Dense ‘how-to guide’ for executives that is worth re-reading from time to time.
Autocracy has become a team sport in which autocrats team-up with kleptocratic financiers, tech surveillance providers, and each other to bring liberal democracy to its knees
Anne Applebaum – Autocracy Inc.
Unfortunately, the strongly opiniated perspectives of the authortake away some of the power of the solid analyses.
Facebook leadership does not care about employees or humanity, but only about market power and profit.
Sarah Wynn-Williams – Careless people
To make the central thesis compelling, it would have been better to split the book in two: one on Facebook’s policy choices and one on how it treats its employees.
You should relentlessly apply the Pareto principle to how you spend your time!
Dan Sulivan and Benjamin Hardy – 10x is easier than 2x
Motivational books are typically easy to misinterpret.
Be a connector
Bob Burg anohn David Mann – The go-giver
Typical business allegory: not wrong, but quite cheesy
You better accept change, because it will happen anyhow
Spencer Johnson – Who moved my cheese?
Typical business allegory: not wrong, but quite cheesy
Without active allies and inclusive policies, disadvantaged groups will never get the same opportunities as the privileged
Sheree Acheson – Deminding more
A refrehingly data-centric book that elegantly yet firmly addresses issues without pointing blame.
A bunch of geeks figured out a better way to run a company and are now taking over the economy
The case that “data trumps opinions, provided your corporate culture doesn’t get in the way” contains little original thinking, but that – to be fair – is not the author’s objective
Silicon valley types and tech icons all recommend using OKRs for business steering, but each means something slightly different
John Doerr – Measure what matters
If you look past the author’s boundless Andy Grove adoration, there are some useful lessons to be learnt.
Beyond a certain point, the limiting factor in your career is most likely a behavioral flaw
Marshall Goldsmith – What got you here won’t get you there
Valuable perspectives on how the minds of successful people work
The West has been underestimating the threat of Putin for many years
Garry Kasparov – Winter is coming
March 2022: A foresighted moral plea, that after the Ukraine invasion has become an even more chilling read.
When belief in progress has vanished, populists promise to rebuild the past – at all costs
Timothy Snyder – the road to unfreedom
October 2019: Elaborate and fascinating analysis of Putin’s Russia, which bears striking parallels to what populists in Western countries try, more recently.
March 2022: Chilling to see these themes back in Putin’s messaging around the Ukraine invasion.
There is an important distinction between being Agile and having agility
Jonathan Smart – Sooner Safer Happier
The book’s premise sounds so blatantly obvious that one wonders why (in many organizations) there is still an issue.
Kill Powerpoint, have to 2-pizza teams, and get your core values straight
Colin Brayer and Bill Carr – Working backwards
Somehow, there is no mention of pee bottles or other excesses concerning operational staff in the book.
To accurately ‘read people’ look for combinations of non-verbal tells
Joe Navarro – What every body is saying
The glossary of non-verbal signals and their meaning makes you aware of the limitations of Zoom, Teams, and Skype, espacially in COVID times.
Increasing inequality and lack of immigration are the two big crises facing the US
the set-up in which interesting historical facts serve to make a political argument makes the author prone to the narrative fallacy.
Even at tech companies where intentions are good, women fight an uphill battle
The book fits neatly in the trend to call out gender inequality, but unfortunately it has limited practical solutions to offer.
Arguing by analogy, one has to conclude that animals have emotions
Frans de Waal – Mama’s last hug
Especially interesting are the behavioral experiments, reminiscent of the line of argument in Moral Tribes
Forget about stopping climate change, but don´t let that stop you fighting it
David Wallace-Wells – The uninhabitable earth
The book clearly illustrates that climate change is the prisoner’s dilemma ‘par excellence’
Anticipate change in products, processes and requirements; and organize for that
Despite the unavoidable buzzwords that come with the genre, Lean and Agile are actually sane and useful management principles.