Dave Concannon

Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff have written a very engaging and accessible work on Game Theory which they purport is a "Guide to success in business and life". Game Theory (not to be confused with Game Mechanics) is the mathematics and psychology of social interactions in strategic situations, and while I'm not sure it's going to make you successful on it's own it's a good place to start at least.

Starting off with examples of games that are easily solvable by starting with the desired goal and working backwards, the authors delve deeper into more complicated issues such as how to strategize when both players can move simultaneously, when there are penalties for certain choices, or how to optimize the situation so that both players get the best possible outcome via cooperation.

This book had me gripped. I happily spent time chilling out reading this book instead of trying to catch some decent waves while on vacation in Hawaii. They authors build on simple cases and then dig into a more complex real-world scenarios involving Nash Equillibrium, Minimax, and decisions where the other players can manipulate information or introduce incentives and penalties. The chapter on strategies for participating in auctions is very interesting.

Included throughout the book are questions designed to test your understanding of the material, and good suggestions for further reading. The writing style is light, despite the material getting into some relatively complicated stuff, and the explanations are more than enough to allow you to understand each concept without having to look elsewhere.  A recommended read, there are some really great ideas in there.

After reading the hugely inspirational "Tribes" I've been on something of a Seth Godin binge.  Purple Cow is a how-to guide to revolutionize a  comatose company into something truly remarkable. The idea of this "Purple Cow" is to make a product that is so remarkable, so antithetical to the status quo that it immediately strikes a chord with your target market.

Purple Cow is a book about how taking the 'safe' course of action is riskier than making the ballsy decisions that defy convention and make a really remarkable product.  Seth describes the 'TV-industrial complex' which used television and print mass-media to advertise and create mindless demand in niche markets that did not yet have a clear leader. The profits from these ventures resulted in a continuous cycle - more money spent on advertisements means more profit means more money spent on advertising.

The end result of this cycle is that consumers become more and more inoculated against your advertising and eventually every product in a given sector is an indistinguishable clone of it's competitors. In markets saturated with similar products that make similar claims the best course of action is the controversial one - stand out. Remarkable products pick a specific customer and solve their problem really well. They solve this problem in a way that turns ordinary customers into fans, and makes fans want to tell everyone else they know.

Most importantly is the premise that remarkable doesn't happen via design-by-committee, watered-down compromise, or blindly imitating your competitors. It's by being what your competitors aren't prepared to; the nicest,  the fastest,  the newest, even the most hated as long as you follow the golden rule:  The surest way to make a terrible product is to try to please everyone at the same time.

Tribes is a manifesto for self-driven change for everyone tired of the status quo - A call to identify the problems in your company, town, or life and start solving them with a like-minded group of enthusiasts.

Seth has written a clear guide through what he describes as a "factory" mindset - Where a job is clearly defined and you do the same things every day in a predictable manner, with someone telling you what to do next. The reality he proposes is that the factory mindset when applied to real life is dangerous - dangerous for the individual who doesn't have the freedom to produce remarkable works with their talents, and dangerous for the company that lets great ideas stagnate due to poor policy.

The central principle of the book is that change is created by people - by leaders who are proud to go against the grain to do what they know is right. Movements are created by groups of these people, all working together at a singular aim without the fear and inertia that stifles innovation and talent.

I've dipped in and out of Seth's blog and always enjoyed it but never really 'drank the kool-aid'. No more - I found this book absolutely inspirational, and if you bump into me in the near future you may find me trying to force this book into your hand. Buy it, rent it, or steal it - this is something you need to read.

Keith Ferrazzi is a fanatical connector; someone who goes out of his way to meet new and interesting people. It's this rabid interest to connect with others, and subsequently introduce his connections to each other that he attributes a lot of his success.   In "Never Eat Alone", Mr Ferrazzi takes the reader through the mindset of some of the most powerful connectors on the planet, before gradually introducing some of the key concepts he uses to meet those he doesn't know.

