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UNBROKEN: A WORLD WAR II STORY OF SURVIVAL, RESILIENCE AND REDEMPTION

Laura Hillenbrand

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • This book is in my Top 3. An unbelievable true story about the triumph of the human spirit. About how we can maintain our humanity, faith and forgiveness despite unimaginable cruelty. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Without dignity, identity is erased."

  • "If you can take it, you can make it."

  • "Louie and Phil´s hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac´s resignation seemed to paralyze him."

  • "The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them."

  • "Some men may be wired for optimism, other for doubt."

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BLOOD MERIDIAN: OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST

Cormac McCarthy

Recommended

Summary​

  • From the author who brought you "The Road" so you know what type of book to expect. The book follows the main character, Kid, across the Mexico-Texas border. Murder, Indians, despair, etc. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Hell, there's no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves."

  • "Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work."

  • "Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern them."

  • "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with."

  • "War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence."

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THE POWER OF SHOWING UP: HOW PARENTAL PRESENCE SHAPED WHO OUR KIDS BECOME AND HOW THEIR BRAINS GET WIRED

Daniel J. Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson

Average

Summary​

  • I read this book because I had read their previous one ('The Whole-Brain Child') and very much enjoyed it. This book focuses on the positive impact that showing up does for our kids. Quality not quantity is what matters. The last chapters become a bit repetitive and that is why I rated it Average and not Recommended.

Memorable Parts

  • "History is not destiny. Our past can be understood so that it does not dictate our present and our future."

  • "These unpredictable and frightening responses by parents typify what´s called an unresolved attachment pattern that we see in some adults."

  • "I´m not to blame for what happened to me. But I am responsible for what I do now (agency)."

  • "A trauma is like a dog bite. If you pull your hand away, he digs his teeth in even more strongly. But if instead you shove your hand down the dog´s throat, he´ll gag and let go."

  • "Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past."

  • "A world without rules and boundaries is a world of chaos, which is frightening. Children need to know what is expected of them."

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THE CHURCHILL FACTOR: HOW ONE MAN MADE HISTORY

Boris Johnson

Recommended

Summary​

  • Written by the current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. If someone asked me for an introductory book on Churchill, it would be this one. This is probably my 10th book I have read on the subject and I keep learning more and more about the great man (flaws and all).

Memorable Parts

  • "[as a young man], he had killed men with his own hand, and been fired at on four continents, and that he was one of the first men to go up in an aeroplane."

  • "He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference."

  • "Winston Churchill was the crowbar of destiny. If he hadn´t been where he was, and put up a resistance, that Nazi train would have carried right on."

  • "He said he was Conservative in principle but Liberal in sympathy."

  • "By now you are beginning to flag. He is not...By the time he finally gests his head down in his London flat, is it as late as 3 a.m."

  • "He then undid his pants and pissed on Hitler´s defences, and so did his colleagues."

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COMPETING IN THE AGE OF AI: STRATEGY AND LEADERSHIP WHEN ALGORITHMS AND NETWORKS RUN THE WORLD

Marco Iansiti & Karim R. Lakhani

Recommended

Summary​

  • How to structure your organization if you are seriously considering implementing AI. AI seems so complex and far away that most organizations do not know how to implement or if they have to. This book provides a solid foundation on the subject. And yes, you can start using AI in your business today. Note: Not a technical book on how to program AI.

Memorable Parts

  • "This is the runtime - the environment that shapes the execution of all processes."

  • "A digital representation is infinitively scalable. It is now possible to easily and perfectly communicate the pattern it represents, replicate it, and transmit it at virtually zero marginal cost to a near infinite numbers of recipients, anywhere in the world."

  • "AI engines like Amazon´s collaborative filtering algorithms do not incur human complexity costs like communication or coordination."

  • "MYBank´s hallmark is a 3-1-0 system for processing loans: it takes three minutes to apply, one second for approval and involves zero human interaction."

  • "Deployed in only ten weeks and on an academic budget, the system is as good as a Harvard-trained radiation oncologist."

  • "Bezos rebuilt Amazon´s retail operation on top of a software platform, which gradually evolved to embed a state-of-the-art AI factory."

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THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

Will Durant & Ariel Durant

Average

Summary​

  • Short and interesting read. Each chapter focuses on a specific theme (i.e. Socialism and History). The book was written in 1968 and I love reading books like this because you rarely get these perspectives in modern books. The 'Socialism and History' chapter is quiet interesting because it was written during The Cold War!

Memorable Parts

  • "Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires quality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way."

  • "Religion does not seem at first to have had any connection with morals. Apparently 'it was fear that first made the gods'."

  • "History, according to Karl Marx, is economics in action - the contest, among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, materials, and economic power."

  • "The men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all."

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FROM HERE TO ETERNITY: THE QUEST FOR THE ULTIMATE THEORY OF TIME

Sean Carroll

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • The best way to explain the theme of the books is via a quote from it: "All of the macroscopic manifestations of the arrow of time - our ability to turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa, see the past but not the future - can be traced to the tendency of entropy to increase, in accordance to the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

Memorable Parts

  • "That's the arrow of time - unlike directions in space, all of which are created pretty much equal, the universe indisputably has a preferred orientation of time."

  • "Time labels moments in the universe. Time measures the duration elapsed between events. Time is a medium through which we move."

  • "Observations are telling us that most of the energy in the universe is not in the form of 'matter' at all, but rather in the form of some stubbornly persistent stuff that sticks around even as space extends. We've dubbed this stuff 'dark energy'."

  • "By fluctuating into a state that consists of a pumpkin pie floating by itself  in an otherwise homogenous box of gas." [on Boltzmann brains]

  • "That somethin else is the Past Hypothesis: the assumption that the very early universe found itself in an extremely low-entropy state."

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ALEXANDER YAKOVLEV: THE MAN WHOSE IDEAS DELIVERED RUSSIA FROM COMMUNISM

Richard Pipes

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Summary​

  • I think the book is meant as a way for the author to give some recognition to this important figure of Russian history that has been largely ignored by Russia and the world. Alexander Yakovlev was a pivotal figure during the fall of USSR, the perestroika movement and releasing key information about the Lenin - Stalin atrocities. Short read.

Memorable Parts

  • "The special meaning of that which was transpiring was that assembled in the hall was the highest nomenklatura of the party and state which, in its majority, had participated in Stalin's villainy. They left the meeting with bowed heads."

  • "But there is still a third reason to explain the dearth of Yakovlev biographies, and it has to do with his political philosophy."

  • "Yakovlev estimated the victims of the Bolshevik regime at close to sixty million: thirteen million in the Civil War, thirty million in WWII, fifteen million victims of Stalin's terror."

  • "We Russians are prisoners, slaves, and victims of Fate, not its masters."

