Charles Koch · ★★★★☆ · 270 pages · 2015

The book was surprisingly good. Not that anything in it is surprising but from the point of view of how to effectively run an organization there is not much to fault from this exposition of how to grow a company. One of the major aspects that I found useful was the notion of hiring: Roles, Responsibilities, Expectations. The idea is that you have a clear role, the responsibilities are clearly laid out. The responsibilities include ownership of decisions. Expectations are open ended but measurable ways to address the value each employee is bringing on. All of these give the company insight into what is expected of the employee and also in return what the employee expects of the company so that they can grow in their role.

Michael E. Porter · ★★★★★ · 397 pages · 1980

This book is dense and takes a while to read because it is so full of information on the strategy of a business. Essentially there are four strategies of a business to optimize for profits and if you are outside of these four strategies you end up being stuck in the middle a place where you don’t have any strategic advantage. However, to practice these four strategies: broad market cost advantage, focused market cost advantage, broad market differentiation and focused market differentiation means attaining different skills. Each strategy has a completely different realm of focus in terms of organizational skills and developing the wrong skills can lead to being stuck in the middle where you end up not being able to maneuver as the industry and competition changes. I’d highly recommend this book as the first 5 books to read when starting a new business to get an idea of what to do in terms of business strategy.

Jim Mattis · ★★★★★ · 332 pages · 2019

Jim Mattis is a deep thinker because of all the books he references, someone who understands war and who understands the sacrifice of war on the political as well as the service side. A great read on America's wars in the last 30 years and a person who has led through all of them.

Christopher Leonard · ★★★★★ · 705 pages · 2019

To be honest I didn't know anything about the Koch brothers until I read this. Leonard does an amazing job putting the pieces that made Koch Industries what it is and the strategies that were used to get there including both the political vision and business vision.

Simon Sinek · ★★★★★ · 350 pages · 2014

I have to say I started this book not being impressed, but by the time the author starts connecting history, our brain and our evolutionary needs and how leadership works I was sold.

Eric Schmidt · ★★★☆☆ · 238 pages · 2019

I didn’t get that much from this book on how to be a coach. Seems largely to respect the other person as a human being but still have high goals. As a biography it also sort of leaves out a lot and doesn’t dive deep into the psyche of Bill Campbell. Quick read but not particularly a deep read.

Patrick Lencioni · ★★★★☆ · 242 pages · 2002

I like that this book is told in a story form like The Goal which makes digesting the material a lot easier. Essentially, the books talks about the following 5 disfunctions:

Kim Malone Scott · ★★★★★ · 305 pages · 2017

How to specifically deal with feedback, meetings and culture. One of the better books on this subject.

Daniel Coyle · ★★★★☆ · 260 pages · 2017

Great book on how to create cultures of success. Create a safe space where people feel safe to communicate their ideas, as a leader open up about your own infallibility, create a concrete vision. The second one of leaders being vulnerable is super important and not one that I had thought of.

Ron Chernow · ★★★★☆ · 834 pages · 1998

This book took a while to finish but here are what I got from his life and the growth of Standard Oil

James Clear · ★★★★★ · 319 pages · 2018

Really liked this book in terms of the exact systems to use to build good habits but one of the most insightful things I read in the book and something I’ve struggle with is how to keep habits. He doesn’t pull any punches and says after you do a habit for a while and it becomes routine it becomes boring and you want to change it. You have to love the boredom and put in the work. Though the rest of the book was packed with a lot of information on how to change habits I found this notion of boredom and putting in the work so refreshing because it means just because you have a habit doesn’t mean you won’t get bored with it. It is essentially pushing through that is important.

Simon Sinek · ★★★☆☆ · 256 pages · 2017

Read Start with Why and found that book very influential but this one is a bit more pragmatic and less of that. Still a good skim if you want to figure out what your why and how.

Jason Fried · ★★★★☆ · 227 pages · 2018

Jeff Goodell · ★★★★☆ · 352 pages · 2017

A good introduction to sea level rising and the likely outcomes of it. I learned a lot about the political ramifications, economic hurdles or cities dying if people stop going to them, and huge engineering hurdles associated with changing cities on the coast to be resilient to the change in sea levels.

Molly Bloom · ★★★★☆ · 274 pages · 2014

Great book looking at the underworld poker games of the rich and famous. I suppose when you have a lot of money this is how you can become more decadent. Great look at the pitfalls of greed and want of power and a warning of what working in the Grey means.

David J. Anderson · ★★★☆☆ · 278 pages · 2010

Kanban is super useful for interrupt driven tasks such as recurring business processes so I wanted to learn more and found this book helpful in understanding the theory of constraints and limited work in progress to achieve the needed outcome. However, the book is a bit wordy and I felt like I was flossing Ofer a lot of it. But I’d say still a good scan for info on how to implement Kanban in an existing organization.

Alexander Osterwalder · ★★★★★ · 273 pages · 2010

One of the influences for the modern Lean movement. It basically moves a business into a canvas that helps you simplify and iterate on assumptions. From there the goal is to validate your business and test the assumptions on each of the different canvas items.

Stephen W. Hawking · ★★★★☆ · 226 pages · 1988

Was good but I felt the content just got way dense by the last couple chapters. I recommend Astrophysics for People in a Hurry over clarity.

Kenneth S. Rubin · ★★★★★ · 797 pages · 2012

Did I read a whole book on running Scrum? Yes, yes I did. This book has a lot of in-depth coverage of Scrum and how to apply it. I honestly feel like it is a book every person at every company I worked at read as Scrum and Agile planning have largely transformed into this big thing with lots of rules like waterfall with Manager fiefdoms. In essence Scrum is simple with few rules and can be adapted to each team.

Cliff Ennico · ★★★★☆ · 290 pages · 2016

In-depth book on crowdfunding