2013 in Books (continued)

I've many things I've mean to post, but being early-jan-going-on-mid-jan, I'd better post my annual summary of the year's reading.

Last year, I decreased my target number of books to read from 48 to 36, and then missed that by one, having read 35.

I read 16 works of fiction and 19 non-fiction books (about the same percentage as last year). Format-wise, 9 were audiobooks, 10 were paper-based, and 16 were e-books (e-books trending up for me, and audio books trending down probably due to lowering my target for the year.

Favorite non-fiction books of the year for me were: The Information, The Signal and The Noise, the Blind Giant, and Born to Run. Favorite works of fiction: Nexus, Wool, Metatropolis. (see links below)

Here's the list grouped by topic, asterisk next to recommended titles, two asterisks next to highly recommended books.

Business
Good Strategy: Bad Strategy
The Coke Machine

The Signal and The Noise**

Overdressed*  (haven't written review yet, but it's good)
Stewardship (haven't written review yet)

Salt Sugar Fat*

Politics/History
Griftopia*

Culture/Art/Media
The American Way of Eating

Sleights of Mind

Future Perfect

Here's Looking at Euclid

Technology
The Information**
Who Owns the Future
The Blind Giant**

Fitness/Health/Self-help
Becoming a Supple Leopard*
First: What It Takes to Win

How will You Measure Your Life

Born to Run**

Biographies/memoirs
Love with a Chance of Drowning

Fiction
Amped
Makers*

Nexus**
The Hangman's Daughter (haven't written review yet)
You
Wool** (haven't written review yet, but it's good)
Robopocalpse
A Crack in Space

Pirate Cinema*

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (didn't bother writing review)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (didn't bother writing review)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Tears in Rain
Metagame*

Metatropolis**

Graphic Novels
The Technopriests BookOne

Book Review: The Signal and the Noise

Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise, is among my fave non-fiction reads of the year. Highly recommended, especially for anyone that does any kind of modelling/forecasting as part of their work (as is the case for me).

Silver made a name for himself doing baseball forecasting, then moved on do playing professional poker during the 'poker bubble', then came onto the mainstream radar by pretty accurately predicting the 2008 election.

In his book, he looks at the poor track record many branches of science & business have in making predictions. He also points to some areas of success. In running through his examples (baseball, weather, politics, finance and earthquake prediction, to name a few), he looks at a variance of available historical data, signal to noise ratios, etc. He gives a nice overview of Bayesian principles of taking bias into account.

I don't want to give it five stars only because much of his work has been covered by others (e.g. Taleb's Black Swans for example), but it's a great book nonetheless. It made me realize some of the flaws in much of the modelling that we do in my work, and gave me some tools to (hopefully) improve.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't

Book Review: Good Strategy - Bad Strategy

I rather enjoyed Good Strategy Bad Strategy. It's a very back-to-basics approach to business strategy that I found a nice reminder that strategy doesn't need to be that complicated. It's very much a one-idea business book but that's OK in this case.

The author starts by outlining what he calls the kernel of any strategy:
- A diagnosis of the situation/problem/opportunity
- A guiding policy that will guide how the organization will react to obstacles/challenges
- A set of clearly defined actions to achieve the goal


While this seems simple enough, it's very useful in cutting through the BS that normally passes as 'strategy'. Additionally, I like they way he frames strategy as hypothesis that is undergoing continual testing and refinement, not something that is authored once and then cast in stone.

Several other things I liked about the book:
- Lots of good case examples. Some well known ones (Apple, Microsoft, GM...) but also some that to me were less well known (International Harvester, many others).
- One case example, Nvidia, is one I have intimate history with, having competed with them in two of my past roles. He didn't nail it all 100%, but it's pretty well summed.

Stuff I didn't like:
- There's a few places in the book where he plays monday morning quarterback, pointing out failed strategies from the recent past, saying he knew better. Would be good if he'd provided proof that he'd called it when he did, vs after the fact. (He may have, but it didn't leap out at me).

In any case, definitely recommended if you are involved with setting strategy for your organization.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

2012 in Books

A little late with it, but here's my annual round up on the year's reading.

I took a goal at the end of 2011 to read 48 books this year and I managed to hit that goal. However, in pursuing that goal, there were times I pushed through books I should have otherwise put down, and times I prioritized lighter fare over heavier stuff. Next year I'm taking the goal of completing 36, but having them be more meaningful. I'll be ok with abandoning books that are turning out as disappointing.