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THE  BUSINESS OF PLATFORMS: STRATEGY IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL COMPETITION, INNOVATION, AND POWER

Michael A. Cusumano, Anabelle Gawer & David B. Yoffie

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Summary​

  • The problem that I am finding with reading books on this topic is that the industry is moving so fast, the concepts and examples become obsolete. You read in the book something about Facebook but today that has completely changed. The only insight I took out of the book is that you can categorize platforms into transactional and innovational. Everything else you can get from reading the news.

Memorable Parts

  • "The  less well-known part of the story is how Gates structured the deal with IBM. Gates allowed IBM to use the operating system with no additional fees or royalty payments as long as Microsoft, and only Microsoft, could license the software to other manufacturers."

  • "For anyone who follows the world of business, it is  now common knowledge that the most valuable firms on the planet are platforms."

  • "Despite comparable revenues to other firms in the same industry, our sample of platform companies had about half the number of employees, much higher operating profits, and much higher market values as well as higher ratios of market value to sales."

  • "AWS accounted for less than 10 percent of revenues bot 60 percent of operating profits."

  • "Airbnb founders developed a piece of software that hacked Craigslist to extract the contact information."

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ZEN MIND, BEGINNER'S MIND: INFORMAL TALKS ON ZEN MEDITATION AND PRACTICE

Shunryu Suzuki

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Summary​

  • Shunryu Suzuki is responsible for the popularity of Zen practice in California and US. The book is a compilation of his talks and I found the book "choppy" - lacking a concise theme. I understand that the issue with these types of books is that translating words to English is  a complicated endeavor (a word in Japanese might not even exist in English). If you practice meditation you might find 1 or 2 phrases interesting but it is not worth purchasing. 

Memorable Parts

  • "To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. You should not be bothered by the images you find in your mind. Let them come, and let them go. Then they will be under control."

  • "A good father is not a good father. One who thinks he is the one of the worst husbands may be a good one if he is always trying to be a good husband with a single-hearted effort."

  • "When you start to wander about in some delusion which is something apart from you yourself, then your surroundings are not real anymore, and your mind is not real anymore."

  • "If our practice is only means to attain enlightenment, there is  actually no way to attain it! We lose the meaning of the way to the goal."

  • "Now it is raining, but we don't know what will happen in the next morning. Sine we don't know, let's appreciate the sound of the rain now."

  • "Which is more important: to make a million dollars, or to enjoy your life in your effort, little by little, even though it is impossible to make that  million?"

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JAMES BALDWIN: A BIOGRAPHY

David Leeming

Average

Summary​

  • Extensive biography on a troubled artist / writer. The book is written by his friend, David Leeming (also a writer). The book follows Baldwin since early age until his death.  I found the structure of the book very appealing since chapters focus either on personal events and insights into his work. I am surprised he is not as popular in recent times as the likes of MLK and Malcom X.

Memorable Parts

  • "He had already realized his alienation from American society as a black; he now experienced a sexual alienation."

  • "I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain."

  • "...they were intent on having their 'Negro experience' in the Village, forcing him into the central role as they played out the myths of black sexuality."

  • "In his room he tied the loose end of the sheet around his neck, and jumped. The only thing that gave way was the water pipe."

  • "Morgan the Magician looked hard at me and suggested that I leave. Suddenly becoming extremely tired, I went off to my room without arguing."

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BUILDING A WINNING SALES FORCE

Andris Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha & Sally Lorimer

Recommended

Summary​

  • This will be a sales force book unlike any other out there. Written by the founders of the boutique sales and marketing consulting firm, ZS Associates. Rich in quantitative rigor. A must for business owners, C-suite executives and anyone working in sales. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Practically every company can dramatically improve its sales revenues by implementing the right effectiveness initiatives. In our interactions with corporate sales leaders and executives, we often see revenue increases of at least 10 percent."

  • "Understanding the effectiveness of your Sales System requires looking at your sales organization within the context of your overall company, industry and business environment."

  • "When the going is good, a even mediocre sales organization looks good. Making the numbers is a sign of success, but it can also be a sign of luck."

  • "A performance frontier analysis isolates the impact of the sales  person on territory performance by controlling for territory differences - say, in market potential, prior sales, or market share."

  • "You can gain insights about sales force size by comparing the percentage of your customers that contributes 80 percent of company sales to the percentage that accounts for 80 percent of the market's sales."

  • "It takes an average of two years too recover from the mistake of hiring the wrong person for a sales job."

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THE POWER OF SALES ANALYTICS

Andris Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha & Sally Lorimer

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • I guarantee you that there is no sales books like this one. This book will be the greatest gift to your CEO, SVP/VP of the Head Sales and Sales Operations. Read it! Sales finally meets science.

Memorable Parts

  • "A sales process will fail if it´s used by managers to control salespeople without adding enough value to salespeople and customers."

  • "If salespeople target accounts randomly, they will roughly cover a percentage of their territory potential equal to the percentage of accounts they cover. For example, if they visit 20 percent of their accounts, those accounts will represent 20 percent of their territory potential."

  • "Use a regression model to analyzed merged date (potential, sales and demographics) of current customers to determine your best customer's profile."

  • "Sales force size answers the question of how many salespeople do we need to appropriately and profitably cover our customers and prospects."

  • "Although it is counterintuitive, when a sales force is undersized, adding sales people increases the cost-to-sales ratio but also increases profitability."

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INSIGHTS FOR SALES FOCE SUCCESS: PRACTICAL IDEAS FOR WINNING IN TODAY'S SALES ENVIRONMENT

Andris Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha & Sally Lorimer

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Summary​

​A collection of the author´s blogs and publications for Harvard Business Review. As such, you get more questions than answers. Instead of buying the books simply google the authors' names and you can read the blogs directly.

Memorable Parts

  • "You should see the Sales Force System as a chain of: sales strategy, sales process & organization design, people, sales activity and customer / company results."

  • "In the last 10 years, only 3 percent of the articles in four leading academic journals have focused on sales force topics."

  • "Sales executives typically have two levers to try to increase sales: they can increase the quantity of sales force effort by adding salespeople, or they can improve the quality of sales effort by investing in coaching and training."

  • "You can publish sales force ranking not only by total sales but by sales growth, market share and market share growth."

  • "Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement."

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THE HOLLOW ONES: THE BLACKWOOD TAPES VOL. 1

GUILLERMO DEL TORO & CHUCK HOGAN

Recommended

Summary​

  • If you have read 'The Strain' trilogies you will be slightly disappointed. If you have never read them, you will enjoy this book. The authors' have a great ability of making the supernatural seem plausible. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Every letter that arrives at The Box is a letter of urgent need - a desperate call for help - and every single envelope carries the same name: Hugo Blackwood, Esq."

