-tech marketing disasters such as Netscape, OS/2, and near and dear to me, Borland. Dig a little deeper and there is some good stuff about how to learn from these mistakes in order to not repeat them, and I imagine that some readers will thake these lessons to heart. The rest of use will laugh out loud and thoroughly enjoy reading about one catastrophe after the other in the same manner we watch NASCAR waiting for that spectacular wreck.

As interesting as the various stories are, the humor is what pushes this book from merely entertaining to magnificent. And the jokes start from page one; the preface contains this gem (and possibly the best hyphenated phrase ever written): “Yes, [Consumer Reports] is not much fun to read, and it has that annoying left-wing, tree-hugger-life-was-better-in-the-19^th-and-early-20^th-centuries-when-choo-choo-trains-belched-smoke-into-the-air attitude, but it does buy its test vehicles and this has no need to suck up to Detroit or Tokyo in the manner of publications such as Car and Driver and Road and Track.” This sort of in-your-face wit coupled with solid-but-harsh observations are repeated on virtually every page. Even the glossary was hilarious: “ROI: Acronym for return on investment. The amount of money earned on investing in a particular program or business. The concept wasn’t in use during the dot-com boom.” “Yahoo: A leading web portal that has never promised not to be evil and therefore has no compunctions about helping the Chinese government jail journalists.”

Chapman clearly has organizations and products he likes and doesn’t; Google, MSN, and Yahoo are all described quite bluntly as “evil.” Apple is largely on his good side, but he plays fair and doesn’t hesitate to scathe them when deserving. “Had Apple not been in its way every bit as stupid as IBM, the company was in a position to become the next Microsoft of OSs. But we all know how that turned out.” The chapter on Borland was especially entertaining to me as I was technically the head of Borland engineering world-wide when reading this. (Borland had been bought by Micro Focus in 2009 and become a wholly owned subsidiary so the position didn’t really mean anything, but various contracts required the company to stay in existence and I was the most senior Borland engineering employee left after the acquisition.) I had first-hand experience with the disaster that was the executive staff at Borland before Micro Focus stepped in; it was entertaining to see that the previous executives were prone to massive blunders as well. Chapman ends this section with the 2006 divestiture of TurboPascal and its progeny with the sentence, “The Borland roller coaster has not yet stopped rolling.” Fast-forward a few years and he was more accurate than he knew!

While the stories are a bit dated—this second edition was released in 2006 and the high-tech world changes very, very quickly—they are valuable lessons in hubris and arrogance. The history lesson alone makes this worth your time; I wonder how many of the youngsters entering the business today have heard of Ashton-Tate or Novell? Both insightful and funny, this should be required reading for anyone developing or marketing software.

First Sentence:

In 1982, Harper & Row published In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.

The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow

Many things we see as factual are in fact random. Mlodinow explores this illusion with humor and insight, making for a pleasant and informative read. One of the most interesting sections was the discussion of the law of small numbers and the exploration of executive success. “Executives’ winning years are attributed to their brilliance, explained retroactively through incisive hindsight.” Mlodinow believes this is nonsense, and supports this belief quite effectively. “We should expect, by chance alone, about 1 in 10 CEOs to have five winning or losing years in a row. What does this tell us? It is more reliable to judge people by analyzing their abilities than by glancing at the scoreboard.” My experiences with various CEOs makes me wish that this was a widely held opinion, because very few executives I’ve known have been what I’d consider successful.

What sets The Drunkard’s Walk above similar books is that not only does Mlodinow explore how we are fooled by random patterns, but how we fall prey to them. Because humans want to feel like we have control, we abhor randomness; this is why we often mistake luck for skill. Our need for being in command of ourselves allows us to find patterns where they often don’t exist. The discussion and analysis about how randomness rules our lives may seem that true fortune is more a factor of luck than skill. Mlodinow shows in more than one place, though, that this isn’t necessarily true. “Successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set — the set of people who don’t give up.” While ability clearly is a factor, “the cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic.” In other words, there are talented people that fail, and mediocre people that succeed; but, mediocre people that give up easily are rarely successful. A solid conclusion to a solid book.

First Sentence:

I remember, as a teenager, watching the yellow flame of the Sabbath candles dancing randomly above the white paraffin cylinders that fueled them.