I read 31 non-fiction books and 18 works of fiction (though three books were a mix of fic/non-fic, so I had to make a call on which category to put them in). Format-wise, 19 were audiobooks, 12 were e-books, and 17 were on dead-trees. All the e-books were consumed on Amazon's Kindle app on the iPad, or rare occasion I used the phone when I was stuck somewhere with downtime. Four of the books (Seven Fables, The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, and Hello Skater Girl, The Art of Videogames) were written by friends; I continue to marvel at how lucky and privileged I am to know such people.

My favorite books of the year were as follows: In non-fiction: The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, Republic Lost, and Rocket Men. In fiction: Rainbows End, Angelmaker, and The Windup Girl.

Here's the full list grouped by topic. An asterisk means recommended, and two means highly recommended.

Business

• Art of the Start
• Venture Deals
• Five Elements of Effective Thinking
• Screw it, Let’s do it
• Screw business as usual
• The Numerati
• Where Good Ideas Come From*
• The Next 100 years
• Physics of the Future

Politics/History

• Bananas
• Library: An Unquiet History
• Rocket Men**
• Republic Lost**
• A Short History of Nearly Everything

Culture/Art/Media

• Just My Type*
• Hello Skater Girl
• Art of Videogames
• Program or be Programmed
• The Influencing Machine*
• Reality Is Broken
• The Information Diet

Technology

• Digital Typography
• Future of the Internet and How To Stop It**
• How to Fix Copyright*
• Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

Biographies

• Ben Franklin =- An American Life
• Steve Jobs
• Stories I Only Tell My Friends*
• The Age of Turbulence

Fiction

• Neuromancer
• The Windup Girl**
• Lauren Ipsum
• Seven Fables
• The Mongoliad: Book 1
• The Mongoliad: Book 2
• Anglemaker**
• The Technologists
• Have Spacesuit Will Travel
• Pattern Recognition
• Rainbows End**
• A Visit from the Goon Squad*
• Distrust That Particular Flavor
• The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow*

Graphic Novels

• The Drops of God
• Logicomix
• ADD: Adolescent Demo Division

What do you think? Did you disagree with any of my recommendations? Any faves from last year that I missed entirely? Let me know!

Book Review: Venture Deals

I'd had Brad Feld's book on my to-read list for some time after I started reading his blog (which is worth subscribing to). I got hold of it recently and put it into the pile of stuff I'm trying to worth through by end of year. It was pretty easy to digest so I made short work of it.

Venture Deals comes from a unique perspective as Feld and Jason Mendelson (his coauthor) have both been on the receiving end of VC deals before going on to become VCs themselves. As such, they call out common pitfalls on both sides of deals that get put together, and explain the motivations and responsibilities for both parties. The bulk of the book is a walk through typical terms of term sheets and letters-of-intent. This part is really good as they make the legalese digestible while still explaining what the different clauses are for and what can go wrong with them if not handled properly.

I'll can't give the book a perfect rating as it has a couple shortcomings. First, I'd like to see it address how the VC space is evolving. They do discuss the ebb and flow between times of bullishness and conservatism, but I'd like to see things like the crowdfunding act addressed, etc. Second, they give a little lip service to legal differences in different states, but the book doesn't talk about differences in VCs in different regions/countries. A good appendix would have been made of interviewing a VC based in, say, London or Paris or Dubai. Third, the disparaging tone they use when speaking about lawyers goes beyond the standard lawyer jokes and grates on the nerves after a while. Finally, even in Silicon Valley, there are different motivations for different VCs. For example, Intel and Google both have venture arms who's motivations are broader than just making money (they often have some strategic alignment with their parent corporation).

These things aside, the book is an easy read and a good intro to venture deals.

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

Book Review: Screw Business As Usual

I'm a big Richard Branson fan-boy, and really liked his first book, Losing My Virginity (which I highly recommend). Since then, I've given a few of his other books a try. I gave Screw Business as Usual a try this week. It was very quick to get through so I thought I'd post a short review.

The book is about the idea that capitalism can, in addition to pursuing the goal of making money, attempt to do good.

On the plus side, it covers a number of interesting cases, some of which are Virgin enterprises, others just ones Branson has come across. It's a wide enough variety to give some creative food for thought, but little is provided in the way of detail if someone wanted to do some analysis of real cost/benefit, or map to their business to see how it differs, etc. Still, they are inspirational stories.

