Content tagged with “business”

“I saw a book sitting in a bookstore over the weekend: Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way) . I’m heavy on unread books right now, so I didn’t buy it. But I got to wondering about it later, so I went looking for a book summary. I…”

“ Employers who took the effort to find and install an alternative web browser performed better on every metric and stayed in jobs longer. ”

“ When the Redbox DVD rental company filed bankruptcy, it ‘orphaned’ 24,000 machines around the country. No one seems to want to remove them. ”

“ A fascinating look into how a new LEGO set is born, and all the challenges that go into engineering and marketing it. ”

“ In order to fulfill a contractual requirement, a movie was shown a limited number of times, at odd hours, in a single theater, prior to being released overseas. This technically made it the lowest-grossing movie ever. ”

“I have never managed anyone (well, once; briefly and poorly). I’ve specifically avoided it, in fact. I regret this. My wife had a manager in her history that was foundational to her success, and she still speaks of this manager with great affection. I would like to be this for someone else someday,…”

“I didn’t write a review for this when I first read it, sometime in 2024. It was recommended by a friend, and I first listened to it on audiobook on a drive to Minneapolis. I knew that I was going to need to re-read it at some point, because there was too much to absorb and – for me – an audiobook…”

“It’s ironic that I haven’t written a review for this book yet (I’m writing these words fully six months after I read the book). This book might have affected my life more than any other. I have recommended it to thousands of people via social media, and dozens of people in multiple countries have…”

“This is another book to which I gave every chance, but I eventually abandoned because it just never proved its point. The author is apparently quite famous in politically conservative circles. His prior book – Wealth and Poverty – was well-known, and I gather that he had something to do with…”

“ It takes a lot to launder the linens products by the largest hotel in the United States. ”

“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 (McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain and Company) and the Big Four accounting firms (Ernst and Young, Deloitte, KPMG,…”

“This book was written by Harvard professor as a paean to Utilitarianism. That’s a philosophy that says every decision we make should be designed to provide the greatest possible value to the most people. Pure utilitarianism would be tough to achieve, and that’s conceded in the book: we try to be…”

“ A professional athlete walked away to indulge his love of Pokemon and create a business around it. ”

“I bought this because I want to get better at explaining things. It was…okay? What’s sad, is that finished it a couple weeks ago, and I honestly can’t remember anything about it worth writing. I do remember it being quite basic. It has a lot of examples as well, which I was nice. But, seriously,…”

“No. This is a very vague title that basically means ‘a group of people who share information about a skill.’ Wikipedia even comes out and says: Due to its broad usage and vague legal precedent, a ‘center of excellence’ in one context may have completely different characteristics from another. The…”

“ A South Korean company is bottling water from the demilitarized zone between North and South, claiming purity because that land has been uninhabited for almost 70 years. ”

“This is the long-form story of the collapse of Enron. It was published in 2005, which means some major events were still pending (Ken Lay died suddenly in 2006; Jeff Skilling’s trial also happened in 2006; etc). Here’s the thing with Enron – The company existed in a very weird field of ‘energy…”

“This is a book about behavioral economics – why humans make the choices they do, and how they can be persuaded to make other choices. Well, not ‘persuaded’ so much, but rather – wait for it – nudged . A ‘nudge’ is a change to how a choice is framed or presented that causes people to pick an option…”

“Note: I did a much deeper re-read of this book a few years after my first reading. Scroll past the initial review for that deeper dive. This is the story of Pixar, from one of the founders. It reads like a standard business history until the second part, where he gets into some of the specific…”

“This is the story of one week in 2008 – the week when Lehman Brothers was about to fail, and then almost everything went with it. It was the week that ended with TARP – the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package. And to be clear: this is 600 pages about that one week . It’s a nauseatingly…”

“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…”

“Apparently, no one knew who actually owned The Empire State Building for a period of years, back in the 90s. A Japanese billionaire had bought it at a cheap price, because it was saddled with a really crappy 114-year lease. But he had actually directed his daughter to buy it (he had never even been…”

“Honestly, I didn’t totally get this book. The basic premise is that there are ‘narratives’ that drive economics. There are stories or explanations of things that we believe, and that cause economic things to happen. Some examples, from the book: Sellers can go into panic mode The Gold Standard is…”