Shine On, by Mike Renfro

I love beer. My first Shiner Bock was opened shortly after moving to Austin in 1988 and I’ve never looked back. Dogfish Head, Victory, Rogue, and Stone craft some of my favorite offerings, but the little brewery in Shiner, Texas holds a special place in my world. After reading this photo-filled coffee table book, I see that I’m nowhere close to alone in that belief!

Shine On gives the corporate biography of the Spoetzl Brewery, founded in 1909. The story is actually quite interesting, giving a good overview of the industry in America as well as the details of this particular business. The number of times the brewery was on the verge of bankruptcy is surprising when looking at its success today; as the author says, “It’s a story that would ring of overdone fiction if it weren’t for the simple fact the whole damn thing’s true.” Today, Shiner Bock is seemingly everywhere; it is hard to imagine that it was nearly 1980 before it was actually brewed full-time.

The photographs that accompany the text are plentiful and include many sent in from loyal drinkers giving a friendly feel to the book which meshes well with the story being told. One of my favorites was of a Volkswagen Bug painted to resemble a bee; when Shiner introduced their hefeweisen (then called Shiner Honey Wheat) they built a “buzz” by sending these “bee-hicles” to local bars and encouraging people to try the new beer. A friend of mine and I dragged our families all over San Antonio chasing the slugbugs and getting free beer. That was a very fun night!

Rich details, colorful photographs, and fond memories make Shine On a refreshing read. It has a permanent place on our coffee table and brings a smile to my face each time I crack it open. If you enjoy Texas history and a good beer, open a cold one and spend an afternoon with this book.

First Sentence:

Just for grins, turn the air conditioning off for a few days.

Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Why are some ideas remembered and others forgotten? That is the central idea discussed in Made to Stick. With a fair amount of humor and a plethora of anecdotes, the Heath brothers do a thorough job of examining this issue. There are six main qualities that make an idea sticky: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and storytelling. Each of these are explored, and accompanied by credible examples such as the Don’t Mess With Texas campaign for emotion and Subway’s Jared campaign for storytelling. A sticky idea that has lasted for nearly 50 years was JFK’s call to “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.” Simple, concrete, credible, emotional, and a story to remember. In contrast, the author’s say “Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, "Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives."” I’ve met several CEO’s that talk that way, none of them memorable.

As with many books, the humor is what I enjoyed the most. Buzzwords are depicted as the antithesis of concrete, abstract phrases that don’t really mean anything. A medical example: “idiopathic cardiomyopathy.” As described by the authors: “"Cardiomyopathty" means something is wrong with your heart, and "idiopathic" means "we have no idea why yours isn’t working."” Another funny bit a few pages later: “Remembering the capital of Kansas is an abstract exercise, unless you happen to live in Topeka. By contrast, when you think about "Hey Jude," you may hear Paul McCartney’s voice and piano playing. (If the phrase "Hey Jude" drew a blank, please exchange this book for a Beatles album. You’ll be happier.)” At the close, a long section on how to apply what was discussed to your own ideas boosts this book from interesting to truly useful. Clearly written and fun to read, this is a great book for examining how ideas are communicated. I enjoyed reading it.

First Sentence:

Every move an Army soldier makes is preceded by a staggering amount of planning, which can be traced to an original order from the president of the United States.

The Search, by John Battelle

This book is an easy appraisal of the state of Internet search. As search is dominated by Google these days, Google stories dominate the book as well. In general I found this a fairly well-balanced book, discussing both the positive and negative aspects of the topic. When discussing Google, though, Battelle’s obvious admiration for the company (“Google has never known anything but success. The only thing Google has failed to do, so far, is fail.”) is pretty obvious. He tries to temper it here and there (he includes one of my favorite Jeff Bezos quotes, “Well, of course you shouldn’t be evil. But then again, you shouldn’t have to brag about it either.”) but the overall text fairly drips with praise. It was so positive that I was surprised that Battelle used Apple rather than Google when he wrote, “While others argued that the wheel or the internal combustion engine was civilization’s greatest tool, I’d stick to my guns and argue for the Mac.” I am as impressed as anyone with what Google has accomplished, but Google’s potential scares me more than Microsoft ever did! But I digress; back to the book.

