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Sunday, December 24, 2017

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
A junkie is murdered. His next door neighbor in the flophouse motel is down-and-out police detective Landsman, who wakes up beside “the shotglass he’s been dating recently.” Turns out the junkie was shot in the back of the head execution style by a small caliber automatic. And since all of the jews who live in Sitka, Alaska only have another few months before they are exiled into a world that will not take them, Landsman has to move fast.

Thus begins The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, a fascinating alternate history noir detective novel which ends up being a meditation on some of the concepts of judiasm and the self-made traps people and peoples find themselves unable to escape.

As a noir detective novel, this is high quality stuff, which embraces some cliché while defying others. As science fiction alternative history, the novel works well. As a piece of prose, the novel is beautifully written, with more great sentences packed into many paragraphs than many writers achieve in a lifetime. As a truly great novel wrestling with huge themes… Well, it tries quite hard. I’d be curious to know what others think, particular any jewish friends.

I suspect that Chabon may have been seen as a race traitor or an anti-semite by some; I did not find that to be the case, but then, I don’t actually know much about Jewish orthodoxy, and finding fault in one of the world’s major religions isn’t something I’m bothered by.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
Elon Musk is a polarizing figure. His efforts at making fundamental changes to the way humanity approaches space travel, transportation, and energy are having a profound impact on our world. He’s the closest thing to an Ayn Randian hero that I’ve ever seen in real life. As I write this, the recent Falcon launch above Los Angeles is the subject of numerous Facebook posts, and the talk of the new Tesla’s phenomenal acceleration abilities is probably the most interesting thing to happen with cars in a long time. He has also recently offered to help Puerto Rico rebuild a new type of power grid, and announced a fleet of Tesla trucks to take on the economics of the modern long haul trucking industry.

This biography was inspiring. Musk’s life is interesting, atypical, and filled with a drive to transform the world in positive ways at almost any cost which make him nearly a literary hero in my mind. In a time when “the best lack all conviction”, this book paints a portrait of one who does not.

Vance attempts to be neutral, though it seems clear that he too has succumbed to some level of Elon worship. The guy is full of faults; he’s not very tolerant of failure and probably pretty hard to be married to. His efforts to craft himself in the image of Tony Stark could come across as silly hubris, except…. It’s working.

This man and the teams of engineers and marketers he has surrounded himself with are transforming the world.

An inspiring book, and a good reminder: “There are no laws or rules other than physics that you must adhere to.”

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne
“To search for a Blue Ocean” has become a Silicon Valley, West Coast cliché. I was resistant to read this one as a result.

But overt the summer, on the way to a fascinating course at the Singapore Insead school, I read it and learned a lot. It turns out that knowing businesses should seek less-crowded spaces in order to thrive and knowing some very practical ways to accomplish this are not the same thing at all. And this book is filled with case studies and some terrific, lightweight ways of ideating and measuring this topic.

I stole a few of the case studies here on how to graph the customer proposition relative to the competition, added a little bit of futurism borrowed from Kurzweil, and created a game I called Blue Ocean that a bunch of innovative thinkers and I used to spend some delightful hours on whiteboards. Over the last three months the result has been ten to fifteen entrepreneurial ideas which – while not all completely practical – are at least deeply innovative and have not been seen before in this world. That’s not an easy thing to do in the modern age, and I give a lot of credit to Kim and Mauborgne for clearly communicating a framework for how to think about competition and the open spaces where it may not exist.

Very useful and interesting book.

The Girls by Emma Cline

The Girls by Emma Cline
Disturbing and patient portrait of a young woman who falls prey to a Manson-style cult in Califoria in the late sixties. She is exonerated of any murder charges, but becomes a minor public figure. In the novel, she reminisces about the steps in life that took her to the Ranch and got her ensnared in the cult.

The novel was well written, gripping, just lurid enough to be mildly titillating and deeply sad.

I read in the Times that Ms. Cline has been engaged in a fairly nasty series of lawsuits against an ex-boyfriend, with whom she lived while writing this novel. He has alleged that she cribbed some of the material in this novel from his work and that she “hacked his email.” While I know nothing about this case, I will say that I’d be absolutely shocked if this novel had been written by a man. It just rings too true with the awkward experiences that I suspect characterize girlhood.

Mindset by Carol Dweck

Mindset by Carol Dweck
There are two ways of approaching a problem: The “fixed” mindset suggests that ability to succeed is implicit, fixed at birth or based on innate ability. The “growth” mindset suggests that people can succeed based on hard work, incremental improvements, training and perseverance.

Dweck argues that those who approach life and work with a growth mindset are more successful in the long run; they work harder even in the face of setbacks. They are also happier, she argues.

This notion is now somewhat ingrained in our culture (at least in North America high tech business culture.) But at the time she wrote it, in 2006, this was a novel way of framing the difference in perspective.

Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee

Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee
This trio addresses the role of Emotional Intelligence in leadership. There are some very useful discussions here on how to build organizations that grow leaders as a nearly automatic function of their structure and cultural values.

Sections on how to increase positivity as a cultural force in the workplace, how to grow leaders who grow more leaders, minimize control and pacesetting values are all valuable. A section on various different styles of leaderships and how they can be effectively employed in different situations was also valuable.

There’s a lot of practical advice here. (“Cultivating special relationships whose sole purpose is to help you along your path, is crucial to continuing development. Mentors and coaches help you understand your strengths…”) etc. Most of us is presented in an unadorned style that seldom gets in the way of the message.

Generally, this is a valuable book for leaders. I wish I had all of these lessons implanted on a microchip in my brain; as it is, it’s challenging to always stop and use them in the head of the moment.