“This is kind of a weird book, because the title makes you feel like it’s going to be a minute-by-minute discussion of the chemical disaster in Bhopal. But, it’s a 400-page book, and you don’t get to the disaster until about page 290. Seriously. It starts with a discussion of insects and pesticides,…”

“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…”

“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,…”

“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…”

“ When you win a hole-in-one contest (or any other longshot contest), the organizer isn’t sad, because they paid a fee to ensure they didn’t have to pay out the prize. ”

“ There were some strange airlines in the past, that catered to very specific passenger demographics. ”

“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…”

“A good overall discussion of A/B testing. More strategic than tactical – this is a book to convince executives to try experimentation, not for marketers to apply it. (Disclaimer: it was written by the founder of Optimizely, which is sort of the company I work for now. We acquired them, then took…”

“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…”

“This is the story of the messy end of Sumner Redstone’s life and the struggle for control of his companies: National Amusements, and, by acquisition, Viacom and Paramount. And it really is the story of the end of Redstone’s life. Not even halfway through the book, he turns 60. At about the halfway…”

“ Airlines make little money on ticket sales. Most of their profits come from selling miles/points to marketing partners like credit cards, hotels, and car rental agencies. ”

“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…”

“Not what I expected. I thought I was getting a technical book with literal strategies for managing and migrating legacy systems. Instead, the book spends a lot of time on organizational politics, change planning, and even developer psychology. I’m not saying this is wrong (the author clearly knows…”

“Hans Rosling is a legend in statistics and health research. He died a few years ago, but his YouTube videos and TED talks live on. He studied health and living trends around the world, and created a unique way to visualize them. His talks usually involve him pointing at bubbles which move around a…”

“Fascinating story of Huguette Clark, the youngest daughter of mining baron W.A. Clark. She was fabulously wealthy, but reclusive and eccentric. She maintained ‘empty mansions’ that she never lived in, and even spent the last 20-ish years of her life contentedly living in a hospital room. (How do…”

“Kind of an odd book, but really interesting and entertaining, far beyond the original point. The book starts out as a condemnation of the Trump administration, on a specific point – they didn’t bother to staff important agencies. Lewis paints a portrait of a man who honestly didn’t think he’d win…”

“ No brand appearance is accidental. Here’s how it works. ”

“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…”

“ Exactly who gets credit for writing a song is a complicated process and fraught with mild fraud and, occasionally, quasi-extortion. ”

“Margot really hits on the thing we all sort of know about content but don’t acknowledge: some content, we just don’t trust, and some content we do. We probably don’t even acknowledge that at any conscious level, but when we talk about ‘good content’ we’re talking content that we trust. I almost…”

“ Streaming pays the artist by the song, not by the minute. So two shorter songs pay more than one longer song. ”

“This is Gate’s second book, four years after ‘The Road Ahead…’ Like that book, it’s an exercise in vision-casting, though it’s directed to business leaders and how the internet is going to change business. Each chapter covers a different aspect of business, and ends with a checklist of major…”

“This book was written 25 years ago, in 1995, right on the cusp of the Internet as we know it today. Bill Gates was the CEO of Microsoft at the time, and this book was really meant to be an look at the exciting things that we coming in the future. It’s chapter after chapter about how the…”

“I struggled to get into this. It’s very high-level/top-down. More about the strategy of building a product team than about the practical nuts and bolts of doing the job. There’s a lot about building a team and interviewing people, and lots of interviews and quotes from people in the industry. If…”

“I don’t know what to do with this book. I read it, but it’s tough to take it seriously in places. The author is ex-CIA. He runs a ‘school’ for spy survival, or something. He trains people in spy skills. He’s very…enthusiastic. He claims to carry two firearms with him at all times. He relays all…”

“ During the late stages of construction, a Vegas hotel was found to have an engineering defect that could not be repaired. It was a total loss, but could not be imploded. It had to be dismantled, floor by floor. ”

“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:…”

“A solid primer on product management – how to figure out what features you should built into your product. The gist is that you need to concentrate on outcomes, not features. You don’t add features to your product, you really try to achieve outcomes for your company. The running example in the book…”

“ With COVID having devastated the cruise industry, many companies are selling older ships off for scrap, thus clogging up ‘ship-breaking’ yards. ”

