Reading
Quick review: Warfighting is insightful and packed full of wisdom, entirely devoid of fluff, and very much to the point (as one would expect from the military). It was striking how much of the book and its truths apply to warfare, but more broadly to business, investing, and life.
Read MoreI read Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord and reviewed it as part of my ongoing series.
Quick review: Patty McCord is the former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix and co-creator of the famous Netflix culture deck. If the deck is the ‘what’ of Netflix’s high performing culture, this book serves as the ‘how’ and ‘why’. It’s a relatively quick read and offers some unique suggestions on developing and maintaining strong corporate cultures at fast growing companies. I was struck by how counter some of the suggestions were to the norms that exist in companies today.
Read MoreI read by Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and reviewed it as part of my ongoing series.
Quick review: This is one of the better ‘business’ books I have read thanks to fascinating stories, a counterintuitive message and immediately useful and actionable suggestions. The author, Chris Voss, was an FBI negotiator dealing with negotiations most of us are unlikely to ever encounter: hostage situations. In a very easy and surprisingly captivating read (it is a book on negotiation after all) he instructs on a negotiation strategy that most people don’t usually consider: getting everything you want.
Read MoreI read AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee and reviewed it as part of my ongoing review series.
Quick review: This book by Dr. Kai Fu Lee touched on a lot of themes I have been reading about for some time: artificial intelligence, China’s economic and technological rise and the similarities and differences between the US and China’s startup environment. Dr. Lee is certainly well versed in these subjects considering his background, having developed the world’s first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his Ph.D. thesis at Carnegie Mellon, where he then went on to become an executive at Apple, SGI, Microsoft and then led Google’s efforts in China. He now, among other things, runs Sinovation Ventures, a venture firm that invests in both the US and Chinese market. Overall I thought the book was quite an informative read (albeit at times came a tad self-serving and effusive in his praise for the Chinese market).
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