Another negative is that a number of his examples consist of things akin to 'I saw a problem. I called up Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Bill Gates and we got together and decided to start a foundation'. Some have complained that this is name-dropping. I don't think that's the case, so much as it's just the circles he travels in. However, the few examples that are along these lines aren't really helpful for anyone looking to do good with their business.

In any case, it's a good read with some unique perspectives that some will get value from. Start with Losing My Virginity though, as I think it's a better read.

Screw Business as Usual

Some good - but insufficient - ebook publisher suggestions

As an industry with more history than most other forms of media, the pain book publishing is going through in trying to transition to digital is quite fascinating to follow and something we can all learn from.

As we've seen with music, film, and games, publishers are not only trying to assert rights that protect existing business models (e.g. trying to curb piracy) but also are pouncing on opportunities to gain rights that previously they didn't have, or had lost (e.g. rights for end users to resell books; rights for libraries to lend books, etc).

BoingBoing last week linked to an interesting piece by Joanna Cabot, calling for a return to common sense. It's a good piece, and a good starting point for discussion, but insufficient on it's own.

The TL;DR version is that she calls for three things:
- If granting rights that are really more akin to rental/lease than ownership, then say so explicitly and don't call it "buying"
- Understand that books are purchased by households, not neccesarily individuals, and sharing among household members shouldn't be a crime.
- Understand that individuals want and need to move books between devices, so don't make it difficult to do so.

In short, she's calling for e-books to allow for the same things that paper books do. If I rent a book I'm expected to return it, and if I buy it, I can do with it what I want. If I buy it or borrow it, I can share it with other members of my household, etc. She is saying that e-books should not allow us to do LESS than their paper counterparts. I agree.

However, it's not enough to stop there. e-books should allow for far more. They should allow for quoting, sharing, promoting. They should allow for commenting and conversing with authors, critics and other fans. They should allow for augmenting metadata about the book, its settings or its author. Some of this stuff has more to do with the e-book's usage in other services (e.g. imagine virtual book club social network groups), and some about opening the format to others (e.g. metadata).

Some of this is publishers not getting that these things can ultimately sell more books than their piracy-paranoid policies are saving in lost sales. Part of it is them rightly being scared that ultimately their role in the ecosystem may be less needed than before.

I think that if conversations in publisher board rooms are focused around "how do we ensure they pay?" instead of "how do we make the e-version of this book the most engaging and valuable, and how do we make it reach the most people?", those publishers are going to lose. The forward thinking ones asking the latter question, they are at least thinking in the right direction.

Book Review: Screw It, Lets Do It

I picked up Richard Branson's Screw It, Let's Do It at the library in audio book form as something to easily get through on a recent business trip where I was going to have a bunch of driving.

I was a fan of his earlier book, Losing My Virginity, and had mixed reviews for Business Stripped Bare. This latest one rates somewhere between the two. More generalized advice, less detail on the early days of Virgin Music and Virgin Atlantic (Losing My Virginity covers both well), but does cover some hairy tales of his sailing and ballooning exploits. Some of these stories overlap with the earlier book, but its interesting enough storytelling that I didn't mind.

Screw It, Let's Do It

Book Review: The Art of the Start

I read The Art of the Start recently. I'd read some of Guy Kawasaki's stuff in the past and found it humorous and easily digestible. The book promised to address not only entrepreneurship but also intrapreneurship as well, which is a little more relevant to me.

Overall, I give the book a B+. It's accessible, and hits on the main points, and does so in Guy's usual tell-it-like-it-is fashion, with some humor to flavor it. However, it really is aimed more at entrepreneurship and the intrapreneurship part is only touched on in a couple sections briefly.

Also, I have to say that it feels like a rushed and/or sub-optimal effort by Kawasaki. There are a lot of recycled jokes and anecdotes, which is OK to a degree. There are also a lot of broken metaphors, or anecdotes that don't directly illustrate the thing Kawasaki's trying to demonstrate.

If you are trying to start a business, or are thinking about it, and want an accessible "first steps" kind of guide, the book can serve in this capacity. Other folks will probably find it less useful.

The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

2011 in Books

At the end of last year, I set a goal of getting through 36 books for this year. I exceeded that, completing 44.  They were pretty evenly divided among formats: 15 audio books, 12 e-books, and 17 in printed format. Interestingly though, the breakdown by format was not evenly distributed among topic areas. (e.g. all the fiction I read was in e-book format, where the bulk of the business books were in print). Of those I read in e-book format, most were consumed on the Kindle app on iPad, occasionally syncing and reading on iPhone.