“ This reads like something out of a spy novel. ”

“ If you think Kirkland products are high quality, that’s because they are literally the best on the market, by design. ”

“ There’s an airline that is forced to fly a single route by a decades-old treaty. It tries very hard to hide its own existence. ”

“ Examples of when missing or extra commas became painful legal judgments. ”

“ A history of the credit card industry and the two biggest players, which were both named something else when they started. ”

“ In the early 1990s. Pepsi accidentally created a contest where a million people were grand prize winners, and Pepsi couldn’t pay the total prize money owed. ”

“ Lots of air cargo is carried in the holds of passenger flights, so it’s a problem when passengers stop flying. Here’s an analysis of how the industry has adapted. ”

“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,…”

“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…”

“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…”

“ The success of a product can be weirdly predicted by its affinity to a particular group of people who are drawn to failure. If they like it, it’s probably not going to survive. ”

“ A list and description of dozens of spreadsheet errors that had significant business impact. ”

“ When you have to renovate one of the most iconic jewelry stores in the world, moving all your inventory is a risky undertaking. ”

“This both a history of Koch Industries and the details of a management philosophy that Charles Koch calls ‘market based management’ (MBM). 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: (1) Koch…”

“ The children of Chinese immigrants are not planning to take over the family business. But that’s okay, because that was actually the goal for many Chinese parents. ”

“I was going to rate this book even lower, because it was just stratospheric in scope – it was so high-level as to be basically useless. There was just nothing at all tactical here; it was full of generalities that, honestly, seemed a little obvious. Additionally, the book seemed like a long…”

“ When you buy stuff and return it, the retailer often just throws it away instead of repackaging it and reselling it. ”

“ Less than 10% of plastic is actually recycled. We’ve been told otherwise by companies who produce plastic to alleviate our guilt at buying it. ”

“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 good explainer of Amtrak’s current status and how their new CEO might get them out of trouble (hint: he has no deep love for trains). ”

“If you want to know all the secrets that advertisers or marketers (or campaign managers) use to make you remember stuff, this is your book. It’s dense, and should probably be read in a group, put to use, and consulted multiple times. There’s just a lot here. But this is the ‘secret sauce’ that…”

“ A small town in Florida lost its only grocery store, so the town itself opened one. City workers help stock the shelves and checkout customers. ”

“ A good explainer of how art gets to auction, how that market is structured, and how people spend eight figures on a painting. ”

“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…”

“ The description of the sad decline of a once-great news publication is very likely a mirror to the rest of the industry. ”

“ The story of the E.T. video game for the Atari 2600 which, along with Pac-Man, destroyed then-mighty Atari. ”

“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 story of a management theory that came and went, then sort of came back. Everything has a hype cycle, and Six Sigma was no exception ”

“ Lovely introduction to general systems theory. You come to understand that a ‘system’ can be almost anything, defined by inputs, outputs, rules, buffers, etc. The book discussed how systems can be effected and changed over time. Exactly what I was looking for. ”

“ A well-done book which is everything it claims to be – all the stuff about M&A from the start (why do it) to the end (challenges in integrating the companies; alternatives to M&A). Some of it is tedious, but so is the subject matter, really. ”

“ In 1991, the CEO of a British jewelry company made some jokes about the quality of his company’s product and effectively destroyed it and his own personal net worth. ”

“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…”

“ Starbucks has created a closed economy of gift cards and app purchases that it controls. It essentially has a secondary income stream of loaning money to its own customers as a specialty private bank. ”

“A book I will remember for the edict that to completely own a category, you need to create it. Salesforce owns cloud CRM because it created cloud CRM. It is the ‘category king.’ And once you create a category, you ‘mine’ it for value. The book is a little over-the-top and breathless in places. Also…”

“ Two kids out of college get a musical all the way to Broadway where it flops spectacularly. This is how it happened, and what happens after you flame out. ”

“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…”

“ A dissection of the demise of Mic that probably mirrors every digital media outlet in the world (hence the title). Well-written and consequently depressing. ”

“ A wonderful documentary explaining the business of contemporary art, and the intersection of artists, dealers, collectors, auction houses, and art fairs. It’s a deeply odd mix of emotion, ego, and big business. ”