Early in his career, Keith's ambition had turned him into 'a jerk' - Ignoring his peers, but going out of his way to catch the attention of his bosses. Eventually one of these bosses informed him that in order to succeed as a manager, you have to enable those around you to be successful. This simple advice the essence of his book - Do good work by allowing others to succeed.

Much of the advice reminds me of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People". He provides solid reasoning as to why you might want to follow his advice, clear examples of what to do (and what not to do), and case studies of famous super-connectors.

I really enjoyed this book, not only is it solid advice but it's clear that Mr Ferrazzi truly believes what he writes. Recommended!

Every person, all the events of your life, are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.

Richard Bach - Illusions

A book that had a huge influence on me when growing up was Richard Bach's "Illusions".  The basic story revolves around a pilot who one day meets a self-proclaimed messiah while giving demonstration flights to people in small towns.  After forming a friendship, this stranger starts mentoring him in all the necessary skills required to be a messiah - skills he claims are there to be learned by anyone.  It's a pretty simple story, told in what my girlfriend describes as Bach's "heavy-handed parable" style. Her MA in English literature doesn't lie; one could be forgiven for dismissing it offhand, but it drove me to question the conventional career choices that most of my classmates were choosing.

Fast-forward a dozen years or so and I'm following a few interesting people on some internet nonsense called twitter. Between dumb luck and random links from creative and inspiring sources I happen to be following two particularly interesting strangers called Cody McKibben and Jun Loayza, who along with Monica O'Brien, Andrew Norcross, Carlos Miceli, Adam Baker, and intern Dariane Nabor have set up Untemplater - A site devoted to taking control of your life and career in a way that defies convention.

To kick off the site launch, they've lead with their free Untemplater manifesto which contains six real-world case studies of the untemplater lifestyle. The untemplater concept is about breaking away from conventions of living. Where entrepreneurship becomes the "alternative" to a corporate 9-to-5 job, entrepreneurship itself can take on a pattern of long hours doing grunt work while ignoring loved ones. The lifestyle design concepts from Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek are a real eye-opener, yet drive some to pursue independence at any cost, ignoring interesting opportunities that smell too much like what they have defined as 'work'.

The case studies are six genuinely interesting independent stories of personal success, with inspiring ideas to make you think about where life can take you. Some might dismiss this concept offhand, but like Illusions, it might inspire you to take your life beyond what others tell you is possible.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.

Grab the Untemplater manifesto, you won't be disappointed.

Last night I headed along to hear Gary Vaynerchuk speak at the Hillside club in Berkeley, one of the stops on his current tour for "Crush It! - Cash in on your passion".

"Crush it!" details Gary's techniques for growing his 60 million dollar wine business using social media, and spinning off a successful media company which consults to Fortune 500 companies. The message is relatively simple, but it's a breath of fresh air in the sort of society where everyone wants instant results and get-rich-quick schemes to rescue them from boredom in a desk job.

At it's simplest the core message is similar to Tim Ferriss' "4-hour work week" in that both authors propose that time spent working at a job you hate is intolerable and every effort should be made to escape if there's an alternative idea you could be pursuing that would make you happy.

What's different about the approach in "Crush it!" is that Vaynerchuk isn't going to pretend that you can achieve success on a few hours a week - the key to his success is patience, perseverance, and in his own words "hustle". He regularly works spartan hours answering every single email sent to him by fans and critics alike, and engaging with people on twitter to build personal brand equity.

Overall it's quite a short book, and for people who've been using social media for a while, or following Gary's conferences and speaking engagements might find it repeats what he's said in the past. At the signing he mentioned that a large proportion of sales are "thank yous" from people he's engaged with over twitter, facebook, winelibrary etc over the last few years - This in my mind definitely rings true about the power of creating personal relationships. Gary was happy to chat with people after the signing, giving advice on how people can ramp up their personal projects.

Some snippets from the book:

1) Don't drop your job straight off the bat, work spare hours early in the morning or late at night to chip away at your passion project.

