Content tagged with "business"
Odd book. I thought it was a book about M&A, but it turned out to be a book about what do when your company gets acquired. However, most of the book was just general business advice. There wasn’t a lot here that would actually be helpful, I don’t think. I suppose if my company got acquired and I was…
An okay overview. I think I was looking for more of an in-depth title that got down into specifics of how a chatbot services might work, but perhaps that’s a different book. This is a very promotional title, written by a guy who runs a firm that consults on these things. It’s clearly trying to build…
Fantastic overview of the VC/angel process. Even if you’re on the other side – so, not investing, but looking at taking investment money – it gives you a good understanding of the entire process. If you do want to become an investor, the book is a little silly. It assumes you have hundreds of…
I read this book 20 years ago. Back then I was starting a company, and it seemed like the perfect book. Today, I’m considering starting a non-profit, so I figured I’d read it again. The book says that it’s applicable to anything you might start, so… No. This is a book about starting businesses….
An appalling, infuriating book about shocking hubris and dishonesty. The fact that Theranos managed to perpetuate their fraud as long as they did is frankly a little amazing. And all these people who so vigorously defended the company and denigrated its detractors simply HAD to know there was a…
Despite the subtitle, this is mostly about government’s usage of consultants. It goes into the history of consulting, and how we ended up with the Big Three consultancies and the Big Four accounting firms . The main problem is pretty clear: a consultancies job is not to solve their client’s…
This book is meant to describe a new approach/strategy to marketing. The “blue ocean” strategy means that you find some aspect of your market that no one is doing, and try to dominate that, rather than fighting it out with other vendors in your space – which is a “red ocean” strategy. It’s a good…
This is an extremely practical book. There’s not really a lot of theory here. The over-arching point of the book is to create a plan to bring sales and marketing together in enterprise technology selling. Honestly, I didn’t really know this was a big problem, but apparently it is. The two authors…
This is one of those books that I feel like you should read in a group. You should study discuss every chapter. There’s just so much here. The book is about products that require “network effects” to work. Network effects is the concept that some things need more than one person using them to be of…
This is the long-form story of the collapse of Enron. It was published in 2005, which means some major events were still pending . Here’s the thing with Enron – The company existed in a very weird field of “energy trading.” It’s all very abstract – they were basically trading futures contracts and…
A very good book, if a little uneven. On the one hand, it provides solid, unrelenting advice for consulting. On the other, it sometimes delves too far into what you should be doing for your clients. It tries to be both: a book about consulting, a book about your clients’ businesses and how to fix…
This book approaches big data a little differently than most. It’s less about actually slicing and dicing statistics and is more about the organizational challenges to building an organization that runs on data above all else. The author discusses the cultural challenges – how to avoid the HiPPO…
I bought this book due to my obsession with Harry Nyquist. I wrote about Nyquist on LinkedIn after I read how-to-know-person, and someone mentioned that this book talked about him as the well. The book is a solid introduction to all the things that make for a “good culture.” Things like…
This is a classic business strategy book by the author of “Crossing the Chasm.” It’s not really practical advice – the author concedes that it’s a “framework of frameworks” that help you think about your company’s future. More specifically, he talks about “power” in several domains: Category Power:…
This both a history of Koch Industries and the details of a management philosophy that Charles Koch calls “market based management” . The book is at its best when he’s explaining some of the history of the company and demonstrating principles via specific examples. Two drawbacks: Koch Industries is…
Enormously entertaining book about the Beanie Baby craze of the mid and late 90s. The book goes deep into Ty Warner’s backstory. He’s the founder of the company that bears his first name. He’s a man who spent his entire career in “plush,” which is the industry term for stuffed animals. Warner is an…
I listened to this on audiobook. It was the long tale about Ben Horowitz and his adventures with Loudcloud, Opsware, and now the Andressen-Horowitz VC fund. It was so full of information that I found it frustrating. You almost needed to read this in a group and discuss it to absorb everything. The…
I didn’t quite know what to make of this book. I couldn’t really figure out the point. It seems to be equal parts a reflection on Nadella’s first 2-3 years as Microsoft CEO, and a look to the future of computing. Each chapter has a theme, but they almost just feel like a collection of reflections…
I actually read this book twice. I listened to it during a roadtrip, and I enjoyed it so much, I bought the hardcover and read that too. One of the authors is a Danish researcher who examines large infrastructure projects and figures out why they failed. He has a database of thousands of these…
I read this book because I had heard Felix Dennis was a character, and I wanted to see how someone would explain how they got rich. The book was stupid and unnecessary. It’s really a self-help or motivational. There is no actual practical advice here except for general platitudes about focus,…
This book is a legendary examination of how companies handle “innovation,” by which the author means new aspects of their business that come out of nowhere and eventually come to dominate their markets. The problem: you can’t just give customers what they ask for. Because lots of customers actually…
This is the “business” version of Klein’s more academic “sources of power.” A good book, but a lot to absorb. The key takeaway: map potential decision points, and role-play and practice scenarios.