  • "He was originally presumed to have first encountered John Dee during Dee's 1555 prosecution for treason - Dee had been accused of reading by 'casting' (that is to say, tampering with) the Queen Mary's horoscope."

  • "A fat black pot with curved rim set in the back corner. It was full of trash: sticks, a string of colored beads, and string."

  • "They are called the Hollow Ones. The emptiness - the ever-hungry. Mesopotamian lore has them born last of the Udug Hul - the fouls spirits."

  • "She saw the mustached Mexican tattoo artist, Joachim, his shirt torn, holding a wrinkled old Hollow One, its mouth-face open and groaning."

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THE ORDER OF TIME

CARLO ROVELLI

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • Another great book by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. He does a magnificent job of explaining complicated concepts using analogies. That is the key, since most of quantum physics defy our intuition and engrained concepts we have about the world.

Memorable Parts

  • "Mass slows down time around itself. The Earth is a large mass and slows down time in its vicinity. It does so more in the plains and less in the mountains. This is why the friend who stays at sea level ages more slowly."

  • "If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float, without falling."

  • "This is the only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future. Every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved."

  • "A partial order establishes relation of before and after between certain elements, but not between any two of them."

  • "Maxwell's equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are. We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being."

  • "The entropy of  a system depends explicitly on blurring. It depends on what I do not register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations."

  • "The experience of thinking of oneself as a subject is not a primary experience: it is a complex deduction, made on the basis of many other thoughts."

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RAISING GOOD HUMANS: A MINDFUL GUIDE TO BREAKING THE CYCLE OF REACTIVE PARENTING AND RAISING KIND, CONFIDENT KIDS.

Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE

Average

Summary​

  • If you are not familiar with mindfulness I think you will find most of the advice given in this book as simplistic and impractical. If you have meditated, this book will help you apply some of those techniques into your parenting world. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Most parenting books don't tell you that all their good advice goes out the window when your stress response kicks in- as in, you literally can't access the areas of the brain where your good new skills are stored."

  • "What do you want for your kids? After you answer that, the big question becomes, Are you practicing these things in your own life? The onus is on us to behave the way we want our children to behave."

  • "Because of this wiring for survival, we all have an innate propensity to be aware of things that could threaten - a negativity bias. We see our kid's uncooperative moments - how about the cooperative ones?"

  • "The best predictor of a child's well-being is the parent's self-understanding."

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THE JOY OF LIVING: UNLOCKING THE SECRET & SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Recommended

Summary​

  • Surprisingly more scientific than you would imagine. This is a great book for anyone at any level of meditation practice (and even none!).

Memorable Parts

  • "One of the earliest lessons I was taught by my father was that Buddhists don't see the mind as a discrete entity, but rather as a perpetually unfolding experience."

  • "most people simply mistake the habitually formed, neuronally constructed image of themselves for how and what they really are. And this image is almost always expressed in dualistic terms: self and other, pain and pleasure, having and not having, attraction and repulsion."

  • "The sense of openness people experience when they simply rest their minds is known in Buddhist terms as emptiness, which is probably on of the most misunderstood words in Buddhist philosophy."

  • "So what does quantum physics have to do with being happy? We like to think of ourselves as solid, distinct individuals with well-defined goals and personalities."

  • "In a dream, if you recognize what you're experiencing is just a dream, then you also recognize that whatever you experience in the dream is merely occurring in your own mind. Transcending the distinction between subject and object is equivalent to recognizing that whatever you experience is not separate from the mind that experiences it."

  • "We tend to combine bare perceptions and our emotional response into a single package."

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TOXIC PARENTS: OVERCOMING THEIR HURTFUL LEGACY AND RECLAIMING YOUR LIFE

Susan Forward, Ph.D.

Recommended

Summary​

  • Let´s call this on a 'How NOT to guide.' Fair warning, it is a difficult read given the nature of the topic and different levels of abuse that some children faced. It opens up your eyes to the evil out there in the world.

Memorable Parts

  • "Therapy is most effective when it proceeds down a double track: both changing current self-defeating behavior and disconnecting from the traumas of the past."

  • "Denial is the most primitive and the most powerful of psychological defenses. It employs a make-believe reality to minimize, or even negate, the impact of creating painful life experiences. Denial is the lid on our emotional pressure cooker."

  • "Children have a right to be children. They have a right to spend their early years being playful. Toxic parents are not only often unavailable to meet their children's needs, but in many cases they expect and demand that their children take case of the parents' needs. When a parent forces parental responsibilities on a child, family roles become indistinct, distorted or reversed. A child has no one to emulate, learn from, and look up to."

  • "Les's fantasy was that if he could put in enough hours, he could prove that he really was a worthwhile, adequate person, that he really could get the job done right. It is typical for children who were forced to exchange emotional roles with their parents to carry into their adult lives tremendous guilt and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility."

  • "Compounding the problem is the fact that many of these parents are so troubled themselves that they evoke pity. Their adult children feel protective. They jump to their parent's defense, like a crime victim apologizing for the perpetrator."

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THE INNOVATOR'S DILEMMA: WHEN NEW TECHNOLOGY CAUSE GREAT FIRMS TO FALL

Clayton M. Christensen

Recommended

Summary​

  • The book contains superb insights and conclusions on how disruptive technologies come about and how it is almost impossible for firms to react to them. The only drawback I can mention about the book is that it only uses four markets as evidence of his conclusions. 

Memorable Parts

  • "This book is about the failure of companies to stay atop their industries. It's not  a failure of simply any company, but of good companies - the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate."

  • "Generally disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches."

  • "And as a general rule, the established firms saw the situation the other way around: They took the market's needs as given. They consequently sought to adapt or improve the technology in ways that would allow them to market the new technology to their existing customers."

  • "Three factors - the promise of upmarket margins, the simultaneous upmarket movement of many of a company's customers, and the difficulty of cuttings - together create powerful barriers to downward mobility."

  • "Generally, once the performance level demanded of a particular attribute has been achieved, customers indicate their situation by being less willing to pay a premium price for continued improvement in that attribute."

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THE ROAD TO CHARACTER

David Brooks

Recommended

Summary​

  • For several years I have watched David Brooks on PBS's NewsHour so I was looking forward to reading this book. The book contains mini biographies of people that display the attributes of character that the author deem relevant. Good read for people in their 30s and 40s. 

Memorable Parts

  • "You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You follow your desires wherever they take you, and you approve of yourself as long as you are not obviously hurting anyone else. You figure that if  the people around you seem to like you, you must be good enough. In the process you end up slowly turning yourself into something a little less impressive than you had originally hoped for."

  • "Self-respect is no the same as self-esteem. It is not comparative. It is not earned by being better than other people at something. It is earned by being better than you used to be, by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation."

  • "And if you can't learn it (humility), God will teach it to you by humiliation."

