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poweredbydietcoke · 8 years

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My favorite books of 2016

(~3500 words, 10-15min read)

As I was thinking back on 2016 over the holidays, I decided to go re-read my notes from all of the books I read this year (a total of 48 books—4 audio books, 5 “tree books”, with the balance on Kindle, and 3 of them were repeat reads) and see what I had learned (or simply enjoyed) … then it seemed easy enough to write it up. Rather than a generic top-ten, I picked my favorite twelve just because, and all by themselves they came out with an interesting blend of topics. My favorite quotes are in block quotes below the book.

Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow - originally recommended to me by Ryan Barrett, this classic engineering tome holds up well in theory (if not in the examples he chose), and is a fantastic reminder to anyone building (or operating) complex systems … which these days, is basically all of us. TL;DR the more linear you can make a system (interactions flow one direction in a well-defined path, instead of complex where everything interacts with everything else), and the more loosely-coupled you can make a system (with buffers and room for slack to ensure errors are isolated to one part of the system, rather than tightly-coupled where an error in system 1 immediately spills over to system 2), the safer and more reliable the system will be.

the characteristics of high-risk technologies that suggest that no matter how effective conventional safety devices are, there is a form of accident that is inevitable.

If interactive complexity and tight coupling—system characteristics—inevitably will produce an accident, I believe we are justified in calling it a normal accident, or a system accident. The odd term normal accident is meant to signal that, given the system characteristics, multiple and unexpected interactions of failures are inevitable.

computers are more reliable than pneumatic controls.

A note on the terms “complex” and “linear” is in order. It is difficult to find precise terms that are also brief; I have opted for brevity. “Complex” should read “interactions in an unexpected sequence”; “linear” should read “interactions in an expected sequence.”

tight coupling is a mechanical term meaning there is no slack or buffer or give between two items.

Tightly coupled systems have more time-dependent processes: they cannot wait or stand by until attended to

Straight to Hell by John Le Fevre of @GSElevator fame - this one can best be described as a guilty pleasure, but it’s funny (and inappropriate) as hell. It’s one banker’s memories, likely exaggerated for good measure, of his time in New York, London, and Hong Kong. Definitely not appropriate for kids.

Who by Geoff Smart - originally recommended by my friend Jordan Burton, and then a number of other people, this is probably the book I’ve gifted most widely this year. Like many “practical” “business” books, it could probably be half the length and just as good, but it lays out a fundamentally useful (and from first principles) approach to evaluating people for the purposes of hiring. TL;DR it emphasizes the importance of functional scorecards (rather than vague, useless, traditional “job descriptions”), well-defined interview objectives, and behavioral interview techniques to increase your chances of hiring well.

Part of successful hiring means having the discipline to pass on talented people who are not a fit

Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach - recommended by my coach Chris Holmberg, this is the closest I got to philosophy this year (that I actually enjoyed), but it was fantastic. Basically, a fable about a seagull learning to fly, and while all the rest of the seagulls just want to “fly to live”, Jonathan wants to “live to fly” and learn everything he can about flying, just for flying’s sake. I certainly haven’t absorbed all of the learnings, but it’s a very rewarding read on multiple dimensions.

He spoke of very simple things—that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form. “Set aside,” came a voice from the multitude, “even if it be the Law of the Flock?” “The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” Jonathan said. “There is no other.”

“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?”

Manna by Marshall Brain - I don’t remember who recommended this to me (maybe Ryan?), but it was a fun pair of short stories on the best- and worst-cases of our future robot overlords. TL;DR don’t kick the robot dog on Youtube (LINK), because its descendants will probably retaliate. But seriously, very quick read and thought-provoking, even if it does diverge into utopian ... "hopefulness."

The Other Side of History by Professor Robert Garland - recommended by Cornell professor David Collum (whose end-of-year essay my dad passed on last year and I quite enjoyed...warning it's not for the faint of heart or easily offended), this was the first Audible audiobook I listened to … and it was fantastic. An engaging series of lectures based on the premise that most of history studies the heroes, the royalty, the “influential figures”, this would instead cover all of the nameless, faceless people that history generally glossed over. What was it like to be an Egyptian peasant during the reign of the Pharaohs? Or an Italian shopkeeper during the time of the Medicis.

Living with a SEAL by Jesse Itzler - recommended by my colleague Steve D’Angelo, this book is another easy/quick/fun read. Based on the premise that the author hired a former Navy SEAL to come live with him for a month and train him (for fitness), it’s an amusing tale of “you can do a lot more than you think you can,” peppered with quotes of “SEAL says …”. Some highlights:

“I don’t stop when I’m tired. I stop when I’m done.”

“It doesn’t have to be fun. It has to be effective.”

