Barry
Inspiring, personal, and relatable.
Inspiring to see the sheer amount of work that the Obamas put in, both during and before the presidency. Great tales from them working hard and pushing through exhausting, tough times.
Lots of great thoughts on parenting. I enjoyed the details on how Barack worked, and the solitude he demanded.
Nice book. I can see it being great to come back and flip through periodically.
Would have liked more quotes from Bourdain himself. The 2 in the intro and outro were the best in the book.
Some solid quotes in there though: Questlove, Obama, Serj Tankian.
Good representation of pictures from some of the best episodes of Parts Unknown.
This book is like the movie Inside Job, but for world poverty.
It'll also leave you feeling angry and helpless to fix the problems, as Inside Job did.
A bleak look at the capability of humans to exploit one another on a mass scale. And the systems in place to mask and obscure the exploitation, twisting it into positive PR.
The author does suggest solutions to world poverty and the systematic exploitation of developing countries, but these solutions are not even remotely realistic and he knows it. This is because the aggressive capitalist system that's doing the exploiting has no incentive to change, even in the face of a huge social uprising. It has huge incentives to push even harder on exploitation, especially on developing countries where it can exploit remotely, from a distance, with debt and tariffs.
Those living in poverty in developing countries will sadly keep getting f*&ked.
Learned a lot about world economics, the IMF, world bank, and trade deals like NAFTA.
Big fan of this book.
It's about how to enable huge, complex teams to be adaptable at scale.
It deep dives into 2 main strategies:
1. Creating shared consciousnesses so that folks at the front lines have a very high level of information and context.
2. Delegating decision making so that senior leadership don't bottleneck, increasing speed, adaptability, and empowerment.
Lots of fantastic, well placed anecdotes from: the fight in Iraq, US companies, NASA, historical books, and the author's personal life.
It takes a bit to get going but warms up by chapter 6 on org structures, which is fantastic. Loved chapter 8 on the O&I meeting structure, and chapter 11 on a leader's role on a team of teams.
It's not immediately drag-and-drop applicable to software teams, but that's also what's so good about this book, as the tactics from a different context (the war against Al Qaeda) spur thought on what methods you could apply to software teams and how you might adapt them. The strategies are generalized enough to last for decades.
I would give 4.5 stars. Going to round up as this is just so well written, with such interesting, practical examples. The best book on empowerment at scale that I've read yet.
3 stars for the authentic illustration of the challenges of Muslim integration in an English town, from the perspective of a white English football hooligan.
I started the book empathizing with some of Tommy's problems, I ended the book disappointed with the road he's chosen, his intolerant views, and the tactless way he's continuing to conduct himself.
Tommy holds all Muslims responsible for radical Islam and crimes, rather than only those engaging in criminal behavior. This intolerant viewpoint towards all Muslims escalates anger and division within his community, which he's seemingly oblivious to and takes no blame for.
He illustrates a number of valid problems and concerns in the book, but he has difficulty getting these points across as they're delegitimized by his overly-simplistic, hardcore Islamophobic worldviews.
Despite that, I still recommend this book. His writing style isn't great, it's very one-sided, he's frustratingly whiney, but it's authentic, and offers lots of first-hand insights into the causes of religious division in England and Europe.
This book is trash.
I hoped to hear a different perspective, explaining concerns around multiculturalism. But this book is impossible to read.
It's continuously factually incorrect. There are some interesting facts here and there, but they're interspersed with complete nonsense. It's impossible to trust anything written given how many facts in this book are wrong.
It continuously exaggerates risks and picks on extreme examples, painting them as norms. Again, a lot of these examples are just straight up wrong—e.g. that detainees in Guantanamo Bay are treated like royalty.
It's terribly written, flitting all over the place from paragraph to paragraph. Rambling from one disconnected story to the next.
This book is fear mongering garbage. Seriously depressing that it has so many positive reviews.
TL;DR: of the whole book...
There are hundreds of thousands of government employees who do very important jobs—preventing nuclear disasters, weather disasters, and health disasters. Many of these employees are bi-partisan field experts with decades of experience.
At transition time when Trump took power these experts summarized all of the critical information to onboard Trump's incoming team.
The incoming team didn't arrive for weeks, months, and when they did arrive they: ignored the experts and onboarding material, were completely incompetent pushing simplistic, destructive political agendas, and shutting down important programs. All for private financial gain, harming Americans.
The fifth risk is a long tail of black swan events that could destroy America due to the ignorance of senior leadership in not investing in preventative measures.
The book dives in to lots of examples of these risks in detail. Feels well researched. But is kind of scattered with no call to action (other than, I guess, don't vote for Trump). 80% of the book is spent describing country/state-wide failure scenarios in detail and the widespread waste of opportunities we're missing by disabling government employees from doing great work.
This is in the top half of my 5 star rated books.
Phenomenal on multiple levels:
1. I learned a ton. Ta-Nehisi combines shocking, brutal, harrowing storytelling with incredibly well researched data and explanations of systems of discrimination.
2. He comes across as deeply passionate, highly knowledgeable, direct, sensitive, introspective and driven. His attitude is an inspiring example of someone committed to passionate, powerful work.
3. The writing in this book is sublime. It's evident that he's invested a lot of effort researching and honing his writing style, influenced by rap and poetry. There are some breathtaking chapter ending sentences with words carefully selected to hit home powerfully.
4. Surprisingly, the abnormal structure of this book worked really well. There are 8 long-form articles (I think one per year that he wrote for The Atlantic?) deep diving into topics like Reparations, and President Obama. Each article is prefaced with ~10 pages where he gives a quite personal feeling retrospective on where his life was at when he wrote the article, and additional context around it. It provided a nice rhythm and contrast between the carefully written articles and the more personal tone of the retrospectives. Broke the book up nicely into chunks, too.