“A book about entrepreneurship and thinking up the next great idea. It’s at its best when talking about the theoretical marketplace, how new ideas fit needs, and different perspectives on how people view the future. It’s get worse when it gets more specific about how to start something up. Mixed…”

“ Contrary to popular belief, small business is not a driver of job growth. Small businesses just grow faster than big business, so they just appear to increase job growth. ”

“I’m rating this 5-starts merely for the level of effort that went into it. That doesn’t mean I understood it all. This is the look at all the ways people design software that handle large volumes of data. Things like replication, partitioning, indexing, etc. And it doesn’t just described them – it…”

“ An article about technology progress, but I found it more interesting for the discussion of the technology hype/adoption cycle. ”

“Mixed bag here. The book is equal parts (1) practical techniques, and (2) motivational speaking. A big part of it is that the author wants you to know that you can be creative. If you already know this, then a lot of the book will be lost on you. It’s better when he talks about some practical…”

“ A company has crowd-sourced a quarter of a billion dollars and has been working on a video game for seven years. ”

“This is a good book, but it’s not really even about marketing – this is a management book, at heart. the key is in the subtitle: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative It’s about bringing agile software development practices to other areas of business – marketing in…”

“There’s nothing new here, and if you read a lot of productivity or self-improvement books, you won’t get much from it. But if you don’t, and you need to pick one, this would be a good one. The gimmick is that this guy spent one year of his life performing every hack he could think of to improve his…”

“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…”

“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…”

“This might be the perfect self-help book, because it doesn’t really introduce anything new. I mean, think about it, when it comes to habit formation, is there anything new to know? I think behavioral science has got a pretty good handle on why we make and break habits. But, what this book does is…”

“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…”

“So, this is an objectively good book, but would be hard to put into practice I think. The author (well, I think he had a ghostwriter) 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 (let them say ‘no’ because…”

“Business fiction is always a crapshoot, but this works. I had a sudden interest in value-chain mapping, so I ordered this book. It’s apparently quite famous in accounting and operations circles. It’s a…thriller (?) about a plant manager that has three months to save his manufacturing plant. They’re…”

“This was a tough book. It’s short (about 200 pages), but it’s dense – both physically and intellectually. The type is small, and the prose is scientific. The book is not a mainstream paperback. I half-suspect it wasn’t written as a book, but rather as a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It’s largely…”

“The basic concept here is that ‘networks’ are the Next Big Thing. Everything in the world is interconnected, and ‘the seventh sense’ is our ability to sense those connections, and think in terms of networks, rather than just isolated things. I think. It’s tough to tell. First of all, the author was…”

“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…”

“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…”

“If you’ve read ‘Walkable City,’ I don’t know that there’s much new here, but it’s more approachable. There are 101 smaller ‘rules’ about how to fix cities and make them more friendly to pedestrians. It’s clearly geared to local politicians and city planners, but I am neither and I loved it. If you…”

“A very complete look at all the steps necessary to manage devops in a software shop. Some of it was lost on me, because it’s exactly what it purported to be: a comprehensive review of everything you might do to manage the process of releasing and supporting software. Of interest was some emphasis…”

“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…”

“I love Steven Johnson, but this one was rough. It was…muddled. I’m still having trouble figuring out what his core premise was. He weaved in an out of it, and the book never seemed to have a central pillar to rally around. Then, at the end, he goes into a 20-page examination of the novel…”

“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…”

“An explanation of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). 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…”

“This is NOT a technical book. It’s more about the larger societal and business implications of blockchain – like, how the world will change because blockchain exists. However, the book might have done well with some more technical information. The most frustrating phrase is ‘on the blockchain.’ The…”

“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…”

“Deals in the generalities of working deeply, without distraction. It spends a lot of time trying to prove the value, which I didn’t think was necessary. And it seemed short on details or concrete plans. It had four principles, which were valuable, but I looked at the book more as motivation or…”

“This book should have been called, ‘How to Make Decisions,’ as this is basically what it is – a series of frameworks for making decisions. The first chapter has some business fiction – a company is arguing about whether or not to purchase a new delivery truck. I normally hate business fiction, and…”

“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 (1) I will often sell in a room with no whiteboard, and (2) my penmanship is awful. Still, it was an interesting…”

“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…”

“Wonderfully written biography. Makes me want to read more Chernow. JDR was a flawed man, certainly. While an upstanding citizen in his personal life, he was a ruthless business, who destroyed his competitors with glee. Provoked some wonder at the line between the personal and professional. Can…”

“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…”

“A few chapters in, I was prepared to dismiss this as just another collection of idealized, ‘aren’t we amazing’ ways of doing things at a hip, with-it company…but it got better. The book is written by the head of HR at Google, and describes all of the ‘Google-ly’ things they do for their employees….”