Battelle clearly understands not only how search works, but that it will become the most important factor in our interaction with the Internet in the future. He uses excellent examples of how subtly search has creeped into our everyday life, and how in turn this has affected the business world. When discussing why sites that force registration to read or search (such as the Economist and the Wall Street Journal), he makes the astute observation that in preventing people from seeing content, they are reducing their status as an respected authority. “Sites that wall themselves off are becoming irrelevant, not because the writing or analysis is necessarily flawed, but because their business model is.” Battelle gives well thought out examples on what we can expect to see in the next few years; for instance the combination of localized search and mobile devices will level many playing fields: being able to compare the prices of wine on a store-by-store, local level will make it easy to draw conclusions such as, “Whole Foods is ripping you off.” Also briefly touching on the emerging fields of domain-specific research (citing the superb Austin-based Indeed as an authority on job hunting) this book gives an encompassing, informative, and interesting survey of the search business.

First Sentence:

By the fall of 2001, the Internet industry was in full retreat.

The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

If you cut off a spider’s head it dies, but if you cut off the leg of a starfish, it grows a new one. This biological truth has been reflected many times in our society: the French underground during WWII, terrorist cells today, open source software, and the Boy Scouts of America to name a few. These examples have led the authors to an interesting conclusion: decentralization is the key to unstoppable organizations. Interestingly, the most successful groups tend to be a combination of spider and starfish: Alcoholics Anonymous is made up of many small circles capable of operating and growing independently of each other (very starfish-like), yet Alcoholics Anonymous World Services is the parent organization that controls copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property (clearly a spider).

Sony Records, IBM, and the U.S. government are clearly not starfish (although I suppose you could argue that the original intent of the Constitution was to allow a much higher degree of state autonomy than we currently possess which in turn would dramatically decrease the spider-like top-down authority our federal government wields) and yet are obviously highly successful; given this, how can anyone claim that decentralization is superior? The answer is that a spider-like organization doesn’t imply failure any more than a starfish structure guarantees success, but the latter arrangement of small independent groups make it very difficult for a rival force to control or defeat them. Take a look at the competitors of the earlier mentioned august institutions: Sony (and most of the recording industry) has been crippled by file sharing (Napster, Kazaa, eMule); IBM while still powerful hasn’t been considered an innovator for years, ceding that label to upstart Internet companies; the government has largely failed in the war on drugs and the war on terror. This is beginning to change, however, largely due to the established companies adopting starfish principles. The armed forces and government intelligence agencies have many small, autonomous units that operate with very loose oversight; this has enabled many successes against terrorism at home and abroad. IBM has become a champion for open source software, especially Linux and Eclipse. The recording industry on the other hand has tried to defend it’s market by becoming even more spider-like, foisting DRM on the public and prosecuting individuals for file sharing which in turn is causing a growing backlash of negative public opinion—clearly not a successful strategy.

Obviously I found this book very interesting. The discussions of when decentralization is a positive thing (free speech, the open flow of ideas, privacy—nobody likes the idea of Big Brother) and when it is negative (security, accountability, safety—when on an airplane, would you want the guy in “seat 28J to decide that right about now is a good time to land?”) were spot on. The discussion behind how a starfish confederation is formed was presented in a simple yet compelling fashion: a catalyst helps like-minded people connect and then gets out of the way, his place taken by a champion that relentlessly promotes the idea. This book gives an excellent analysis of a time-proven organizational technique that anyone interested in innovation or corporate evolution should read.

First Sentence:

Don Verrilli might as well have uncorked the champagne bottle right then and there on the marble steps of the Supreme Court—the case he was about to argue was a slam-dunk.

Serious Play, by Michael Schrage

In my current job I’m leading a team that is creating a product that allows companies to create quick simulations in order to verify requirements early in the development cycle when it is relatively cheap to make changes. My product goes to the heart of what this book preaches: models and prototypes allow companies to manage risk while encouraging innovation and collaboration. I was excited when this was picked for our book club, hoping to gain more insight into the reasons why simulations are so useful and ammunition against those that believe exhaustive documentation and multi-year planning cycles are a better way to develop software. Twenty minutes after opening the book, however, my excitement was gone and the realization that I had yet another uninspiring business tome on my hands had set in.

Like many books found in the business methodology section of the bookstore, much of the content is both useful and applicable to real-world situations. Also like many of them, the writing is insipid and the style utterly dull. More than once I had to reread a section not because it was thought-provoking or packed with details, but because it was so vanilla and unmemorable nothing really stuck—kind of like watching a game score ticker for a sport you don’t follow. Perhaps I disliked this because I already understand the value of interactive simulations and early feedback; it is entirely possible that this would be a much more useful text for those that are skeptical or uneducated on the benefits prototyping. For me, though, I was sorely disappointed.

