Book Report: Born Standing Up

In the late 1970s, Steve Martin was the biggest thing stand up comedy ever saw. Routinely playing before audiences of over 20,000 people, a regular on The Tonight Show, and the originator of catch phrases that were cemented in American popular culture at the time, he was a huge success.

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life is mostly a story about how huge a failure he was that enabled that success and a worthy study for career advancement. By far my favorite quote in the book explains one of the two overriding themes of his story:

“Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.”

Book Report: Good to Great

What’s the secret to running a great company?To find out, former Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty member Jim Collins turned his impressive researchers loose on mountains of public data. They examined the 1,435 companies that appeared in the Fortune 500 from 1965 to 1995 looking for a pattern: more than 15 years of sustained growth.

While that sounds simple, that 15 year period was selected on purpose so that the growth was related to the management excellence at a particular company as opposed to their specific industry getting hot or the market in general. From that huge list of companies, only 11 made the cut. Collins’ team then studied those top companies closely, interviewing as many of their top executives as would talk to them and did the same for one of their competitors to find out what it was that made one company good, but the other great. That’s the premise of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t.

Book Report: The Search

As a co-founding editor of Wired, John Battelle qualifies in my book for a nerd crush article. His book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture is a look at the past, present (circa 2005), and potential future of the search industry. Although he got unprecedented access to Google insiders when researching the book, it does a great job of recording the achievements of early search pioneers as well.

It starts by explaining what Battelle calls The Database of Intentions, which is a conceptual model for everything people have collectively looked for in the past when used to predict what we’d like to do next. He explains how close he thought Google was to having just that in 2001:

“Given the millions upon millions of queries streaming into its servers each hour, it seemed to me that the company was sitting on a gold mine of information. entire publishing businesses could be created from the traces of intent in such a database; in fact, Google already started its first: a beta project called Google News. Could it not also start a research and marketing company capable of telling clients exactly what people were buying, looking to buy, or avoiding?”

Book Report: Send – The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home

I think that David Shipley and Will Schwalbe may have been looking over my shoulder the past 14 years, because every mistake I’ve ever made using electronic communication (and its solution) is cataloged in Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. Email has become a bigger and bigger part of our lives over the years, but nobody ever gets a course on how to do it properly. That’s exactly what this book is: the “how to email” class you never took.

Book Report: Getting Things Done

I have been assimilated.

Lots and lots of people have recommended David Allen’s productivity bible, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity to me over the years, but I kept thinking, “I’m already pretty productive, I don’t need that.” I couldn’t have been more wrong. Over the past several months, Allen’s techniques have made a noticeable impact on my day to day life that I didn’t think was possible. Instead of doing a traditional review of his material, I thought I’d walk through what I’ve done with it over the past few months that has changed the way I approach my job.

Book Report: Empire Building

I’ve often written in this space that it’s a good practice to study successful people in other fields. Even if what they do is completely unrelated to your own career, you can still find a nugget or two to bring to your own life. Who better to study for an engineer, than the creator of the ultimate in nerd subculture?

Empire Building: The Remarkable, Real-Life Story of Star Wars is a really good biography of George Lucas by Garry Jenkins. It starts with his simple but some times rebellious childhood in Northern California and the revised edition ends during production of the unfortunate Jar Jar Binks career vehicle known as Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. In between, though, there are lots of interesting tid bits:

Book Report: Every Business is a Growth Business

On its face, Every Business is a Growth Business: How Your Company Can Prosper Year After Year, by Ram Charan and Noel M. Tichy looks like a market analysis book. In a broader sense, though, it is about taking something and trying to look at it a different way. In doing so, you find more creative uses for what you already have or realize there is something else you might go about building instead that’s a lot better. Such things aren’t exclusively directed at the marketers of the world, but can help everybody.

Book Report: The Virtual Handshake

Whenever someone starts to talk about networking, the computer geek in me assumes they mean something having to do with TCP/IP. To most people, though, that means tracking and growing the relationships you have with different people. For most of my professional career, I’ve equated this practice with going to bars in groups of people you hardly know that only talk to you long enough until they can figure out way to exploit your skills to do their bidding. Obviously, I’ve had a bad attitude about it and much to my detriment.

What changed my way of thinking was reading David Teten and Scott Allen’s excellent book The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors And Closing Deals Online. Since then, I’ve broadened my network far beyond what I had before and did so from the comfort of my desk (and one trip to a Chipotle in Austin, TX). While I’m not exactly ready to leave HP over this epiphany, I’m involved in a lot of things I wasn’t before that have opened side opportunities that weren’t possible with my previous mindset.

Book Report: Accidental Empires

Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date should be required reading for anybody even remotely involved in the computer industry. Robert X. Cringely covers the birth of what he calls the 4th largest industry in the world (after cars, energy production, and illegal drugs) from its infancy in the world of semi-conductors until just before the explosion of the Internet. This book is the basis for the mid 1990s PBS multi-hour documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” (not to be confused with the TNT original movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley” which dramatizes a subset of the same material) which is pretty epic in its own right (although, according to Amazon reviews the DVD version has been shortened considerably compared to what originally aired).

Book Report: Barack Obama’s autobiography

I am generally not a very political person and I did not start reading this book for political reasons. As such, I start this review in an unusual fashion.

In 2004 as Jessica Simpson was getting ready to marry Nick Lachey, she came out with a book entitled “Jessica Simpson I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding“. In fairness, I never read this book. I did, however, see her interviewed on a few different talk shows when she was promoting it so I got the gist of what her advice was:

1. Get yourself a million dollars
2. Spend it on a really nice wedding

While that may have worked for her, it wasn’t advice that was terribly practical for the general public.

I know, you’re asking yourself, “What could this possibly have to do with Barack Obama?”