  • "When people think about the future, they dream up ways they might live happier lives. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don't usually talk about happiness."

  • "The key paradox of pride is that it often combines extreme self-confidence with anxiety. People absentmindedly or intentionally are treat the proud man's ego with less reverence than he thinks it deserves."

  • "I was in love with the idea of the happy life, but I feared to find it its true place and I sought for it by runnign away from it."

  • "I will be conquered. I will not capitulate."

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HELGOLAND: MAKING SENSE OF THE QUANTUM REVOLUTION

Carlo Rovelli

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • Another 'home run' book by Rovelli. He has a unique talent for writing short and concise books about complicated topics. Reading Rovelli and Sean Caroll has been a enjoyable way of learning more about quantum mechanics. 

Memorable Parts

  • "The calculation scheme by Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac, the strange idea of 'limiting yourself to only what's observable' and to substituting physical variables with matrices, has never yet been wrong. It is the only fundamental theory about the world that until now has never been found wrong - and whose limits we still do not know."​

  • "Schrodinger's wave at a point in space is related to the probability of observing the electron at this point."

  • "Not to fear rethinking the world is the power of science: ever since Anaximander removed the foundation on which the Earth rested, Copernicus launched it to rotate in the sky, Einstein dissolved the rigidity of space and of time, and Darwin demolished the separateness of humanity...reality is constantly being redrawn in images that are increasingly effective."

  • "Delta X times Delta P is always greater than or equal to h-bar divided by two. This general property of reality is called the 'Heisenberg's uncertainty principle'. It applies to everything."

  • "The chair is still here, with its obvious physical characteristics of color, hardness and so on. But even these characteristics exist only in relation to us."

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CAT'S CRADLE

Kurt Vonnegut

Recommended

Summary​

  • My second Kurt Vonnegut novel and, as always, it delivers. Keeping in mind that this book was written in 1963 makes it extra special. The book is a satirical comedy with the themes of religion, war, society, government and nuclear / arms threat. As relevant as ever, I guess.

Memorable Parts

  • "We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without every discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokononists."

  • "Making that cat's cradle was the closest I ever saw my father come to playing what anybody else would call a game."

  • "After that thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?'"

  • Bokonon suggested the hook, too, as the proper punishment for Bokononists. It was something he'd seen in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's."

  • "And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big."

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MINDISGHT: THE NEW SCIENCE OF PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

Recommended

Summary​

  • Another solid book from Daniel J. Siegel. The book is a combination of psychotherapy, mindfulness, neuroscience and evolution. This would be a great book to start if you want to know some of the many benefits of mindfulness practice. We navigate life thru a river whose banks are Rigidity and Chaos. We need to go with the flow.

Memorable Parts

  • "We can say that any healthy complex system has a FACES flow: Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized and Stable. We sense the familiar but are not trapped by it (depression = rigidity). We live at the threshold of the unknown and have the courage to move into new and unchartered  waters (chaos)."

  • "Objectivity permitted him to distinguish awareness from mental activity, to further free his identity from the storms of this mental sea. These are the prisons of life. Trying to change how we actually feel by ordering ourselves to do so is a strategy that gets us nowhere."

  • "There are many reasons that someone might grow up 'leaning to the left hemisphere.' What if our need to be close to others is not met by a caring , connecting, communicating other? Or even worse, what if those early interactions are terrifying?"

  • "If you grew up in a family in which anger was expressed as destructive rage, for example, you might get incredibly anxious whenever anger is expressed (fight, flight or freeze)."

  • "An emotional response -> creating a reaction of anxiety/fear -> which initiates a defense. Defenses come in many forms. 'Selective neglect' (seeing only the good) or 'projecting' feelings onto others and then hating them for this. Whatever the defense, the idea is the same: we build a fence around our awareness so that we don't feel the anxiety or fear."

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A BEHAVIORAL THEORY OF LABOR NEGOTATIONS: AN ANALYSIS OF A SOCIAL INTERACTION SYSTEM

Richard E. Walton & Robert B. McKersie

Skip

Summary​

  • If you work in human resources, you are in luck. If you deal with unions, wow, this is the Holy Grail for you. The book is written in the 60s so some industry examples might be outdated (i.e. Hoffa and the Teamsters) but the theory and framework is still solid. My skip review is based on how narrow this topic is for people.

Memorable Parts

  • "The SEU of an alternative demand  (x) is its utility (U) times the probability (P) that it will be accepted plus the strike costs (S) associated with a failure to agree times the probability (1-P) that the demand will not be acceptable. SEU = P(x)*U(x) + [1 - P(x)] *S(x)"

  • "The most obvious way to ask questions designed to clarify both the meaning of the proposal and its underlying rationale. Sometimes Party will direct such questions to some of the 'less-coached' members of Opponent's team."

  • "Party may have a man-to-man policy in composing his own negotiation team. Many management find it useful to have one management committeeman for each union committeeman, so the latter can be under constant observation."

  • "Instead of striking a restaurant, a union arranged to have hundreds of sympathizers enter the restaurant just before the noon rush hour, order a cup of coffee, and sit down."

  • "Timing of a final offer as premature is a mistake. The timing of final concessions usually takes place within the shadow of the deadline."

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RELENTLESS: FROM GOOD TO GREAT TO UNSTOPPABLE

Tim S. Grover

Skip

Summary​

  • This book is like having a dinner with someone you do not like and they will not stop talking about themselves. Tim´s call to fame is that he was Michael Jordan´s personal trainer when Michael decided to 'bulk up'. You would imagine he would talk about Michael but he ends up talking more about himself! Skip this one.

Memorable Parts

  • "You're what I call a Cleaner, the most intense and driven competitor imaginable. You refuse limitations. You let them judge you by your results, and nothing else; it's none of their business how you get where you're going."

  • "His teammates began to see that, and suddenly they were like troops marching into battle without their leader, completely shutting down. That's how great teams lose; the leader doesn't show up."

  • "You will never has a more powerful training tool than this: get your mind strong, so your body can follow."

  • "You're not going to win these guys over by making them feel worthless."

  • "Most guys, on the day they're drafted, go out to celebrate. Kobe went to the gym to practice. But if you're an athlete who just got rich quick, the day you sign that contract can easily be the beginning of the end."

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ON STRATEGY

Various authors

Average

Summary​

  • This is the sixth and final book from the 'HBR's 10 must reads' box set and by far the one I enjoyed the most. The articles focus much more on the high level aspects of strategy rather than on specific and actionable recommendations. It is worth the read for any senior executive and people who work in Strategic Planning.

Memorable Parts

  • "Operational effectiveness means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them. In contract, strategic positioning means performing different activities from rivals' or performing similar activities in different ways."