2) "It's never a bad time to start a business unless you're starting a mediocre business"

3) "Do the right thing by your customers, because the right thing is never the wrong thing" - Customer service is everything: If you have to sacrifice money to keep your customer happy it'll pay dividends it because that satisfied customer is going to tell everyone they know how you looked after them. Gary cites word-of-mouth as the most effective form of advertising he knows of,  quoting around an 89% repeat business vs ~12% for radio/tv/magazine business. He's got a few nice personal stories of delivering cases of wine to customers when someone screwed up to turn around a sour customer relationship.

4) "Traditional media are going out of business, where's that 3 million dollar a year ad spend going to go?" - Gourmet magazine is shutting down, yet online food portals are ramping up. That advertising spend has to go somewhere, and social media is going to grab the lion's share of it.

5) Patience and hard work win in the long run - If you cut corners, eventually someone with more integrity is going to come along and clean the floor with you.

Described on the back cover as the "adventures of a curious character," "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!" is a transcription of conversations between nobel-prize winning physicist Richard P. Feynman and his friend Ralph Leighton. It chronicles his early interest in tinkering with radios through his years working in Los Alamos on the Manhattan project, and on to his dalliances with Art, bongo playing, Mayan mathematics, and practical jokes.

This has to be one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time - I've long been a fan of Feynman for his unpretentious attitude to life. He was truly someone who kept a child-like fascination with the world around him long past the point at which most people have begun to accept the state of things as unchangeable fact. This constant curiosity and playful attitude to life coupled with his razor-sharp intellect led to his winning of the Nobel prize for physics in 1965.

It's very interesting to get an insight as to how one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century mulled over problems - it seems a lot of how he figured out a puzzle was by direct analogy. If presented with a set of facts, he would construct some simple mental model which exhibited the same state as the known facts, E.g. representing an abstract concept as two balls that spin, and add more properties as more facts are known. Then when presented with a question about the state of the theory, he could relate the question to his constructed model and answer whether the theory was likely to be true based on how his set of "spinning balls" would react given the new information.

His playful side is covered during a very funny chapter detailing his obsession with safe-cracking during Los Alamos. He figured out a method for reducing the number of turns needed to crack a safe, and became known as the go-to guy when any given safe was unavailable when the owner was away on holiday or similar. He took an avid interest in Frigideira playing (described as a "musical frying pan"!),became a competent artist, and could adequately converse in Portuguese and Japanese. The impression you get from the book is that he would happily immerse himself in just about anything that took his interest just for the sake of learning. He describes some initial inspiration for his Nobel-prize winning work as originating from a proof he developed  after watching someone in the college cafeteria throwing a plate and wondering why the spinning of the pattern didn't seem to match the "wobble".

The final chapter is an adaptation of a talk he gave at Caltech in 1974 on "Cargo Cult Science", a call for integrity and discipline during scientific investigation. He was someone who shunned pretense and snobbery throughout his life, and initially tried to not accept the Nobel prize. I'd highly recommend the book, and also suggest watching clips of him on youtube to get an idea of this "curious character".

Ram Charan is an advisor to Fortune 500 companies and has lectured at Harvard and Northwestern's Kellogg school of business.  In his book What the CEO wants you to know, he explores what he describes as the "basic building blocks of a business".  Using comparisons from his family's shoe shop in India he deciphers the day-to-day necessities of a business in order to describe the essential information you can use to determine whether a business is successful.

Here is a synopsis of some of the essential finances of a business as described in"What the CEO wants you to know":