“ Nice reading, but I don’t know that I learned anything particularly new. She makes a case for taking time away from work, and has chapters about things you can do and why they matter, but I’m not sure I’m any better off for having read it. ”

“ An enjoyable look at how people collaborate to produce information, with particular emphasis on the fallacies that groups fall for, and the use of competitive markets for information aggregation. ”

“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…”

“This book could literally have been written in 25 pages. I find Taleb incredibly narcissistic. He doesn’t say anything in 1 word that could be said in 10, and his main goal seems to be on injecting himself into the text so we all know how smart he is. There’s a decent point here, but be prepared to…”

“ 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 title of this book should have made the narrow focus a bit more clear – this is not a book about general employee collaboration, but it’s rather specifically about professional services firms. This is about getting lawyers and accountants and consultants to play nice with each other. Some good…”

“ Highly readable discussion about how hard it is to predict the future, and all the cognitive traps we fall into when we try to do so. Includes a handy list of Ten Commandments (actually 11) of Super Forecasting. ”

“I read this for historic context. At 13 years old, it’s not relevant, but it does reveal that managing files was really was CMS did back then. Most of the book is about how to manage files without overwriting people (the ‘collaborative approach’). This was written by the founder of Interwoven, and…”

“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…”

“Given the title, I’m a little embarrassed to say I thought this book was about content management. It’s not – it’s about the use of metadata in data warehousing. I stuck with it though because it discussed an aspect of data warehousing with which I wasn’t familiar. It’s dated, but well-written and…”

“ Wonderful book on all the lies we’ve been told about how innovation happens. Well-written. Funny and witty, with scads of footnotes and historical references. ”

“ Astonishingly good book with a title that doesn’t do it justice. This is one of the most profound books I’ve read on human communication and self-perception. I will re-read this again, likely multiple times. ”

“ Hard to review, because it’s 15-years-old, but a nice look back at what CMS was in 2002. It drifts a lot – talks about governance, content strategy, and design – but perhaps that’s how ‘content management’ was perceived back then? ”

“incredibly dense book about library organization and cataloging systems. it’s good, but would take about three readings (with a group) to really plumb the depths of it. the key takeaway for me was: organizing information is often not perfect, and you have to make concessions to reality….”

“ 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. ”

“I read every word of this book and I still don’t understand what the author was trying to say. He’s clearly trying to start a movement of some kind – he puts ‘the purpose economy’ up there with ‘the industrial economy’ and ‘the information economy,’ for example – but I can’t figure out for what….”

“I don’t really know what to do with this book. I have trouble even categorizing it. It’s about working remotely, but it’s not a how-to manual, or even something with the solution to practical problems. It’s more of a…polemic, basically. It’s a call to arms; an encouragement for everyone to try…”

“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 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…”

“This book wasn’t what I expected. It doesn’t really have much actionable in it (except a few pages in the conclusion). 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…”

“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 good look at why a lot of IT projects and implementations don’t deliver. The author is a consultant specializing in ERP, and he details a litany of disastrous project implementations and what went wrong. The book is more of a guide to implementations. It almost details failure causes…”

“I’m still struggling to find the book I want around data science. I’ve learned that there are two levels: KNOWING data science DOING data science This book is about the second one. Make no mistake, this is a ‘statistical computation’ manual. This shows you how to find statistical answers using…”

“I enjoyed this book, but understand that it’s not a simple book of techniques or direction. The author goes deep into the human mind – the swear, the first chapter is a lesson in neurological anatomy. You’ll read more about the human brain than you probably care to know. The book is interesting,…”

“This book was perhaps inspiring, but not much else. The author spends a lot of time explaining why multi-tasking is bad, which is fine, but I think we all know this. Did I learn anything practical from the book? Probably not. But it was inspiration to get me to try and single-task more. I…”