  • "Competition based on operational effectiveness alone is mutually destructive, leading to wars of attrition that can be arrested only by limiting competition."

  • "Improving operation effectiveness is a necessary part of management, but it is not strategy. In confusing the two, managers have unintentionally backed into a way of thinking about competition that is driving many industries toward competitive convergence, which is in no one's best interest and is not viable."

  • "The company would utterly and completely cease to exist. Would you accept the offer? What would be lost if the company ceased to exist?"

  • "You need to have a clear and concise strategic principle that people can follow when in doubt. Admiral Lord Nelson's had a simple one: whatever you do, get alongside an enemy ship."

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GENGHIS KHAN: AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

Jack Weatherford

Recommended

Summary​

  • The Mongol empire does not get the attention it deserves. I am trying really hard to remember even one discussion in class about them. Their achievements and influence in the world is sadly overlooked. 

Memorable Parts

  • "In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Whether measured by total number of people defeated, sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history."

  • For precisely seven hundred years, from that day in 1330 to 1920, when the Soviets moved in, Genghis Khan's descendants ruled as khans and emirs over the city of Bukhara in one of the longest family dynasties in history."

  • "In a flash, only thirty years, the Mongol warriors would defeat every army, capture every fort, and bring down the walls of every city they encountered."

  • "When the Byzantine Christian emperor Basil defeated the Bulgarians in 1014, he had fifteen thousand Bulgarian war captives blinded. He left one man out of each hundred with one eye so that he might lead the other ninety-nine homeward and thereby spread the terror."

  • "The Mongol army had accomplished in a mere two years what the European Crusaders from the West and the Seljuk Turk from the East had failed to do in two centuries."

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TURING'S CATHEDRALS: THE ORIGINS FOR OUR DIGITAL UNIVERSE

George Dyson

Recommended

Summary​

  • THE book about the birth of the computer. Extremely detailed account of all the major players involved in the development of algorithms, computer science, etc. It is a amazing that we spends so much time in our computers and know so little about it's controversial (and ethically challenging) history. 

Memorable Parts

  • "The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things."

  • "The new computer was assigned two problems: how to destroy life as we know it, and how to create life of unknown forms."

  • "Veblen wrote to Albert Einstein requesting permission to inscribe a remark Einstein had made in Princeton in 1921 - 'God is clever, but not dishonest.'."

  • "Mathematicians produce their best work at about the same age that they produce their children, and the nursery school helped keep the two apart."

  • "The history of digital computing can be divided into an Old Testament whose prophets, led by Leibniz, supplied the logic, and a New Testament whose prophets, led by von Neumann, build the machines. Alan Turing arrived in between."

  • "By mid-1953, five distinct sets of problems were running on the MANIAC, characterized by different scaled in time: (1) nuclear explosions, over microseconds; (2) shock and blast waves, ranging from microseconds to minutes; (3) meteorology, ranging from minutes to years; (4) biological evolution, ranging from years to millions of years; and (5) stellar revolution, ranging from millions to billions of years. All this in 5 kilobytes."

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OPEN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Andre Agassi

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • Superb autobiography. By far one of the best ones I have ever read. I keep seeing this pattern in the lives of people who achieved greatness: a difficult childhood. So next time you catch yourself being jealous about someone famous who "had it easy", you might want to challenge that assumption.

Memorable Parts

  • "Now, from the next room, I hear Stefanie and the children. I need to hoist myself up, to go vertical. Hate brings me to my knees, love gets me on my feet."

  • "One thing I´ve learned in twenty-nine years of playing tennis: Life will throw everything but the kitchen sink in your path, and then it will throw the kitchen sink."

  • "He grew up with pictures of me on his bedroom wall, patterned his game after mine. In other words, I'll be playing my mirror image."

  • "I can't promise you that you won't be tired, he says. But please know this. There's a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired, Andre. That's where you're going to know yourself. On the other side of tired."

  • "I marvel at how unexciting it is to be famous, how mundane famous people are. They're confused, uncertain, insecure, and often hate what they do."

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INSIGHT: THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT HOW OTHERS SEE US, HOW  WE SEE OURSELVES, AND WHY THE ANSWERS MATTER MORE THAN WE THINK.

Tasha Eurich

Average

Summary​

  • It's ok. It's average. Just by reading the subtitle you know the type of book it is. Many of the research examples that the author presents in the book appear in many other books (i.e. the Google study about what makes teams be highly functional).

Memorable Parts

  • "When the winds of change rage, some build shelters while other build windmills."

  • "It's far easier to feel wonderful and special than to become wonderful and special."

  • "When we're trying so hard to convince everyone [social media] how successful or happy or attractive we are, not only are we not fooling anyone; we're reminding ourselves of how unsuccessful or unhappy or unattractive we really feel."

  • "Would I saw what I just said to myself to someone whom I like and respect?"

  • "Tirthang Tulku uses an apt analogy: when we introspect, our response is similar to a hungry cat watching mice. We eagerly pounce on whatever 'insights' we find without questioning their validity or value."

  • "What Not Why. Why did this happen to me? What's most important to me? Why do I feel terrible? What situations make me feel terrible and what do they have in common?"

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RICH DAD POOR DAD

Robert T. Kiyosaki

Skip

Summary​

  • It is not a 'get rich scheme' book but at the same time it does not provide with very concrete recommendations on how to be more financially secure. I will say that this book could be a great motivator for those people thinking about opening their own business but afraid of doing so. The author does make a compelling case to take action. 

Memorable Parts

  • "If you learn life's lessons, you will do well. If not, life will just continue to push you around. People do two things. Some just let life push them around. Others get angry and push back. But they push back against their boss, or their job, or their husband and wife. They do not know it's life that pushing."

  • "It's not how much you make. It's how much money you keep."

  • "Once a dollar hits your asset column, it becomes your employee. The best thing about money is that it works 24 hours a day and can work for generations."

  • "Rich people buy luxuries last. The poor and the middle class often buy them first."

  • "Today, the president of The Rich Dad Company is an IT genius."

  • "Maybe McDonald's does not make the best hamburger, but they are the best at selling and delivering a basic average burger."

  • "By having a lazy mind that says 'I can't afford it,' a war breaks out inside you. Your spirit is angry, and your lazy mind must defend its lie. The spirit is screaming."

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THE STORM BEFORE THE STORM: THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC

Mike Duncan

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • A superb history of the Roman Republic from 146 to 78 BC. For those who have listened to Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, this book is equally good. Two thousand years have passed and we humans repeat the same mistakes. As the quote goes, "history does not repeat itself but it rhymes."

Memorable Parts

  • "By simultaneously destroying Carthage and Corinth in 146, the Roman Republic took a final decisive step toward its imperial destiny. No longer one power among many, Rome now asserted itself as the power in the Mediterranean world."