For next year, I'm setting a goal of 48 books. I also want to plan my to-read pile a little better (e.g. some of the audio books I read were random picks at the library as I was under time pressure before a trip), and to be more willing to give up on books that aren't living up to expectations, rather than slogging through them.

As with last year, I'm grouping by topic. One asterisk for recommended books, two for highly recommended. Links are to my reviews, which in turn have links to Amazon or other place to buy.

The summary on recommendations is as follows: My favorite non-fiction book of the year is The Master Switch which I recommend everyone read, and Super Sad True Love Story is my fiction pick of the year. I'll also recommend Escape Velocity if you work at any company of over a hundred employees in which you want to effect change.

Business

• The Master Switch (**)
• Escape Velocity (**)
• Business Model Generation
• Resonate
• How to Lie with Statistics
• Evil Plans
• Poke the Box
• The Whuffie Factor
• Panic
• Liars Poker
• Linchpin
• Do The Work
• Age of Persuasion
• The Undercover Economist

Politics/History

• The Assault on Reason
• 1776 (*)
• The Ascent of Money (*)
• Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
• Outrageous Fortunes
• My Life
• Edward Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism (**)
• Republican Noise Machine
• Havana Nocturne
• Churchill (*)
• The Age of Gold
• Team of Rivals (*)
• Alexander The Great And His Time (*)
• The Next Decade

Culture

• Life
• The Art of Living According to Joe Beef
• The Wave (*)

Technology

• We, Robot (*)
• Best of Technology Writing 2010
• You are not a gadget
• The Filter Bubble (*)

Fiction

• Super Sad True Love Story (**)
• Rule 34
• Ready Player One
• Reamde
• Paintwork (*)
• The Technician (*)
• Anathem (*)
• The Tomorrow Project (*)

Graphic Novels

• SVK (*)

Book Review: Escape Velocity

This was one of my favorite business books of the year. I've been a disciple of Geoffrey Moore ever since reading Crossing the Chasm and the fantastic Inside the Tornado. Moore is skilled at distilling complex machinations of markets and organizations, getting them down to their fundamental systems, and then explaining those in crystal clear form.

In Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past, he turns his attention to the question of why companies are unable to innovate, arguing that a major factor is their being trapped by the pull of their past and current product efforts. He argues that the way budgeting & planning work at most large organizations, headcount & spending are allocated among existing efforts first, and that afterward anything left for innovating in new areas is meager at best. Having worked at a couple such companies, I was struck by how accurately he portrayed the details of this process and problem.

Moore goes on to propose a framework for tackling this problem in four parts.

First, he describes this budgeting dilemma and proposes that the key areas for innovation, once identified, get planned for outside of the rest of the budget planning process, and that the company make highly assymetrical bets on these in order to acheive 'escape velocity'.

Next he provides a framework for identifying company and competitor areas of strength in a hierarchy of domains of category power, company power, market power, offer power. I found this framework useful for discussion of competitor offerings. He makes the case that your breakthrough will come from focusing on a key differentiator in one of these domains, and identifying which is key.

He then goes on to provide a really useful model for categorizing types of innovation, breaking things into differentiation vs neutralization (innovation efforts in matching competitor offerings) vs efficiency vs waste (innovation efforts spend in areas that won't be leveraged or that don't align with the one area you've picked to differentiate). This framework too, I found really useful, and intend to employ it at work.

Finally, he presents a well structured blueprint for how to go put all this into action. He does so for both volume-operation vs service-oriented businesses (the tactics are different for each). His model suggests that there are three key phases for these efforts (invention, deployment, and optimization), and that the efforts for each should be handled by completely different management teams with different skill sets. He also outlines the structure for a transition team and process to move the product efforts between these three phases.

Throughout the whole book there are many, many case examples, and I liked that - with one exception - he called upon himself to avoid the temptation of using Apple in case examples (too easy).

Moore has an uncanny ability for structuring order out of the chaos that exists in high tech business. This is a masterwork, and a must-read for anyone in management or planning at any company of a few hundred employees or greater. However, even those other roles or at small companies will, I think they'll get a lot out of the framework tools for evaluating their place in the market, or their competitors. I highly recommend this book.

Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past

Book Review: Business Model Generation

Business Model Generation is described as a tool to help imagine and craft new business models through use of  something called the "business model canvas", a framework for analyzing business models and considering "what if..." type questions around potential different models.