This was my second partial abandon of the year. I actually read half of it, then skimmed the rest. The author is an English/literature professor, and he seeks to prove that capitalism has corrupted many words in our society. So, words that meant one thing have been “stolen” by capitalism and their…
I’m not rating this because it was a book fundamentally about manufacturing. I’m very interesting in value-stream mapping at the moment, in the context of professional services, so it didn’t quite transfer. It was still quite interesting, and for the right audience, it would be helpful. Note that…
The basic idea behind the book is that innovation is incremental, not revolutionary. You make “little bets” that change the status quo slightly, and then iterate on those, rather than wiping the slate clean and starting over. This is not an uncommon theme. I’ve seen idea this in business,…
Turns out, “strategy” is fairly new in business. This is the story of the Big Three business strategy firms – Bain, BCG, and McKinsey – how they created a new industry throughout the 20th century.
A disappointing book. It’s about making cars. You might think, “Well, yeah, this is about Toyota, right?” And it is, so I should of known it was about making cars, but it’s really about making cars, and how many people actually make cars? Clearly, most people are going to read this with an eye…
this is a solid book about larger scale digital governance. i say “larger scale” because it’s primarily about how to get order at the higher-levels – c-level, vp level, and steering committee level. this differentiates “governance” and “operations” for me: governance is Big Picture steering, where…
This is the masterwork about OKRs – Objectives and Key Results. OKRs are a management concept pioneered by Andy Grove in the 1970s at Intel, and currently championed by Google. The author, John Doerr, is a billionaire VC investor who worked for Grove and was an early investor in Google, to which he…
A well-done book which is everything it claims to be – all the stuff about M&A from the start to the end . Some of it is tedious, but so is the subject matter, really.