  • "As early as 195, Cato the Elder warned his colleagues, 'We have crossed into Greece and Asia, places filled with the allurements of vice, and we are handling the treasures of kings...I fear that these things will capture us rather than we them.'"

  • "...but those who were wealthiest and most able to inflict harm were considered 'good' because they defended the existing state of affairs."

  • "'It is dangerous, Amelianus said, 'to buy from a few what belonged to the many'."

  • "But what makes this moment so important is that it marked permanent transition from temporary armies conscripted from among the free citizens to professional armies composed of soldiers who made their careers in the army [on the exemption by Gaius Marius on property qualification]."

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MAJOR ACCOUNT SALES STRATEGY

Neil Rackham

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • From the author who brought you SPIN selling comes this great book focused on B2B selling. The book was written in 1989 and is as relevant as ever. So far, this is the best book I have read on B2B selling. Many examples, pragmatic and executable.

Memorable Parts

  • "We've seen many account strategies collapse because they became so complex that they forgot the basic fact that decisions are made by people. Effective strategy begins with an understanding of how people buy."

  • "A measure of health of a sales organization is the amount of time it spends relating to customers compared with the time it takes relating to the internal needs of the company."

  • "Successful people ask a lot more questions during sales calls than do their less successful colleagues. They search to uncover the source of dissatisfaction."

  • "Successful people tended to seek a sponsor - an individual within the account who helped them, advised them, and represented them in places where they could not gain access."

  • "Never try directly to diminish or minimize something which is important to another person."

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Recommended

Recommended

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AWARE: THE SCIENCEE AND PRACTICE OF PRESENCE

Daniel J. Siegel, MD

Recommended

Summary​

  • Another great book by Daniel J. Siegel. Siegel is the executive director of the Mindsight Institute and professor of clinical psychiatry at UCLA Medical School. He brings brings medical knowledge and background to the practice of mindfulness. Very practical and pragmatic book; great balance of theory and exercises. 

Memorable Parts

  • "If you let the comparisons and the symbols of odd, weird and strange go, and just let yourself sit for a moment with what the experience was like, just see if you can feel what it feels like, what it felt like, to be aware of awareness."

  • "...rising up to the point where they're so complex that they require coordinators. We need to realize that we do not have brains served by the body, it's the other war around."

  • "An expanded sense of awareness in the hub may allow us the mental space and neural functions to differentiate the feeling of liking something and being able to choose it, or not, from that of wanting or needing something."

  • "'That felt rewarding' each time we post a fantasy image of ourselves, and the addiction of self-preoccupation is reinforced. No wonder people check their phones while driving. We can only imagine how a sense of never being quite done is massively amplifying the intensity of a DMN-mediated preoccupation with the inadequacy of the self in comparison to others."​

  • "A mind stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension.

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RATIONALITY: WHAT IT IS. WHY IT SEEMS SCARCE. WHY IT MATTERS-

Steven Pinker

Average

Summary​

  • The reason I rated this book "Average" is because it lacks some of that Steven Pinker je ne sais quoi that characterizes his books. Understandably he spends a good portion of the book explaining statistical concepts but, if you have taken a college level statistics course, you will find these sections dull. The paradox with statistics is that you need to be great at math and I doubt there are people that are great at math that haven't been exposed to statistics before. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Aye', he remarked, 'but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?'"

  • "Many informal fallacies come out of a feature of human reasoning which lies so deep in us that, according to cognitive scientists Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, it was the selective pressure that allowed reasoning to evolve. We like to win arguments."

  • "These networks are called deep learning systems because of the number of layers between the input and the output (they're not deep in the sense of understanding anything). These networks are powering 'the great AI awakening."

  • "Mistaking a nonrandom pattern for a nonrandom process is one of the thickest chapters in the annals of human folly, and knowing the difference between them is one of the greatest gifts of rationality that education can offer."

  • "Our credence in a hypothesis after looking at the evidence should be our prior credence in the hypothesis, multiplied by how likely the evidence would be if the hypothesis is true, scaled by how common the evidence is across the board."

  • "The winner, almost every time, is the equation. In fact, an expert who is given the equation and allowed to use it to supplement his or her judgement often does worse than the equation alone."

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YOU'VE GOT THIS: UNLOCKING THE HERO DAD WITHIN

Meg Meeker, M.D.

Skip

Summary​

  • A bit too conservative for my taste (God, traditional roles of men and women, etc.) Notwithstanding it contains pieces of advice that can help any father become a better one. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Sure, my dad, as a father, made a lot of mistakes but his successes overshadowed them. He lost his temper but he said he was sorry. He lived with humility because he knew his inner demons."

  • "Many fathers are perfectionists; they feel that if they're not excellent, they're terrible; and if they think they're terrible, they tend to withdraw."

  • "A large part of a man's identity comes from his work. But the most important work, and the most rewarding work, you'll ever have is being a father."

  • "Coaches can teach skills and encourage their execution, but it's a leader who brings vision, which is another way of saying a moral framework for how life is to be lived. That's your job."

  • "Moral leadership relies on the same virtue it always has, and that's moral courage - which means having the intestinal fortitude to do, say, and believe what you know to be right."

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SHOE DOG: A MEMOIR BY THE CREATOR OF NIKE

Phil Knight

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • So good this could be a fiction business thriller. I am still debating in my head whether this is the best business memoir I have ever read or if it is still Sam Walton's Made in America. Read it!

Memorable Parts

  • "Self is the bald-faced lie we tell ourselves daily, and happiness requires seeing through the lie, debunking it. To study the self, said the thirteen-century Zen master Dogen, is to forget the self. Inner voice, outer voices, it's all the same. No dividing lines."

  • "And yet the first-century rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah said our work is the holiest part of us. All are proud of their craft. God speaks of his  work; how much more should man."

  • "There are many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guide-book but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought."

  • "At Price Waterhouse I was also learning how they survive, or didn't. how they sold things, or didn't.  How they got into trouble, how they got out. Again and again I learned that lack of equity was a leading cause of failure."

  • "I went to Manila to visit a shoe factory, a very good one. Then, closing an old loop, I spent the night in MacArthur's suite."

  • "I definitively couldn't see the forest for the trees. When you see only problems, you're not seeing clearly. At just the moment I needed to be my sharpest, I was approaching burnout."

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STALINGRAD

Anthony Beever

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • Most military historians agree that Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for Hitler and the Nazis. Many war books tend to be very dry and are read almost like a transcript. Beever manages to combine facts and stories in a way that the book will appeal to military enthusiasts and folks looking for a good story to read. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Former imperial army officers under Tukhachesvky had been developing a sophisticated theory of 'Operational Art' based on the 'study of the relationship between mass firepower and mobility.' By 1941, this was a treasonous heresy, which explained why few Red Army generals had dared to mass their tanks effectively against the German threat. Even though most of the purged officers were reinstated, the psychological effect had been devastating."