The book is very pretty. It seems cut from the same cloth as Slideology and others like it. Lots of pictures, pages with sparse text and varied typographical styles. This makes the book easy, even a pleasure, to proceed through, and the concepts easy to internalize.

Two complaints I have don't necessarily mean you should shy away from it, but take them into account. First, the book is too lightweight on, well, details around business models. It would be nice to see a few case studies where it at least went to business plan level. Its easy to imagine thousands of business models, but whether they'll fly or not, well, you need to put some numbers behind them. Secondly, where there are case studies, they are all after the fact. It would be nice if they picked examples of businesses they'd worked with so they had the before-after case, including how the process was used to dream up the new model, what worked, what didn't, etc.

These complaints aside, it's still an interesting book. I think it would be of most use as a framework for a group exercise. Say if you and a few collaborators are trying to do a brainstorm on new business models.

So, if with that in mind the book still sounds interesting, by all means pick it up. Just keep in mind that the detail work is left as an exercise to the reader.

 Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Book Review: Linchpin

I've reviewed a bunch of Seth Godin books here, and while I'm a great admirer of his, my reviews have varied; with some medium-to-highly rated (Meatball Sundae, Poke the Box, Small is the New Big), and some less so (The Dip).

Linchpin is flawed, but valuable. I give it a recommendation, but only for those that understand that there'll be some repetitiveness, and some random jumping from topic to topic. Nevertheless, there are some good points made.

At a high level, it's Seth's take on what it takes to be essential - a linchpin - in your organization, network or community. His high level assertion is that the Internet, the attention economy, and other factors have fundamentally changed the nature of work. Being a quiet cog in a machine is a decreasingly viable path, and so people need to think about what factors make certain people indispensable.

By way of flaws, the book flits from topic to topic and back without a lot of structure. It's divided into sections, but then bounces between some of the same issues covered in other sections. Many of the anecdotes are detail and context free enough that they added little value or color.

The book is still valuable though. There are many points in the book that provide good food for thought, and several more structured entries that provide the kind of well articulated analysis that Godin is capable of and that I wish we'd see more in his recent books. At least one of these sections was valuable enough, and resonated with me enough, that I'm doing a separate post on it alone.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Book Review: the Master Switch

Tim Wu's The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires is one of my favorite books of the past several years. It is a deeply insightful and ultimately important work, and should be on everyone's reading list, especially those in any part of the computing, communications or entertainment industry.

More on why I feel so strongly about it in a second, but first, since a picture is worth a thousand words:

I can't think of a book I've dog-eared this much since I was in school. There were a ton of points I wanted to mark and reference in future talks or articles.

In The Master Switch, Wu takes a look at the history of the telephone, film, radio, broadcast television, and cable television industries, to show how all of them exemplify The Cycle. The Cycle being that between an open period following the invention of a new information medium, and the closed period that follows as a few economic giants gain control over that medium. His presentation of these histories is as entertaining as it is educational, and I found myself glued to the page.

This is not strictly a historical text though. All of these case histories serve both to define the rules by which the cycle occurs, and also to warn of its costs to societies, and to innovation.

He then goes on to look at the last great information empire battle: The battle for the Internet. As Wu puts asks it, "Which is mightier: the radicalism of the Internet, or the inevitability of The Cycle?"

Those of us raised in recent times, and on the openness of the Internet and in the era of Google, Microsoft and Amazon, may take it for granted that the open horizontal platforms inevitably win. However, as Wu shows in the cycle, the vertically integrated conglomerates and the owners of infrastructure are remarkably resilient in their ability to tame those that would rock their boat. Also, he shows us that often enough, those that free prisoners from one market are soon tempted to forge chains of their own. Apple of course being a great example here.

If anything, the first line of defense this book offers us is education. An ability to recognize the elements of the cycle at work should be important for all of us. Secondly, Wu offers a prescription for a "constitutional solution". This is meant not in the sense that he'd have us modify the US constitution, but rather that a balance of powers could be struck between members, with sufficient but not over-reaching regulation from bodies such as the DOJ and FCC.

If there's one downside to the book - and it's a small one in an otherwise masterful work - its that the work is extremely US-centric. Some reference is made to Europe, and there is the occasional mention of PRC, but that's it. I would have thought it worth a lengthy discussion about how, for example, the entertainment industries are using international copyright treaties to entrench their favorite policies in foreign countries' laws, and then in turn to use that as precedent to influence US law.

This minor complaint aside, this is a must read work for our day and age.

