Kerman

A fantastic book that I'm going to be re-reading but also applying the concepts learned from it in my own life. My next task after reading this is to re-examine my life and ensure that I'm in unity with the four agreements outlined in this book.

Enjoyed the first 1/3 of this book which is what I read till but then kind of lost interest. The bit I did read I really enjoyed. Grand Strategies are stories and adventures that span a lifetime and seeing them in different contexts was very enjoyable.

My fav read this year by-far. Some notes I made while reading:

- Humans and machines aka centeaurs are the ultimate combos that will be spawned and dominate the planet.
-AI is good at tactics and pattern recognition although humans excel at strategy.
- Savants and prodigies are just pattern matchers and things that break their patterns completely fuck them up.
- Understanding when you're pattern matching is critical. Things like chess, golf and tennis are easy to become exceptional because you have clear, fast feedback loops with binary outcomes.
- Things like business are far more complex and are called wicked domains because they can reinforce the wrong lessons.
- The essence of success is finding your own voice and being authentic at the highest levels.
- Designing an organisation requires careful principles that promote flexibility and paradoxes from top to down.
- Remove your ego and take a higher order view of whatever you're doing of maximal results.

Hands down the best books on learning how to build a proper sales organisation from the ground up. Can't recommend it enough!

Loved the first half of this book! The journey, values and twists and turns of entrepreneurship are always amazing to follow. Fun fact: the founder of Starbucks isn't Howard (the author), but rather an ex-employee who ended up buying Starbucks from his own coffee company!? Okay, so why the 3 stars for this one?

Well, the second half kind of sucks. It's basically around how amazing Starbucks is etc etc without being real of the challenges. Starbucks is in a huge fight against unions right now which doesn't make sense for someone who boasts about how employees are treated as “partners”. Maybe this is a reflection of the shadow company? Idk but TLDR you can stop reading this book once you get 50% of the way through.