Book Recommendations
The Coming Storm
Let’s set the record straight: I’m no weather geek. I picked this up because of an admiration for the author’s research and writing on other topics. And I’m glad I did.
Lewis tackles the topic of weather forecasting from a number of angles including:
- Storm predictions to trigger evacuations
- Weather predictions to help farmers
- The business of weather forecasting
- The politics of weather forecasting
City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago
Author: Gary Krist
If you’re not interested in Chicago history, skip this book.
For those of you still with me, there’s a lot to learn from this story.
The author sheds light on a short period of time in 1919 when a lot of things happened. I knew about none of them before reading.
Here’s some highlights:
- A hydrogen blimp exploded over downtown, crashing into one of the largest banks in the city and killing and injuring a many people.
- A little girl is reported missing, leading to a city-wide search and the arrest of a very suspicious suspect. Also the rest of the city’s parents start paying close attention to adults who hang around children.
- And probably most important – a week of race riots turn the city into a war zone. The mayor delays calling in the state militia for way too long. The governor avoids sending them in directly for political reasons. It’s bad.
If you’ve made it this far you may want to pick this one up.
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
Author: Ben Macintyre
This is not the author’s first time writing a thrilling true-life spy book – and once again he delivers a phenomenal story full of intrigue, insight, spycraft the all-important details.
Set against the backdrop of the cold war, the story revolves around KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky. Born into a KGB family where his father and brother both loyally served the state, he joined the bureaucracy and began diligently working to build a career. Like the lyrics to Eminem song Guilty Conscience, “he has a sudden change of heart, and suddenly his conscience comes into play” when he witnesses the Soviet Union put down the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
He had an ideological break with the Soviet Union, and left himself open for recruitment by the west. MI6 took the opportunity and over a long period of time cultivated him as a double-agent.
Gordievsky was eventually posted to the Londen rezidentura (KGB office within the consulate) where he delivered some of the most impactful and high-level intelligence of the Cold War.
If you like spy stories, this book is a must read. Also check out author Ben Macintyre’s other excellent work about a British officer who spied for the Soviets: A Spy Among Friends.
Farsighted
Author: Steven Johnson
People have been making decisions of great importance for as long as there have been people. With the help of evolution, some of those decision-making tools have been genetically encoded into our human DNA as biases and heuristics.
What we’ve learned from the field of study that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman founded – cognitive psychology – is that when the outcome of a decision is important, the process we employ to achieve the best outcome must be more thorough and rigorous. Our genetic algorithms for decision-making work well most of the time and have helped our species survive thus far, but are increasingly ill-suited to modern challenges we face.
That’s where Farsighted comes into the picture. The author offers a cursory review of some of the ‘state of the art’ tools that people and teams can use to improve the quality of their decision-making when there’s a lot at stake. In essence, all of them add up to methods that slow down your thinking to ensure consideration of all the angles. He doesn’t tread a lot of new ground or share anything that a sophisticated reader and experienced “decider” hasn’t already heard. Despite that, the book is enjoyable because of the anecdotes the author employs.
Read this book if you want a short refresher on decision-making tools and a few interesting stories of decisions good and bad from the past. If you’re expecting new information beyond fun facts or surface-level frameworks, I’d suggest looking elsewhere.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Author: Michael Pollan
Author Michael Pollen weaves together a lot of science, stories and experience into an intriguing narrative about psychedelics. I read this shortly after finishing a science-based book about meditation. It seems both methods – mindfulness and psychedelic chemicals – are an effective way to quiet the ego that lives in the brain’s default mode network. Why would anyone want to do this? It tends to be the case that once people accomplish this they are better able to cope with the daily trials of life.
LSD, mushrooms and other psychedelics earned a bad reputation in the US after the counterculture movement of the 60s. It was interesting to learn that before that movement, there was much legitimate research into the benefits of these substances. Many studies showed effectiveness of these chemicals at treating depression, addiction (including alcoholism and cigarettes), and fear of death.
This books comes at a time when acceptance of the benefits of psychedelics is once again growing and the restrictions of their study are loosening. I’m excited to see the scientific community dig deeper and uncover more about how these substances can be used for our benefit, and what their underlying mechanics can teach us about how our minds work.
The Science of Mindfulness: A Research-Based Path to Well-Being
Author: Ronald Siegel 
I’ve tried meditation a few times in my life, but not yet with the dedication that I apply to other areas. Partly, I’ve been skeptical of its effects. And partly, it’s hard to do! I decided to read this book because the author is a Professor and clinical psychologist at the Harvard Medical School. I figured if anyone could make a believer out of me, it’d be a well-credentialed academic and clinician.