Book Review: The Black Swan

While travelling this week I finished Nassim Teleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and I give it a rating of... well... so-so.

I do so not because it lacks any good ideas - this is not the case - but because of two things.

First, the author writes with such contempt for, well, most of humanity it would seem, and with such an arrogance, that I found myself wavering between being amused and being annoyed. At times it just distracted from the book's content.

Secondly, while the book's central premise is sound, and there are a few discussions about how it can be applied, it really is a 'one idea book'. As well, like many 'one idea' books (Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and Free come to mind), the author stretches the idea a bit too far and to too many areas. e.g. Why did MS beat Apple in the early days of the PC? luck certainly played a role but to say it's the ENTIRE reason is a bit of a stretch).

On the plus side, the idea is sound. The central premise is that people fall prey to two things:

(1) They under-estimate the risk of 'black swans' - unforeseen events that disprove models and rules governing a market or force us to reexamine fundamental assumptions, and (2) that when these events occur, they can be massively larger that we anticipate.

There are many illustrative examples in the book, and many more come to mind. Models of real estate prices prior to the recent downturn; understanding of what the phone market looked like before iPhone shipped (how many planners at Motorola had that plotted on their curves? Likely none!), etc.

The author doesn't suggest that because we can't plan/forecast that we then just throw our hands up and do nothing. Rather, he suggests that we always examine fundamental assumptions, understand that models are built on simplified models, and always attempt to quantify the risk if a black swan occurs.

As someone that does silicon requirements forecasting for a living I found the book to be both useful and disheartening. Disheartening in that I can think of so many occasions that our fundamental assumptions turn out to be wrong (by 'we' I mean the entire industry), but useful in that it's given me food for thought about how to account for the unknown. To ask not just "what should our plans be?", but ask "what's the worst case if they are wrong?"

So, if after reading my warnings earlier in this review, the book still sounds interesting, then give it a go. Once you sift past the ego and the contempt, there are some useful bits there.

(Note, several people commented that the author's prior book Fooled by Randomness, is better. I haven't yet read it, but thought I'd pass that along)

Book Review: The Big Short

I ripped through The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine in a few days. I'd been told it was a easily digestible take on the recent financial crisis.

What I didn't expect was something that frightened me like a horror novel. For such a dry topic, he really turns it into a page-turner.

Some folk have critiqued the book for over-simplifying the topic. Little blame is placed on government, for example. The blame is mainly placed on improperly structured incentives and lack of risk prevention systems in Wall Street firms. These concerns are probably well founded. Nothing is so cut and dried, for sure.

That said, it's a good lesson in how companies - especially large complex ones - can get into real trouble when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and in how leadership has a responsibility in both understanding their businesses and making sure the systems are in place to make sure those businesses don't run off the rails. Bottom line: If the buck stops with you, do you understand your balance sheet, and do you feel confident that the people and systems that report information into it are honest and correct?

I recommend the read, though be forewarned that you may find yourself pulling your money out of your mutual fund afterward and shoving it under your mattress.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Book Review: Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution is the best business book I've read this year, and may one of my top favorites of all time.

Many books have been written about intrapreneurship, the incubating of new businesses or products inside large companies. This is the first I've come across that looks at the causes of success and failure when those incubation projects are brought out of the back room and re-integrated into the larger fabric of the company.

It's at this point that many fail, and they do so for a number of reasons. This book looks at a number of case examples and illustrates what things were done right and wrong, and more importantly why this is the case.

The book hit close to home with me because there are many examples (both good and bad) that resonated with the Larrabee project I came back to Intel to work on. This aside though, I found it relevant to many efforts I've seen at Intel and Microsoft and at other companies through conversations with friends.

If you work at a large company and are interested in the dynamics of trying to bootstrap new products or businesses within those walls, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book.

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution

Book Review: How The Mighty Fall

Finished How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In in two short plane rides. It is certainly a short business book, but also good. Oh, and terrifying.

From Jim Collins, the same guy that authored Good to Great, this looks at the other side of the coin: what factors make companies fall from greatness. He comes to the conclusion that there are many different ways to fail (vs fewer to succeed) but that there are some common traits to the examples they looked at.

Like many business books, the key point can be gleaned in just a few pages. In fact, this picture says much of it in a nutshell:

However, recognizing if your company is in one of these phases (as all companies suffer from at least SOME of the symptoms) makes the book worth reading, to compared to the numerous case examples throughout the book.

The terrifying part is how often great companies are unable to see the cliff, even as they are going over it.