Miha Rekar
A detailed look into WeWork and the life of Adam Neumann. The beginnings. the rise, and the epic collapse. Come for the schadenfreude and stay because it's even worse than you think it's going to be.
The book highlights how far a magnificent showman can go with (almost) unlimited VC money support and backing. Adam managed to convince everyone, from poorly paid workers to bankers, that his idea was about really changing the world. In reality, it was not even coworking but plain and boring office sharing.
I generally dislike VC-backed companies overpromising and underdelivering, but Adam and WeWork took it to another level. If you like this sort of reading, you'll enjoy this book. But you won't learn much, other than maybe trusting your gut and never working for people like Adam.
If you liked Furiously Happy, you'll like this one. It's more of the mental issues this time and less of the jokes, but still plenty of both. Incredibly fun and mind-opening book intertwined with genuine thought provoking texts.
If you're into americanisms and MOTIVATION and WORK HARDER and SCREAMING or in general a gan of Kevin, you'll enjoy this a lot.
If not, feel free to skip.
I went into this book with “capitalism is not perfect but it's not that bad compared to communism” mindset. What this book opened my mind to is that this is not a duopoly. Democracy and capitalism do not come hand in hand. And what's at the core of capitalism is continuous growth. Mostly for growths sake. A sort of larpurlartism, if you will. And here is the crux of the situation we find ourselves in these times: growth and ecology simply can not co-exist.
>Whenever there appears to be a conflict between ecology and growth, economists and politicians opt for the latter and try ever more creative ways to get reality to conform to it.
But that doesn't work anymore. We have to ditch GDP as a measure of success and chose ecology/well-being. After a certain point there is no correlation between how good people have it vs how high the GDP is anyway. If anything it's actually reverse: take a look at Portugal and USA for example. We have to pick a metric that adjusts for income inequality as well as the social and environmental costs of economic activity.
>Decoupling of GDP growth from resource use is at best only temporary. Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits. It is therefore misleading to develop growth-oriented policy around the expectation that decoupling is possible.
>If scarcity is created for the sake of growth, then by reversing artificial scarcities we can render growth unnecessary. By decommodifying public goods, expanding the commons, shortening the working week and reducing inequality, we can enable people to access the goods that they need to live well without requiring additional growth in order to do so. People would be able to work less without any loss to their well-being, thus producing less unnecessary stuff and generating less pressure for unnecessary consumption elsewhere.
TL;DR: We have enough already. We have to find a way to redistribute it so we can all have better and more fulfilling lives. And in the process also save ourselves from growth that's killing us via the actions we make on this planet.
The book is trying so hard not to offend that it's basically unreadable. And it's extremely US centric to the degree that you feel the authors have never seen the rest of the world. There are so many better factual climate books out there - go read those instead.
It is an insightful and engaging book that provides a behind-the-scenes look into the business strategies and corporate culture that have driven Amazon's extraordinary success.
I found many of the points in this book to be quite valuable. The authors, both former Amazon executives, delve into the company's unique principles, such as their focus on customer obsession, long-term thinking, and data-driven decision-making. The book explores the idea of working backwards from the customer's perspective, which has been a key factor in Amazon's ability to innovate and disrupt various industries.
While I quite enjoyed “Working Backwards,” there were moments when the book felt a bit too much like a promotional piece for Amazon. Despite this, the valuable insights and lessons shared by the authors make it a worthwhile read for anyone interested in understanding the driving forces behind one of the world's most successful companies.
Main suggestions:
- Replace PowerPoint presentations with six-page narratives and PR/FAQ documents for discussing complex topics in leadership meetings.
- Implement the Bar Raiser hiring process, which improves the quality of hires and overall team performance.
- Focus on controllable input metrics, requiring patient trial and error to identify those with the greatest impact on desired results.
- Adopt an organizational structure with autonomous teams and single-threaded leaders, starting with your product development group.
- Revise the compensation structure for leaders to encourage long-term commitment and decision-making.
- Clearly articulate the core elements of your company's culture and integrate them into every process and discussion.
- Develop a set of leadership principles with input from multiple contributors and incorporate them into every process.
- Create a visual representation of your company's growth drivers, evaluating actions based on their impact on the flywheel.
TLDR: Spend money when you're young an able on experiences. That way when you tell stories they accrue interest like money would. Also you want to experience thing while you're still fully abled and not in your late years when everything hurts.
This Art of PostgreSQL is a mixed bag. Its format resembles a patchwork of blog posts rather than a coherent text, and numerous links within are dead, undermining its utility. The book is also marred by grammatical errors and a lack of clear explanations, suggesting there wasn't any professional editing. While it offers a basic introduction to Postgres, it fails to instill confidence in its application, especially for developers concerned about scalability. There are definitely some gems inside that not everyone knows, but the way it's described and structured made an impression like “this books about everything and nothing in the same time”.
No matter what you think of Gates and him fudging numbers to boost impressions of progress they've been making, there is no doubt he's a very smart and well researched man.
This book is a great overview of main contributors of CO2 emissions. There are a ton of surprising facts and figures and good examples to reevaluate your worldview on climate change. Global warming is getting progressively worse and we have to speed up taking steps getting to 0 emissions. And no, not using plastic straws is not helping the planet one bit. Changes need to be much bigger and more structural and they have to start rolling out yesterday. We should start with tripling down investment in clean (not necessarily renewable) energy, and efficient massive energy storage.
If you're even vaguely interested in the topic (and you should be since it's endangering existence of humans) I can really recommend reading this.
Great insight into how Basecamp gets shit done. I'd love to be a part of a team like that one day to experience it first hand.
Strongly recommended read for all managers and all who want to be one.