  • "One of the defenders scratched on a wall: 'I am dying but do not surrender. Farewell Motherland. 20/VII-41.' This piece of wall is still reverently preserved in the Central Museum of Armed Forces in Moscow."

  • "At that stage, the only interest in Stalingrad was to eliminate the armaments factories there and secure a position on the Volga. The  capture of the city itself was not considered necessary."

  •  "'Comrade Chuikov,' said Khrushchev. 'How do you interpret your task?' 'We will defend the city or die in the attempt,' he replied."

  • "During the summer when Germany was producing 500 tanks a month the Soviet Union was producing 1,200. The Fuhrer had slammed the table and said that it was simply not possible."

  • "The invasion of the Soviet Union had forced Russians to defend Stalinism. now the threat of defeat forced the Germans to defend Hitler's regime and its ghastly failure."

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LETTERS FROM A STOIC

Seneca

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • Two thousand years have passed and his advice is still relevant. This book is a collection of letters he wrote to Lucilius Junior, a native of Pompeii and procurator of Sicily at that time. 

Memorable Parts

  • "To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life travelling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships."

  • "It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more. What difference does it make how much there is laid away in a man's safe if he is always after what is in another's and only counts what he has yet to get, never what he was already?"

  • "A number of our blessings [foresight] do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present."

  • "'What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend'."

  • "Any man who does not think that was he has is more than ample is an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world."

  • "There is a need for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler to do it against you won't make the crooked straight."

  • "So continually remind yourself, Lucilius, of the many things you have achieved. When you look at all the people out in front of you, think of all the ones behind you."

  • "In the ashes all men are levelled. We're born unequal, we die equal. And my words apply as much to cities as to those who live in them."

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BEING YOU: A NEW SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Anil Seth

Recommended

Summary​

  • Anil Seth is a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. This book is, by far, one of the most up-to-date books regarding theories of consciousness. His 2017 TED Talk has more than 9M views.

Memorable Parts

  • "What is consciousness? For a conscious creature, there is something that it is like to be that creature. This way of putting things is most closely associated with  the philosopher Thomas Nagel and his legendary article 'What is it like to be a bat?'"

  • "At the core of IIT is the Greek letter phi. The easiest way to think about it is that it measures how much a system is 'more than the sum' of its parts, in terms of information."

  • "Perceptions do not come from the bottom-up or the outside in, they come primarily from the top down, or the inside out. What we experience is built from the brain's prediction about the causes of those sensory signals."

  • "The self is not  an immutable entity that lurks behind the windows of the eyes, looking out into the world and controlling the body. The experience of being me is a a collection of perceptions. A tightly woven bundle of neurally encoded predictions geared towards keeping your body alive."

  • "Arthur Schopenhauer put it, 'Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."

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SOLUTION SELLING: CREATING BUYERS IN DIFFICULT SELLING MARKETS

Michael T. Bosworth

Skip

Summary​

  • Some sales books stand the test of time, but not this one. It is difficult to stay engaged when the author talks about sending letters or faxes to prospects. There are a few selling tips that I will implement at work but ideas in rest of the book have been told much better in more contemporary books. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Most people love to buy but hate to feel 'sold'. Feeling 'sold' means feeling like you have lost control - been taken advantage of, coerced, or manipulated."

  • "The worst thing a seller can do is to take the product out and say, 'Here it is!.' The seller has just prescribed without diagnosing  the vision. You need to work towards a mutual vision of the solution."

  • "I believe the primary problem salespeople have with prospecting is that sellers are creating tension rather than interest."

  • "When I see a buyer in panic, I believe it is almost always a good thing. Why? Because buyers are in the last phase of the buying process - risk analysis."

  • "Protect your price. If you have to concede a thing, concede something other than price, something other than cash."

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THE TELOMERE EFFECT: A REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO LIVING YOUNGER, HEALTHIER AND LONGER

Elizabeth Blackburn & Elissa Epel

Recommended

Summary​

  • Elizabeth Blackburn co-won the 2009 Nobel Prize for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. Telomeres are the endcaps of our chromosomes and all research results point to how the shortening of those telomeres has negative consequences on our health and the aging process.

Memorable Parts

  • "Your telomeres, it turns out, are listening to you. They absorb the instructions you give them. The way you live can, in effect, tell your telomeres to speed up the process of cellular aging. But it can also do the opposite."

  • "The brain uses memories of past experiences to continually anticipate what will happen next, and then corrects those predictions with, both the current incoming information from the outside world, and from all the signals in your body. Then our brain comes up with an emotion to match all of this."

  • "Cynical hostility (Type A personality) is defined by an emotional style of high anger and frequent thoughts that other people cannot be trusted. These people have shorter telomeres."

  • "But here is one beautifully clear idea that drives some successful treatments: Depression is partly a dysfunctional response to stress."

  • "Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) helps people close the gap between how we feel and how we want to feel. It's been shown to be as effective as an antidepressant."

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EL COACH DE SILICON VALLE: LECCIONES DE LIDERAZGO DEL LEGENDARIO COACH DE NEGOCIOS BILL CAMPBELL

Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg & Alan Eagle

Evitar

Resumen​

  • El ex-jugador de futlbol americano colegial, Bill Campbell, fue parte fundamental del éxito de empresass como Apple, Google e Intuit. Este libro es una especie de 'carta de amor' para aquellas personas que fueron 'coacheadas' por Bill.

Partes Memorables

  • "Porque mientras los mentores comparten palabras sabias, los coaches se remangan la camisa y se ensucian las manos. Son gente que no sólo cree en nuestro potencial, también se mete al campo para ayudarnos a asimilarlo."

  • "De hecho, como nos enteramos más adelante, muchas de las personas que estab presentes en su funeral, y que sumaban más de 1,000, consideraban que Bill era su mejor amigo."

  • "Bill y su equipo se lo mostraron a Steve jobs, cofundador de Apple. Se trataba de una alusión a la novela 1984 de George Orwell."

  • "La gente exitosa dirige bien sus empresas, tiene buenos procesos, se asegura de que sus empleados sean confiables, sabe cómo contratar empleados excelentes, cómo evaluarlos y darles retroalimentación, y además, les pagan bien."

  • "Los psicólogos le llamarían a esta técnica 'lidiar con el problema como punto de enfoque', en oposición a 'lidiar con la emoción como punto de enfoque'."

​

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DOLORES CLAIBORNE

Stephen King

Average

Summary​

  • I remember sitting in the movie theatre when I was thirteen and seeing this trailer. I thought it was one of the coolest sounding names for a person: Dolores Claiborne. I promised myself I would read the book first before watching the movie. 18 years later, here we are.