First Sentence:

We shape our models, and then our models shape us.

The Myth of Multitasking, by Dave Crenshaw

Written with the “management fable” style (think The Goal by Goldratt and Cox) this is a very fast read. As the title suggests this book illustrates how multitasking (which Crenshaw renames to switchtasking) is an illusion that actually hurts productivity instead of enhancing it. Many folks take pride in the ability to do multiple things at once; this book outlines several exercises that clearly show that the overall time these take is actually much longer because of the hidden time it takes to switch between tasks. As Crenshaw puts it, as a society we have embraced concurrency “as a way of life, but the truth is that multitasking is neither a reality nor is it efficient.” After the story itself, an appendix includes a set of worksheets for the reader to duplicate the exercises described in the prose, making this an odd mix of both fiction and non-fiction: part novel and part textbook.

As the concept of completing work before starting something new is important to the agile management world in which I work I expected to enjoy this book. Instead, I found it a bit pedantic and found myself skimming sections even though it is just over 100 pages long. The overall message is solid and reinforced what I believe to be true (although admittedly don’t practice well in my personal tasks) but I was left with an empty sense of, “Is that it?” The worksheets in the back redeem the book in a big way, though; these tools can be used both to improve your personal productivity and convince others of the “myth of multitasking.”

First Sentence:

Phil glanced at the digital clock on his sedan.

hackoff.com, by Tom Evslin

With stock charts, email threads, chat transcripts, and police interviews mixed in with traditional storytelling techniques, the format of this novel was just as interesting as the story itself. The stories I should say; there are two main threads that weave through the book: one tells the tale of the rise and fall of a .com startup during the internet bubble and the other of the murder of the CEO of said company. The .com story was fascinating; having lived through the 90’s myself working at a variety of software startups much of this rang true. Arrogant executives, selfish salesmen, primary and secondary offerings, bitter rivals (“The [buyout] price sucks. And it is in antihack stock, which sucks. And it is from antihack, which sucks.”), and the ignorance of message boards (“Your an idiot or just getting reddy to dump your stock.”)—Evslin is clearly well acquainted with the tech craziness at the millennium. In the murder mystery, none of the characters were obvious heroes or villains, so we are kept guessing right up to the end. The conclusion is a bit of a stretch, but doesn’t distract from an otherwise enjoyable read. Truly a unique book.

First Sentence:

New York, NY—April 1, 2003—(BUSINESS WIRE) hackoff.com (NASDAQ:HOFC) announced today that the company’s Chairman and CEO, Larry Lazard, was found dead in his corporate office of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Mr. China, by Tim Clissold

This book brought back a lot of memories for me. Clissold’s first trip to China was in the summer of 1988 and so was mine. Several years later he was unhappy at his job, so he quit and started learning to speak Mandarin; one of my closest friends did the same. Clissold becomes the main investor in the Five Star Brewery and while traveling there I drank a lot of their beer. Reading about his experiences was like talking to an old friend.

Mr. China is the story of one of the first multi-national investment groups to invest in domestic businesses in China. We get a look at how the research was conducted, where the money was invested, how the companies conducted business (surprisingly unethical), and how success didn’t arrive until they stopped trying to force European values on Chinese industries. I found this to be a fascinating read that told two basic tales: one of the government handing more and more control to individual businesses, and another of a foreigner becoming more and more Chinese in his thinking. At the conclusion these intertwine with the lesson that you can’t affect a culture without immersing yourself in it.

One of the things I liked the most was the optimism about China that the author espouses. “Since the Open Door policy in 1979, China has lifted two hundred and fifty million people out of absolute poverty, probably the greatest improvement in the human condition ever achieved. ... The lives of millions of ordinary Chinese have been improved beyond recognition as the effects slowly trickle down to street level. Chinese citizens now have choices that we take completely for granted but that would have been unimaginable two decades ago; choices in clothing, in housing, schooling for their kids, maybe the chance to buy a car or take a vacation abroad.” While this doesn’t excuse the country’s stance on human rights or the fact that they have 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, it does show that progress is being made and China is taking steps towards being a leader on the world stage.

First Sentence:

For anyone whose mood is affected by the weather, Hong Kong in October is heaven.