A good overview of where Instagram came for, and how Facebook annexed it and starting destroying it from its core. As someone who has been on IG from the very early days I felt the changes and it's interesting to map them to what was happening in the background. In the end it's more a story of Facebook and how it does business than about Instagram, but a good read regardless.
The Wim Hof Method: Own Your Mind, Master Your Biology, and Activate Your Full Human Potential
Did this book have an editor? Certainly doesn't seem like it. It's not only that it's repetitive, the exact same sentences and conclusions are repeated several times. Narrative (if you can even call it that) is all over the place. Not to even mention all the mentions of “science” without any citations/sources. This book is a first draft at best that needs a lot of work to get it to a polished book.
Which is a shame, because the core of it (Wim Hof Method) is certainly a very interesting thing. Both breathing and cold water plunges/showering. But for that I think you're better off googling for it, or using the app. This book has the method spread throughout the book in several different variations without giving you a definitive/basic version explicitly. It's so badly edited. Or, more likely, it's completely unedited. First draft straight to print. Infuriating.
I've been very interested in climate change lately. From How to Avoid a Climate Disaster to The Uninhabitable Earth, Less Is More, and tons of articles and YouTube videos in between.
But Michael takes an entirely different approach. He claims that many environmentalists have Malthusian views. They oppose the extension of cheap energy and agricultural modernization to developing nations by using left-wing and socialist language of redistribution. It wasn't that poor nations needed to develop; it was that rich nations needed to consume less.
“Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse.”
I don't remember ever opposing nuclear myself, but my enthusiasm for it grows daily. Nuclear energy is basically zero pollution and has a radically low environmental footprint. What matters most is power density. Solar and wind simply aren't power-dense. You need vast amounts of land to create a comparably low amount of electricity. Not to mention they are extremely weather dependent. And that they don't work at night and very poorly in winter. Battery storage isn't an answer. Especially not for seasonal differences in production. This is why, wherever they built a lot of solar/wind, they also build coal/natural gas plants. And that's why oil giants support renewables and oppose nuclear because it means more oil/gas consumption.
The gist to be pro-nuclear is very clear: the denser the fuel, the less of an impact on the environment. Solar and wind are not dense. Neither is wood. Coal is denser than wood. Oil is denser than coal. Nuclear is FAR denser than anything.
We shouldn't be against solar on top of existing buildings. But cutting down forests to build solar plants is ridiculous. We can't be up in arms against Brazilians cutting down forests for agriculture while not having issues when we do the same but for renewables. Wind plants are not that great since they kill many birds and bats. Not to mention they look ugly.
The path to low emissions is clear: no wood, as little coal as possible (only allow it in the transition period), as little oil as possible, maximize solar/hydro when conditions allow, nuclear for the majority of energy, and natural gas (or hydrogen if we figure out how to produce it efficiently) to cover the spikes.
One thing is clear throughout the books I read on climate change: cheap, reliable, and abundant electricity is a prerequisite for prosperity.
The first half of the book explains Reed's experience with leading teams prior to Netflix and then taking those learnings and applying them to Netflix culture. He talks about how to apply same or similar culture in your own team/company and why you should do so.
The second half of the book is basically Culture Map v2 on the examples of Netflix. So that's a recommended pre-reading although not necessary.
Overall a good book with many interesting points. But, as usual with this kind of books, could easily be 90% shorter without compromising the main points.
TL;DR: Trust your employees and be hones with them.
“Why we sleep” but for breathing. Absolutely breathtaking. No pun intended. I think everyone should read it and start paying attention to how they breathe.
TL;DR Unlike sleep, we breathe too much. Breathe through nose, breathe less, practice breathing.
A classic. A must read. Outdated in places but still filled with very valuable lessons.
Absolute must read! I've ran much longer runs because I didn't want the book listening to end. Maybe there's too much of his “life story” and too little of his “uncoverings”, but it's a phenomenal book nonetheless. World is in a better place because of him, but we're still far off from good.
Fav quote goes something like: saying we don't need privacy because you've got nothing to hide is like saying we don't need free speech because you've got nothing to say.
After No Rules Rules I was so interested in Netfilx I wanted to learn more. So I got recommended this. It's a memoir by the person with the original idea and the first CEO. It neatly describes the entire history from how he was throwing around ideas, how they landed on “mailing DVDs”, and the many many struggles of a early-stage startup. He exited the Netflix almost immediately after it went public. This, to me, tells a lot about a person. To me, this book highlighted the (power) dynamic between Reed and Randolph. Reed gets the work done, while Randolph is the idea guy who with every 1000 ideas sometimes strikes on a good one. But he doesn't know the difference, Reed does.
It's a well written book, and it reads nice, if you're into this sort of things. But there are next to 0 lessons in it that you could take and apply to your life/business.
If you read his previous books you'll enjoy this. If you didn't, start there: Obstacle is the way and Ego is the enemy are much more self contained. This one is sort of like a book end to them.
I enjoyed it a lot but I'm sure I'll appreciate it even more on second and third reading.
If you like podcasts, you'll love this one. It's not a normal audiobook but more like a heavily produced long form podcast episode. Similarly if you're into Gladwell you will enjoy this very much. It's him at his best. Connecting the dots, making the stories, the whole shebang. But it's not particularly usable or applicable in real life. Listen to it as an entertainment not a self-improvement and you'll love it.
Japanese rediscovering Austrians rediscovering Stoics told in a fake conversation with someone who has no clue how youth speaks. It's not terrible but I suggest you find a good Stoic book instead.
Skipped most of it. More like a class than a book really. At least 70% of it are just quotes with some filling around them. The material is good, no doubt, but the book itself? Less so.