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
Mr. Sinek uses the metaphor of the Marine Corps chow line to discuss how leaders should run their businesses. He preaches the need to make people feel safe and happy in their jobs, to give them a sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. His writing is conversational to the point of being sloppy at times, but certainly accessible. He tries to tie lessons about leadership into an overarching thesis that humans’ biochemistry – as a result of evolution through natural selection – dictates how they perceive and respond to threats, camaraderie, and other social dynamics in the workplace.

When he dives into attempting to describe the way various neurotransmitters work in various office settings the work suffers. There's a lot of sloppy thinking masquerading as soft science. Indeed, Sinek will regularly offer a few sentences that are facty, if devoid of actual facts, then jump to a conclusion that is little more than metaphorical conjecture.

Example: "Oxytocin really is magical stuff. Mother Nature wants the ones who give to others to keep their genes in the gene pool." What? I thought we were talking about neurotransmitters, not magic. And I'm unsure of the role of Mother Nature in the evolutionary process. Unfortunately, language like this blunts the message Sinek is trying to deliver. And he is barely able to write a page without some of this kind of nonsense talk.

This isn't to say that there's not a valuable lecture here; this text would work great as a TED talk (which it started as) or as a series of lectures for undergrad business students. It's a decent, if shallow attempt to tie a basic understanding of the role of neurotransmitters in human motivation into hoary platitudes about the workplace. Dilbert meets Jared Diamond meets Malcom Gladwell.

Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation by Idris Mootee

Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation by Idris Mootee
I didn’t love this book.

The author had a half of a book here, very little of it fresh. And he stretched this lackluster content for 202 pages by publishing lots of poorly edited photos of boring business scenes, weak formatting, and excessive verbosity.

Consider, for example: “Within dynamic environments, foresight helps organizations better understand the variables influencing the pace, nature and possible impacts of change.” Well… Sure. But that’s hardly news. And the language is so tortured and poorly massaged that what little content there is here feels like it has been run through a Grad School Speak version of Google Translate.

Few of the ideas were wrong, and many of the little exercise suggestions in the book would be a good ice breaker at a strategic offsite… But that's about the best I can say.

Still, there were some good quotes in here from people like Warren Buffett.

The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes & Barry Posner

The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes & Barry Posner
Another Monicat gift, The Leadership Challenge is a sprawling 300+ pages on how to be a better leader. It covers topics like credibility, values, establishing a shared vision, how to empower others, how to encourage people to do their best, how to give feedback that is constructive, etc. There are a lot of very valuable lessons in this book, if nothing that feels particularly new. Still, anyone in a leadership role anywhere would likely be well served to pick this book up each morning, flip to a random page, then make sure they tried to follow the advice therein that day.

Pulp by Charles Bukowski

Pulp by Charles Bukowski
I’d never read any Bukowski, and he is certainly well known and referenced by everyone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Modest Mouse. For my birthday, the Professor got me a signed first edition of his take on the noir detective genre!

Except, this novel is a parody send up of the genre, and more of a meta-spoof on Bukowski’s impending death from leukemia. This was the last novel he wrote and he died shortly after completing it. The main character, Belane, is a dark-complected parody of Bukowski himself – a drunk, a misogynist, a layabout – and he does little but bum around making mistakes and waiting for “Lady Death” or “The Red Sparrow” to find them.

Cynical, short, and unsatisfying unless you’re a Bukowski fan or scholar, I should think.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
What starts as an interesting sketch of a relationship sparling towards conclusion takes a turn for the Shutter Island and becomes a nightmarish dream sequence before falling apart completely by the end. Great tone in the first third, descent into the mind of a non-character by the end left me irritated.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
What a beautiful coming of age novel, told with Mitchell’s pateience, keen sense of observation, obsession with the dialect of different ages, and his not-quite-in-focus-while-passing-through-the-background supernatural influence.

Black Swan Green tells us of a year in the life of a teenage boy in the small British Hamlet of Black Swan Green. He has a strange encounter with a Baba Yaga, probably dies, his dad leaves his mom, he deals with bullies and class and learns about girls and money and generally gets a year older. There’s just so much good stuff here, even wrapped in a fairly traditional bildungsroman.

I’m eager for David Mitchell to write more, because he is really quite good.

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munroe

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munroe

Alice Munroe has a terrific ear for the quiet emotions that motivate average people. This collection of thirteen short stories about the relationships between Canadian women speaks volumes in just over two hundred pages. Their secret fears and hopes and misdeeds large and (mostly) small are laid bare here if you’re patient enough to just listen; they’ll tell you all about their lives, and reading about them will enrich yours.

I’ll happily read everything Mrs. Munroe has written, and I only hope that it’ll help me get a little closer to being able to listen as carefully as she does to all the things people don’t say.

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Christmas 2017

It's time!

After an incredible, but incredibly busy year, I've finally got a little down time to update Word.

I'm writing this from a lovely little village in the mountains of Laos. Dr. Stout is here and we're enjoying breakfast. Coffee and an omlet laced with thai chilis.

While my reading has probably been a little slower than some years, and my writing has been almost nil, it has been a great year. I've learned a ton, we've travelled to some wonderful places, and have unlocked a few achievements professionally. The people I love all seem to be doing well.

Merry Christmas, all.

Here are the books that will be posted in the next day or two:

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munroe
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Pulp by Charles Bukowski
The Leadership Challenge James Kouzes & Barry Posner
Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation by Idris Mootee
Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee
Mindset by Carol Dweck
The Girls by Emma Cline
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon


-tf