Or maybe this should be titled “Rabbitholes I Went Down This Week.” Basic Research I’m reading the The Price of Peace right now — the life and legacy of Keynes. …
Author: john
Technology strategy Steven Sinofsky is writing a great memoir of his Microsoft years, I’m avidly reading. Chapter 3 links to the story of David Weiss and Murray Sargent figuring out…
Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker. Quite the story of a family plagued by schizophrenia, their attempts to survive, and the slow growth in understanding schizophrenia. A Children’s Bible by…
CapEx, Attention, Intention, Progressive Ohio, Pickleball, Ponzi, ENIAC — things I learned this week
CapEx A meandering tour through capital expenditures. First the semiconductor industry, where it is now estimated to cost almost $20B to create a state-of-the-art fab. Fab is now primarily done…
My last day at Xevo is tomorrow. I’ve been reflecting this week on how fortunate I have been to work with so many great people. I met some great people…
Sharpe’s Rifles by Bernard Cornwell. Enjoyable historical novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, a part of a series detailing Sharpe’s rise. Good character, good pacing. Business Adventures by John Brooks.…
We have been moving houses this week so not as much time as I would like to dig into some things but still a few nuggets. The information passed between…
Your strategy is what you ship. I didn’t learn this so much as I relearned it. The story of the Edsel in Business Adventures is instructive. The Ford team dreamed…
I aspire to be a lifelong learner. I do read a lot — books and online — and I find increasingly that if I don’t take a few moments to…
The End of Everything by Katie Mack. In the midst of all our current political and social turmoil, you can read this book and either a) have even more to…
This year I read or attempted to read 75 books. There were some dogs but also some great ones. I tried to come up with the “best book of the…
The Adventure Zone by the McElroy family, Carey Pietsch illustrator. Gets great reviews but pretty thin gruel for me. I probably would have thought it hilarious when I was young.…
Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Great tale of intrigue inside MI5. Started a little choppy but then the story took off and the characters rose to the fore. Intuition Pumps…
The Dragon Factory by Jonathan Maberry. Would have been a good graphic novel — evil albino twins, gene-engineered monsters (scorpion-dogs!), Nazis, a plot to end the world. Just a so-so…
Collapse of an Empire by Yegor Gaidar. Good look at the unraveling of the USSR, it’s inherent fragility, and the human costs of the unraveling. Recommended by my Russian friends.…
The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin. A book about a terrible storm written by a Russian author? I expected some serious gloom, but this story was trippy and strange. Memorable but…
Kent State by Derf Backderf. The Kent State shootings stand tall in my memory, but I don’t think I ever knew all the details of the events. This is an…
An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal. An anecdote-driven walk through the dysfunctional health care industry. Some enraging anecdotes, and some useful how-to’s at the end. Would have liked even more…
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. This didn’t really float my boat, I suspect the difficulty of translating from Chinese is significant, it is not just the straight translation but…
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Pretty damning. If you still somehow believe that America is the perfect embodiment of the “shining city upon a hill”, this book will but that notion…