1. Cash generation - The difference between all the cash that flows into or out of the business in a given time period.
2. Margin - Margin is the percentage profit made on the products the company sells or services the company provides. As a meaningful statistic it usually refers to a company's net profit margin after taxes.
3. Velocity - Sometimes referred to as "inventory turns",  describes the concept of how frequently the company's stock is moved off the shelves into the hands of it's customers, and replenished by suppliers.  It defined by how many times a particular product has to be restocked in a year.  Additionally he measures "Asset velocity", this is AV = Sales / total assets. This measurement is somewhat more interesting in terms of software companies that don't have a physical  product.
4. Return on Assets (ROA) - The amount of money you are able to make with a given amount of fixed assets. Occasionally companies use slightle different measurements such as "Return on investment (ROI)" or "Return on equity (ROE)". These measurements answer the questions of "How much money are you making with your investments, or with the money shareholders have invested in the company?".   ROA can be simplistically defined as a product of Margin and Velocity (R = M x V). Mr Charan describes the ROI of a business as a critical marker to the health of a business. Comparing this figure with competitors and the previous year can gauge whether a company is succeeding or failing.
5. Growth - A company's growth is the increase in a company's size in terms of employees. The author argues that with a lack of sustainable, profitable growth, a company may not be able to attract the type of employees that the company needs to succeed in the marketplace.  If a company stagnates, the amount of money it can afford to spend on research and development decreases, the opportunities for promotion within the company begin to dry up, and the ambitious employees move on for greener pastures. Even more dangerous is unnecessary growth, where the company expands at a rate which is not consistent with the return on the investment in the new employees/stores etc.
6. Customers - A company must listen to it's customers in order to succeed. In terms of e-business, neglecting user feedback to your software or website is detrimental. The prevalence of the internet means it is possible to promote your business globally, and if you don't cater to the tastes of your customers they have little need to stay. The cost of attracting customers is relatively high, but in most cases the cost of switching for a customer is very low.

Using these measurements, you can get a summary of the business:

• What were the company's sales?
• Is the company growing, or is growth flat or declining? How does this growth compare to competitors or the market segment?
• What is the company's profit margin? How does this margin compare to the competition?
• What is the company's inventory velocity? It's asset velocity?

In terms of wealth the book delves into the business from the eyes of an investor:

• Price-earnings multiple (P-E Ratio) - How much profit the company made for each share of stock. For example, a P-E Ratio of 7 means that for every dollar of earnings per share the stock is worth seven times that much. It represents the expectations about a company's current and future money-making abilities. When a company begins to miss it's earnings-per-share expectation investors often decide to take their money elsewhere, resulting in sliding stock prices.

This is followed up with some notes on personnel management, coaching, and how to determine whether a person is suited to a job, though I'm not certain that this chapter belongs in the overall context of the rest of the book. Finally there is a personal check-list you can use to evaluate your own company on the metrics described previously. I found this a nice basic primer on business finance, I'm certain that each of the topics could have entire books devoted to them, but this is a good overview with enough detail to be interesting without getting too dry.

Check it out on Amazon here.

The latest book on my reading list is Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's 1999 best-seller "First, Break all the Rules". This book examines the practices and methods that effective managers use, and how these practices differ from the methodologies implemented by mediocre managers.

Good analysis starts with a mountainous sample space of data - in this case two enormous research studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization over twenty five years, surveying over a million employees from broad demographics and industries. The central aim of this research was to determine what factors motivate and retain talented employees. The somewhat surprising results suggest that although remuneration, excellent working conditions, and responsibility play their part, the employee experience of their working life is most heavily influenced by their relationship with their direct manager.

Perhaps more surprisingly is the difference in attitude between the exceptional managers (those whose charges out-perform the other employees, stay longer in their respective companies, and have more successful careers overall) and the average managers. The essence of this difference is that an exceptional manager does not attempt to focus on adding talents that an employee doesn't possess through extra training in weak areas, rather they focus on their innate skills - drawing them out and manoeuvring the employee into a role where these strengths are maximised.

In terms of practical tools offered, the book provides examples of the survey questions asked and substantial analysis to allow you to interpret the results provided by your subordinates. Some of these questions provide enlightenment on areas directly related to the relationship with their manager, and others relating to the work environment, career prospects, and role itself.

One interesting point I took away from the book was that the amount of time an employee stays in a company is tightly coupled with their relationship with their immediate supervisor. An interesting role, company perks, and all the share options in the world won't keep you in a job if your direct manager isn't someone you can see eye-to-eye with.

Overall, definitely a recommendation. It remained interesting and for the most part very practical; my one criticism was that some of the examples used to emphasise the points were a little convoluted, but it wasn't something which detracted from the information presented.