I found out SEAL once entered a race where you could either run for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Shocker: SEAL signed up for the forty-eight-hour one. At around the twenty-three-hour mark, he’d run approximately 130 miles, but he’d also torn his quad. He asked the race officials if they could just clock him out at twenty-four hours. When he was told they couldn’t do that, he said, “ROGER THAT,” asked for a roll of tape, and wrapped his quad. He walked (limped) on a torn quad for the last twenty-four hours to finish the race and complete the entire forty-eight hours. “When you think you’re done, you’re only at forty percent of what your body is capable of doing. That’s just the limit that we put on ourselves.”

Open by Andre Agassi - recommended by my old roommate Tricia Lee prior to my first-ever trip to Wimbledon, this was a great autobiographical account of one of the great legends (and characters) of tennis, including all of his ups and downs.

The scoreboard said I lost today, but what the scoreboard doesn’t say is what it is I have found. Over the last twenty-one years I have found loyalty: You have pulled for me on the court, and also in life. I have found inspiration: You have willed me to succeed, sometimes even in my lowest moments. And I have found generosity: You have given me your shoulders to stand on, to reach for my dreams—dreams I could have never reached without you. Over the last twenty-one years I have found you, and I will take you and the memory of you with me for the rest of my life.

Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet - recommended by Robert MacCloy, this was the other contender for my most-gifted book of 2016. From the email I sent to our executive team:

It’s the story of a USN captain assigned to command the USS Santa Fe, one of the latest of the 688-class nuclear attack submarines, and how he guides it from one of the worst-performing submarines in the fleet to one of the best. Let’s start with the metrics he chose — not only performance evaluations during exercises, but also the promotion rates for the crew, and how many of them went on to bigger and better things in the Navy (captaining their own ships, etc). And what’s even cooler, he focuses on what happens to those numbers *ten years* after he has left command; it’s about building a system that runs itself, not simply about him being awesome.

He, and the crew, affect this change largely through adopting his philosophy on leadership (which he calls “leader-leader”, in contrast to “leader-follower”) … this matches very well with my own personal philosophy, only he has thought about it a lot more, written it down, and is probably way better at it to boot. :)

First, a few observations he makes about leader-follower. It’s great when you wanted physical labor from people, and didn’t need to harness everyone’s intelligence. But it tends to suppress people thinking for themselves the farther down the chain they get. Even when it works, it leads to personality-driven leaders (and organizations) that fall apart when leaders leave. There are no checks and balances (he tells a great story about an order he gave, by mistake, which is a physical impossibility and yet was relayed all the way down the chain of command “because he said so”). And finally, he points out that to scale this type of organization demands incredible stamina from the leader(s), who must be everywhere all the time to make sure things don’t fail.

In contrast, leader-leader is the idea that each individual in the organization has both the responsibility and the authority to do his or her job. This doesn’t mean there’s no org chart / structure (it’s the Navy, after all!), but that the default assumption is that each person does his/her job and his/her manager will only step in when things go totally wrong. Put differently, “don’t move information to authority — move the authority to the information.” The person closest to the work is probably the right one to make the decision. I could write a few more paragraphs on specific learnings and stories but I’ll leave it for you to discover, and/or maybe discuss in the future. Instead I’ll leave you with one major change he made in his organization which, while we’re way less formal, I think makes sense for us as well. Instead of the classic “sir, I request permission to…”, everyone on the Santa Fe says “I intend to…”, and one of the captain’s goals is to go as long as possible saying only “very well.” This means that the crew plays “a game” of providing just the right level of information upwards in any decision to allow the approver to decide it’s the right action (without needing to ask a lot of questions back).

And the Weak Suffer What They Must by Yanis Varoufakis - I think I first heard about this book from dad; it’s a fun, opinionated (even if I don’t agree with a lot of them) account of the Euro crisis by Greece’s short-term finance minister, starting from before Bretton Woods and going to the present day, and closing with a chilling personal warning about the rise of the Golden Dawn party in Greece and what he believes is a return of Nazi-ism across Europe. As with many political economic texts, I found it hard to separate fact from opinion (there’s an immense amount of “X caused Y”), but the perspective is interesting and certainly credible.

“Gentlemen, for years you have been disparaging our stewardship of the postwar global financial system—the one we created to help you rise up from ashes of your own making. You felt at liberty to violate its spirit and its rules. You assumed we would continue, Atlas-like, to prop it up whatever the cost and despite your insults and acts of sabotage. But you were wrong! On Sunday, President Nixon severed the lifeline between our dollar and your currencies.4 Let’s see how this will work for you! My hunch is that your currencies will resemble lifeboats jettisoned from the good ship USS Dollar, buffeted by high seas they were never designed for, crashing into each other and, generally, failing to chart their own course.”

looking through Keynes’s papers and books at King’s College, Cambridge, I noticed a copy of Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War in the original ancient Greek. I took it out and quickly browsed through its pages. There it was, underlined in pencil, the famous passage in which powerful Athenian generals explained to the helpless Melians why “rights” are only pertinent “between equals in power” and, for this reason, they were about “to do as they pleased with them.” It was because “the strong actually do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” ... “those who find themselves in the clutches of misfortune should . . . be allowed to thrive beyond the limits set by the precise calculation of their power. And this is a principle which does not affect you less, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible vengeance, watched by the whole world”

So what did these Bundesbank men do? In a move more reminiscent of a banana republic than a European democracy, Germany’s central bank engineered a sharp recession to oust the government.