“Throughout this book, the author keeps trying to make the phrase ‘Super Cruncher/ing/ed’ happen. I kept thinking back to the character in Mean Girls that said, ‘Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen.’ It gets distracting. And annoying. It doesn’t help that it sounds…”

“A good overview of how a large scale enterprise search implementation might go. This is not a technical book, and only gets far into the technical weeds as is absolutely necessary to talk about how search works in general. Considerable time is spent on the larger industry trends and how they might…”

“I got a review copy of ‘Bitcoin for the Befuddled’ from No Starch Press (a publisher I’ve really enjoyed over the years). The title is an accurate description of where I’m at on Bitcoin – I have a basic understanding of it, but the intricacies are escaping me. Sadly, Duning-Kruger being what it is,…”

“A collection of stories about 20% and ‘skunkworks’ projects and what makes them tick. The stories were interesting – the first ones were slanted toward tech, and the later stories branched out – but I was having trouble drawing any common principles out of it. This was remedied somewhat in the…”

“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 own 25% of Blend Interactive , which is a significant percentage. This chunk of ownership binds me to this company, in the sense that I see the company as a sort of extension of myself in many ways. I’m not a minor owner – I’m a significant part of the day-to-day operations, and my input goes a…”

“i did not enjoy this book at all. i couldn’t figure out, for the life of me, who the target audience is. it appears to be one of three: People wanting a job in some statistical analysis field Business people trying to understand the same Actual statisticians It’s that last one that’s important,…”

“Genuinely one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, hands down. Speck explains why and how our cities started being designed first for cars, then for people, and why this is bad. Then he gives us 10 ways to change it, from increasing pedestrian safety, to fixing parking, to making the…”

“This is a fairly awful book. I didn’t disagree with anything Koch wrote, but the problem is that (1) he’s a poor writer, and (2) 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…”

“ Meant to be a powerful business fable, the book comes across as shallow and clichéd. It’s poorly written fiction with an obvious point which is repeated over and over and over. ”

“I freely admit I read this because Bill Gates called it his favorite book. I’m not sure that I agree, but it wasn’t bad. It was written by John Brooks – a business writer for The New Yorker – in the late 60s. The book is a collection of 12 essays about business. One is a long recitation of what…”

“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…”

“Solid, practical book full of tips to help you get work done. Of course, it’s up to you to implement this stuff, and this is where most people will fall down (which clearly isn’t the book’s fault). Deliberately follow the advice of the book, and you will clearly improve your life, both personal and…”

“This book is kind of the benchmark, I think, for books on negotiating. It was written by three Harvard professors who collectively chair some foundation or think tank about negotiating. And not just business negotiating – many of their examples come from the United Nations, and represent nations…”

“This was just okay. The author presents nine points to make you give better TED-like presentations. It’s padded – some of the lessons are obvious, and the author gets really repetitive trying to stretch them out for an entire chapter. Additionally, she keeps going over the same TED talks again and…”

“I quit this book about a quarter of the way through. I had read Stanley’s first book ‘The Millionaire Next Door’ about 20 years ago. As a friend told me, this is essentially the same book. The premise is simple: people who act rich, aren’t. People who really ARE rich often don’t act it. They live…”

“There are books that inform and there are books that inspire. This is both. It’s a delicate balance between practical down-to-Earth suggestions, and large-scale though-provoking visions. Pulizzi navigates the line well. The book gets you thinking about content marketing – specifically, what’s…”

“I abandoned this book, but not by choice – truth is, I lost it about 2/3s of the way through (it’s a physically small book, and thus easy to lose). The book was…okay. True to the tag line, it presents a series of thought models with which to evaluate decisions. Some I had heard of (Pareto, SWOT,…”

“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: (1) a book about consulting, (2) a book about your clients’ businesses and how…”

“I think I loved the idea of this book more than the reality of it. She presents a really intriguing concept – consider your entire professional history together as your ‘body of work’ rather than individual jobs. However, the result is scattered. There are flashes of brilliance toward her topic,…”

“I actually quit this book part way through, which I’m loathe to do, but the simple fact is that I was reading it seven years too late. It was written in 2006. Things that were revolutionary then just aren’t anymore. This is made even more apparent by a breathless, hyperbolic writing style that made…”