This is a weird and wonderful book. The author is a private investigator, and it seems he just decided to write a book one day about cases he’s worked on. And the book is really good. Each chapter details a separate case, and goes deep into details. You find that being a corporate PI is not about…
So, this is an objectively good book, but would be hard to put into practice I think. The author is/was an FBI hostage negotiator. He has a LOT of stories about negotiating. He also has tips, some of which are about human psychology , and some are just obvious . That said, to really use this book,…
I picked this up from an automation vendor at a MarTech conference . It’s not a bad title, but it’s clearly designed to get people excited about the possibilities of automation and what they could do with it . There’s not a lot to say here – the book presents all sorts of ideas and “recipes” for how…
A book about the rise of “platforms” – systems that don’t do anything except connect other people. Think AirBnB, Facebook, Uber, etc. A good look at all the challenges, especially things like network effects, how to get people on the platform to start with, and how to keep them on the platform over…
An absolutely solid introduction to project management. If you’re new to the practice, then this is your book. However, if you’ve been managing projects for any period of time, I don’t think you’re going to find anything new here. This is clearly an introductory book, and it serves that purpose…
A good overview of how technology is changing the employment landscape. Technology is eliminating jobs, and the authors present the case, along with 19 things we need to do as a society to increase innovation to make up the difference. We need to keep innovating to create new jobs to replace the…
I think maybe I was the wrong audience for this. It’s very much directed towards encouraging people to do thought leadership, whereas I was looking for something on how to measure engagement, and perhaps take it to the next level. Well-written, though. If you want to move into more public thought…
This was on many “best of” books for 2015, It’s a broad overview of the problems of automation and the potential effects on the economy and society. Beyond the standard litany of automation horror stories, Ford offers some interesting analysis, primarily in seven reasons why the answer to the…
This is a fairly awful book. I didn’t disagree with anything Koch wrote, but the problem is that he’s a poor writer, and he’s not saying anything profound. His writing just careens back and forth between points. I was trying to highlight the book and take notes, but it just defies logical…
Entertaining history of Nike from its beginning in 1962 through to when it went public in 1980. Those 18 years were run on a shoestring budget, and the company was constantly, hilariously broke. In the last chapter, Knight catches up to everything that’s happened since 1980. That sounds rushed, but…
This book wasn’t what I expected. It doesn’t really have much actionable in it . Instead, it’s basically a set of stories about information silos – where one person has Puzzle Piece A and another person has Puzzle Piece B, and they just can’t get both of them put together. The stories are sometimes…
This is a history of Fred Koch and his sons. Fred started what would become Koch Industries. He had four sons: Frederick, who never took much interest in the business, never married, and apparently spoke with the author multiple times to insist he wasn’t gay Charles, who is the mastermind of the…
Honestly, I just didn’t get it. This book was described in near-mythical terms, but it seemed tedious to me. Maybe I’m just not used to hardware design, or I’m not an engineer anymore – I don’t know what, but the over-arching point of this was lost. There was some philosophy toward the end of…
The book is about all the large-scale economic players and theatrics that happen behind the scenes. This is the world of George Soros and Long-Term Capital Management and Bilderberg and Davos and the IMF and the World Bank. It’s the world where billionaires make moves and countermoves that make them…
Extremely readable summary of pop psychology hacks for making change. It still runs into the problem that people are generally hard-pressed to put these things to use, but it’s well-written and enjoyable. It concentrates a bit more on the approach than other books, which might be key – the sad fact…
This book infuriated me. I wanted a serious discussion of systems theory, but what I got was a Dilbert-esque attempt at comedy. The book is incredibly hard to follow. I started off diligently trying to highlight stuff and make sense of it, but the writing is scattered, and is going for laughs most…
An explanation of the Entrepreneurial Operating System . This is a philosophy of management that my company is implementing. Your enjoyment of this book will correspond highly with your belief in EOS, but it’s worth noting the the book is well-written and clear, and I think anyone can learn from it,…
An excellent look at how metrics can be used poorly to justify bad policies. Either we measure the wrong thing, measure it the wrong way, or – more often than not – game the measurement system so that we look better than we are. Want it to look like your city’s crime rate is going down? Stop taking…
A solid introduction to the net promoter score methodology of performance reporting that falls into a common trap: it could be a blog post, or a 30-page ebook. To get this thing published, the authors had to pad it out to book length, and it’s just way, way, way long. It talks about the same things,…
At best, this book introduced me to the idea of using a whiteboard as a sales tool. However, its grand vision as a whiteboard as a universal presentation tool is a bit flawed because I will often sell in a room with no whiteboard, and my penmanship is awful. Still, it was an interesting look at a…
A remarkable book about how to take the power back in the professional services relationship. Instead of chasing after clients, make them chase after you. The book is 12 principles, from “We Will Specialize” to “We Will Hold Our Heads High.” The book is a rejection of the love of creative work as a…