Memorable Parts

  • "One girl was named Jessie Mahout - she was in Sharbot, at the western end of the state. The other was a mother of three named Dolores St. George - she was on Little Tall Island, at the eastern end of the state."

  • "Oh, gorry! I'm getting to it, Andy, if you'll just give me a little peace! I'm just trying to decide if I should tell it back to front or front to back."

  • "Six pins, now, Dolores! You mind me, now! Six, not four! I'm counting, and my eyes are just as good now as they ever were!"

  • "The dirty old bag had her a shit savings account, and it was like some weeks she banked it in order to collect the interest...only I was the one who got all the withdrawals"

  • "That, and a line from the Bible. It clanged in my head like a big iron bell: I have digged a pit for mine enemies, and am fallen into it myself."

​

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO SALES FORCE INCENTIVE COMPENSATION

Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha & Sally E. Lorimer

Recommended

Summary​

  • The most comprehensive book ever written about sales force incentive compensation. A must read for sales force leadership and HR. The book is 500 pages long and demonstrates the complexity of the topics and tools available to get the most results from it.

Memorable Parts

  • "In our experience, changing a pay plan from mostly salary to a significant incentive component is almost impossible to pull of while keeping the same salespeople."

  • "About half of the time, the primary source of the problem turns out to be some other aspect of the sales management system and not incentive compensation."

  • "The Excitement Index measures the rate at which salespeople earn their last incremental incentive dollar. A plan that pays at a higher rate creates more excitement than one that pays at a lower rate."

  • "The 30% rule sates that leadership's ability to influence sales force activity through means other than IC diminishes as incentives grow beyond 30 percent."

  • "Diagnosis of performance measures but take into account: downstream consequences for customer and company results, upstream consequences with marketing and compatibility with culture and capabilities."

  • "Psychological drives of motivation: expectancy (greater effort greater results), instrumentality (greater performance greater results) and valence (rewards will make you happy)."

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A CARNIVAL OF SNACKERY: DIARIES 2003-2020

David Sedaris

Summary​

  • A compilation of his diaries from 2003 - 2020. Most are not even a page long and the book is about 550 pages. I very much enjoyed reading the book and, as always, it is hilarious.

Memorable Parts

  • "Aside from their looks, Democratic women lack...well, vaginal tenacity. That's what I call it. The female equivalent of balls. Now tell me I'm wrong."

  • "If the book presents a tragic homosexual, the type who suffers and then commits suicide, that's okay. He doesn't want the happy kind. Which one am I? I wonder."

  • "You should name your boat...Row v. Wave."

  • "The woman had just lost 165 pounds, and on hearing it, Dad said, not 'Congratulations' or 'That must have been tough,' but rather 'I'll bet you're a real sight to see in the shower.' And people accuse me of having no filter."

  • "Tamara handed me my sports coat [Commes de Garcons], and after putting it on, I turned to her and Ari and the asshole who was doubting him and cried, 'What have you people done to my jacket!' Oh, the look on that man's face."

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THE MEANING OF HAPPINESS: THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM OF THE SPIRIT IN MODERN PSYCHOLOGY AND THE WISDOM OF THE EAST

Alan Watts

Summary​

  • The book was originally written in 1940 by a twenty-five year old (!) Alan Watts. This is the second  book I read from Watts and, again, he delivers. I find that his books help enhance my meditation practice. 

Memorable Parts

  • "At each moment we are what we experience, and there is no real possibility of being other than what we are. Wisdom therefore consists in accepting what we are, rather than in struggling fruitlessly to be something else, as if it were possible to run away from one's own feet."

  • "For yes has only meaning in relation to no. If I say yes to everything the word ceases to have any content. To abolish the valleys is to get rid of the mountains. For the meaning is in the whole."

  • "Would it not be true to say that one who does not search for happiness, either directly or indirectly, already has it?"

  • "Am I really courageous if there were nothing to fear? Loyal if there were no temptations?"

  • "For as the snail and the tortoise withdraw to their shells, man retires into his castle of illusion. He tries to preserve life but he might as well try to imprison sunlight in a room by pulling down the blind."

  • "This is were the psychology of the West can take a lesson from the East, which pays more attention to the way of acceptance and less to the things to be accepted."

  • "Buddhism is very suggestive. For here the object is not to reach any particular stage, it is to find the right attitude of mind in whatever stage one happens to be."

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Recommended

THE REAL THING: TRUTH AND POWER AT THE COCA-COLA COMPANY

Constance L. Hays

Summary​

  • Arguably the most recognized brand in the world. Arguably the most consumed product in the world. Yet, we know so little about the inner workings of this company. As I read it, I was surprised the aren't more books written about it (this book came out in 2004).

Memorable Parts

  • "He became notorious for...peering into the trash cans on the banks of the Nile to find out what people were drinking - how much Coke, and how much of everything else."

  • "Clearly believing that they would be bankrupt before long, he issued them perpetual contracts that also set the price of syrup in perpetuity, at a dollar a gallon."

  • "Bottlers on their deathbeds were said to summon their heirs for a single piece of advice: 'Son, whatever you do, don't let 'em mess with the contract.'"

  • "Roberto would always say that he could not delegate the reputation of the company to anyone but the CEO. It was a responsibility that he took on seriously, and thoroughly."

  • "In the early sixties, Russia had been entirely Pepsi's, thanks to a little help from Richard Nixon. Rebuffed by the Coke management when he sought a senior position at the company during that era, Nixon had transmogrified into Coke's archenemy."

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Recommended

AT HOME WITH MUHAMMAD ALI: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LOSS AND FORGIVENESS

Hana Ali

Summary​

  • Hana is the youngest daughter from Ali's third wife, Veronica Porche. Perhaps the most controversial since he dated her while still married. The book is filled with transcripts from the man tape recording Ali made while married to Veronica.

Memorable Parts

  • "Hello, Muhammad. You've just been voted by their four million readers as the celebrity of the decade - over everybody!"

  • "Poor kid from Louisville, Kentucky, at the White House, talking about being in China."

  • "Dad always jogged in big black army boots (instead of tennis shoes), so that his feet would feel light in the ring."

  • "But I'm not even worth ten thousand cash. It would be embarrassing if that ever got out - that Muhammad Ali doesn't even have ten thousand dollars in the bank."

  • "When your father and I were guests of the ruler of Bangladesh, your father disappeared halfway through the banquet. Do you know where I found him? In the kitchen, performing magic tricks for the staff."

  • "It said that you, Muhammad Ali, were interested in going to Iran and seeing Iranian authorities, including Khomeini, and, if possible, resolving the present crisis."

  • "We're all victims of victims...when we learn about our parents' childhood we learn where their fears and rigid patterns come from."

  • "That's the kind of fighter I want to be. Fast, classy and PRETTY

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