I preferred this to Between The World And Me. The topics of the articles were super interesting and content was fantastic.
P.S. The paperback copy is of very high production quality, lovely feel. And it's set in a beautiful typeface—the fancy custom Qu is cool!
The book is written with the arrogant tone of a man that believes he's figured out the US media system, exploited it, and wants to bask in tales of his success. If you can get past the egotistical tone and the right-leaning one-sidedness of this book, Breitbart's perspective on how the media works is tremendously insightful, at times frightening, as he utilized a number of morally reprehensible, manipulative tactics.
Stand out chapters for me: Chapter 5 on the Bush era, and chapter 6 on Marxism and Alinsky's 13 rules for radicals.
Overall the book does a great job of explaining the tactics that the far-right media (and to some extent Trump) are currently employing.
I was surprised at how light this book is on vision for America's future. I thought it was going to come in the last chapter, but surprisingly it didn't arrive at all. Instead this book is heavy on details of Buttigeig's day-to-day job as a mayor, running his campaign for mayor, university studies, and his work at McKinsey. The continuous examples of his common-sense, data-driven approach were impressive, and his career trajectory is impressive, but I didn't learn a lot of big, new things about him from this book, just a ton of minor details.
Stand-out chapters for me were the ones where I did glean interesting new info: Chapter 14 and 15 on his deployment to the Afghanistan war, where he gave a detailed view of his day-to-day work in Afghanistan, and the thoughts he wrestled with around the cost of life in war. Chapter 17 on his relationship and proposal(s) with his partner, which was very personal and heartwarming.
Much like Ben's other book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, this book is 1/2 story telling and 1/2 advice on running a company.
What's different is the story telling 1/2 in What You Do Is Who You Are focuses on leaders outside of the business realm. This includes deep dives into how Toussaint Louverture, Shaka Senghor and Genghis Khan built cultures with their actions. These sections felt like dragged out history lessons with tenuous connections to the purpose of the book. I struggled for useful take-aways. However... they were interesting, and I appreciate Ben including some different perspectives than you'd usually find in a book about building a business culture.
Be prepared: the structure of this book is messy. It bounces around exploring cultures with no real order. It'd alternate between a chapter or two that didn't connect with me, then a chapter or two that connected strongly.
Where it really shined was the 1/2 of the book telling stories and describing cultural challenges at modern companies: Netflix, Google, Uber, etc. Ben has tremendous insight here and highlights great examples.
This would be a phenomenal book to read while creating cultural principals for a company—it's very geared towards that. I really enjoyed the examples of using principles to counter-balance other principles in order to create a punchy but balanced set.
2 stars to the history lesson part of the book, 4 stars to the practical advice on startup culture.
A little slow and biography-like in the 1st half, leading into an incredibly strong 2nd half providing a detailed view into American government surveillance, insight into how government systems operate (technically, socially, politically), and a gripping tale digging into the gritty details of how he actually extracted the information and executed on the leak. I doubt there's another read like this. Huge appreciation for the transparency of this book.
Would also recommend Snowden's 3-hour long Joe Rogan podcast, packed with interesting viewpoints.
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
I don't doubt that Bill was an incredible leader, but given the level of people on-hand to contribute to this book, this was a disappointing effort.
A wide range of shallow, generic advice.
It's good advice... but it's generic... with not nearly enough examples of how Bill applied it. The author continuously fills in the blanks with references to studies or harvard business school articles.
Here are a few of the things make this book so special:
1. Alex Ferguson is the best football manager of all time with an astonishing level of success, worked to it from the bottom-up, and he's from a working class background.
2. He got there by building his team and culture around long-term thinking and decision making, which is rare in modern football. He describes how this long-term mindset applies to hiring, scouting, decision making, culture, etc.
3. His focus on hiring and youth development is incredible, with multiple chapters describing how he built one of the best teams in the world, and a lasting culture of dedication and excellence.
4. He isn't afraid to call people out directly, and describe their successes or failings. I don't feel like he held anything back in this book, putting it all out on the table, right down to how his family and marriage worked around his strenuous job.
5. At this point in his life (post-retirement), he has strong perspectives on business, finance, and politics and how those systems work. Some of these from his sons, who have also grown up and given him their perspectives on business and finance, and some from teaching leadership at Harvard.
6. This book is written with a slight slant towards usefulness for start-ups and businesses, occasionally making comparisons between football management and business management. He offers anecdotes from discussions with politicians such as the Prime Minister.
Disclaimer: I'm am biased towards this book in a couple of ways: 1) I'm Scottish, 2) I admire Man U as a football team and culture.
Enjoyed this. Nowhere near as polished, complete, and seminal as Sapiens. But great for hearing more of Yuval's perspectives on how 21st century social, economic and political systems work, and how he expects they might change with the rise of data and AI. Particularly enjoyed the Liberty, Community and Science Fiction chapters.
I don't agree with some of his points, and am certain a number are wrong (e.g. his over the top expectations for AI based on progress in solving games like chess), but he's quick to set expectations that he's not going to accurately predict every detail about the future. It's great that he published such a raw collection of his thoughts, as his historical perspective and ability to explain complex systems is so unique.
It's not really a book of “lessons”, more “considerations”.
Amazing book. The author has such a strong understanding of political, religious, social and emotional systems, combining them all to give context on how the world has reached it's current state.
Struggled with interest in part 1, but parts 2 and 3 build up to an incredible part 4 on the scientific revolution with particularly awesome chapters on capitalism, and happiness (separate topics :)).
Enjoyed the very occasional hints of humor, too.