Well, it worked – I’m now a believer that effective mindfulness can really help people improve outlook on life. It’s eye-opening to learn (from this book) about the many controlled studies that have demonstrated positive mental effects of this practice. It’s been demonstrated to effectively treat depression, help people overcome trauma, and generally come to terms with the stream of thoughts that constantly flow through human brains.
Despite all of this information, I must admit that I haven’t yet restarted my efforts at regular practice. Something unknown is holding me back. But next time I try, I think it’ll be easier to stay motivated knowing there’s a real basis for it demonstrated in scientific research.
The Lessons of History
Authors: Will Durant, Ariel Durant
Will and Arial Durant are historians who spent five decades studying world history and creating an 11-volume Story of Civilization. From Wikipedia: “It totals four million words across nearly 10,000 pages, but is incomplete.” This is a much shorter version of that content, interspersed with actual interview recordings of the Durants from the ‘50s – ‘70s. It begins with a great disclaimer: “Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.”
Of interest to me is that this content is already 40ish years old, and yet extremely relevant to understanding today’s world and, I think, the future world as well.
The Durants explain the cycles of human behavior that lead to repetition among our outcomes. From orderly civilization to disorderly chaos and back. From religious underpinning that bind behavior to unregulated societies and back. This is a quote, not from this book, but from one of the longer volumes: “For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.”
I found one part especially interesting: as a young man Durant has disdain for organized religion. When interviewed in his advanced years, though, he believed his youthful view was the wrong attitude. Instead, he sees religion as very useful for the benefits it bestows on constraining man’s actions. Without this, how could we ever form societies of cooperation?
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Author: Khaled Hosseini
About half-way through this one, I had to search the internet to confirm that it is indeed a work of fiction. When that was confirmed, I had a sigh of relief.
Much of the book is incredibly sad. And the reality is that much of the situation in Kabul (where most of the story is based) is incredibly sad and has been for a long time.
The story, though, is beautiful in a way. It touches on relationships between people when things get ugly and complicated, and the beauty that can exist even in the ugliest of situations.
One aspect of the book I appreciated was the rare glimpse into how people in the Muslim world look at things. The particular example that comes to mind: at one point a female character discusses wearing a Burqa at her husband’s request (demand?). She grew to like it because it was like a 1-way window to the world.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Author: Jack Weatherford
I loved this book because it opened my eyes to a perspective and an account of history that I’m rarely exposed to. I had some idea of who Genghis Khan was, but the more I read this book the more I realized that my ideas were limited and often inaccurate.
A lot of reference material comes from The Secret History that was recently uncovered and translated. It was a set of records kept by warrior’s family that was specifically for their use and education. This obviously comes with some risks, but considering the other accounts available are generally western and often completely fabricated based on myth.
Some interesting learnings from this book:
• One reason that the advance of the Mongol armies was stopped: their arrows didn’t fly as straight when the climate was more humid.
• The Silk Road and its accompanying laws created the best environment for free trade until that time in history.
• Descendants of the Khan family continued to rule some territories until 1920!
I absolutely recommend this book for anyone interested in history!
Measure What Matters
Author: John Doerr
John Doerr is the legendary venture capitalist who invested in (among others) Google, Amazon, Compaq, Intuit, Netscape, Symantec, Twitter and Zynga. Seriously this guy is an OG in the venture world. He started his career at Intel where he learned the system of OKRs (“Objectives and Key Results”) developed by Andy Grove. He’s been sharing it with the world ever since, it seems.
The OKR system helps organizations focus the talents and efforts of groups of people to accomplish incredible things together – from “making the trains run on time” to moonshot goals.
Shortly after Doerr’s firm Kleiner Perkins invest into Google, he showed up with a slide-show to pitch Larry & Sergey on OKRs. He presented it as an operating system for their business. They signed up, and have been using it ever since. This book includes excerpts from Larry Page and other founders/execs telling their story of OKRs.
I loved reading this book because I am a believer in goal-setting generally, and goal-setting processes for teams specifically to improve outcomes. Goal-setting and measurement are, for me, permanently intertwined. At eComfort, we used a similar methodology to set goals and metrics for each individual, and I was thrilled with the results. It was a bit rougher than OKRs, so the next opportunity I get I think we’ll migrate over to this instead.
Bonus: Google’s OKR Playbook