Volcker symbolizes the self-confident American policy maker whose greatest fault is an unquestioning conviction that what is good for the United States is good for the world; a weakness compensated for with an astonishing capacity to look into the future and distinguish between that which is desirable from that which is feasible.

If the budget goes into a deficit exceeding the Maastricht Treaty maximum of 3 percent, the commission begins to issue warnings that can eventually lead to sanctions. Usually this triggers a long negotiation between the member-state and the commission that becomes the subject of lengthy Eurogroup meetings, leading to some additional austerity for the country in question plus a great deal of creative fiddling with its macroeconomic accounting.

The Seven-Day Weekend by Ricardo Semmler - another recommendation from Chris Holmberg, this could be quite simply described as the hippie version of Turn The Ship Around. :) A discussion of Semco, a reasonably large and successful company in Brazil which eschews all traditional management structures in favor of complete “use your best judgement”. Both are somewhat light on tactical explanations of how this actually works, and strong on the reasoning behind “why”, but clearly there’s something here (and clearly it resonates with me!)

“Sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just sits.” —Satchel Paige

To put it another way, people who have learned to answer e-mails on Sunday evenings also need to learn how to go to the movies on Monday afternoons.

We brainstorm up to ten years into the future, but we only write down the next six months, a process that guarantees freedom. Besides, every one-year plan that I see has all the good things happening in the second half.

It’s hard for a leader, especially a charismatic one, to avoid becoming synonymous with the company in the eyes of employees and the public. Equally harmful is that leader who believes all the hype and equates himself with the company. To avoid this trap, I believe a dedicated leader must physically distance himself from day-to-day company workings and continually decrease his influence.

I also want my customers to depend on the company, not on me. I learned this maxim from a client who owned a large chain of diners and bought his dishwashers from us at a heavy discount. He was a ferocious bargainer and often tried to go up the corporate ladder for even more rebates. When the unit general manager passed him on to me, I listened at length to his tale of loyalty and commitment. When he finished, I asked him the size of his current discount. I expressed utter shock at the size of his discount (shock akin to that felt by Claude Raines that there was gambling at Rick’s place in the movie Casablanca), but immediately promised to honor it and also have a stern talk with the manager who’d authorized it. The customer hung up, relieved that he could keep the same deal, but knowing that deeper rebates were unlikely. After I’d done the same to a half dozen customers, they stopped calling me.

How did he keep his job when his official forecasts were so off the mark? “Ah,” said the man with silver hair and thick eyeglasses, “I have the right to be wrong, but only so long as I am precisely wrong!” Talk about Alice in Wonderland–style logic!

As an IBM CEO once put it, “We only restructure for a good reason, and if we haven’t restructured in a while, that’s a good reason.”

Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian - this was a book that kept popping up enough I finally had to read it (first Lizzie, then Scott Cannon, and so on from there)…and it was totally worth it. The basic premise is “what do computer science algorithms look like when applied to life?”, and it a) largely jibes with the way I think about my life, b) is a great reminder and exploration of new stuff, and c) is quite entertaining. Think the optimal-stopping problem applied to apartment searches or dating; explore/exploit applied to trying new restaurants; etc.

I find that the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty. —Clark Kerr, President of UC Berkeley, 1958–1967

A similar insight might help us resist the quick-moving fads of human society. When it comes to culture, tradition plays the role of the evolutionary constraints. A bit of conservatism, a certain bias in favor of history, can buffer us against the boom-and-bust cycle of fads. That doesn’t mean we ought to ignore the latest data either, of course. Jump toward the bandwagon, by all means—but not necessarily on it.

When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker, instead of a ball-point pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They’re too high-resolution. They encourage you to worry about things that you shouldn’t worry about yet, like perfecting the shading or whether to use a dotted or dashed line. You end up focusing on things that should still be out of focus. A Sharpie makes it impossible to drill down that deep. You can only draw shapes, lines, and boxes. That’s good. The big picture is all you should be worrying about in the beginning.

The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as “ilunga,” from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.… Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.”

Now is better than never. Although never is often better than right now.

I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart.… I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. —Steve Jobs

the value of a stock isn’t what people think it’s worth but what people think people think it’s worth. In fact, even that’s not going far enough...We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe who practice the fourth, fifth, and higher degrees.

James Branch Cabell: “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”

NB: once again, all links are Amazon Affiliate links ... any affiliate fees go to the charity of my choosing, right now Wounded Warriors.

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