Books I Read in 2020

I would like to share with you some of the books I read in 2020. I hope you find some inspiration in this list.

Business Books

Since I am writing on LinkedIn, I will start with Business books.

Loonshots, by Safi Bahcall

Safi Bahcall is an entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in physics. In his book “Loonshots” he tries to apply the principle of physics to innovation in business ventures. The book is inspired by two success stories in recent American history 1) the turnaround of the Bell Telephone Company, led by Theodore Vail, during the first decade of the 20th century, which resulted in the creation of the Bell Labs, 2) and the efforts of Vannevar Bush to improve the technology of the US army during the second world war. 

The author suggests that for an organization to nurture innovation, the following conditions should be met:

- Create phase separation and dynamic equilibrium: to separate the artists, who want to create crazy technology, from soldiers whose discipline ensures that the technology is being implemented efficiently (quality, cost, time). And create a continuous exchange of ideas, information, and people between the two groups (dynamic equilibrium) to allow the transfer of technology from the innovation phase to the implementation phase, and to allow the transfer of field experience to innovators.

- Innovation leaders should be like gardeners: their role is to balance between the two groups and to manage the transfer between them. Not to intervene as soldiers, nor to contribute as artists. Leaders should love their artists and soldiers equally.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions

We make decisions every day. We think that we are, or try to be, rational. The fact is that our emotions play a major role in our decision making. Our rational mind can be easily fooled by our hidden biases. Hidden (cognitive) biases have been gaining more interest among researchers in the last decades. The articles in this book discuss the traps of cognitive biases in decision-making in business, and how to avoid these traps.

Actually, the title of the book should not be about “making smart decisions”, but rather about “not making stupid decisions”. Such nuances are too much for HBR.

Rework, by Freid and Hansson

Rework is a business book that tries to teach you how to start a business and remain in the market. It is based on the experience of the authors in creating and managing a (relatively small but successful) software company. It presents a new way of doing business and gives practical ideas to implement in such a journey.

The Infinite Game, by Simon Sinek

In this book, Simon Sinek differentiates between two types of games in life: finite and infinite. Finite games have agreed-upon rules, a limited number of players, and limited time, like football or chess. In infinite games the rules change all the time, players come and go continuously, and the game never ends. Business, careers, politics, etc. are all infinite games. In a finite game, the goal is to win. In infinite games, the goal is to sustain the game, to keep playing, and avoid being expelled from the game. Once you know the type of game you’re in, you know how to adjust your mindset and tools to play it.

The author argues that for a company to stay in the game, it should not only focus on numbers with a finite mindset. A company should have a just cause to work towards it and motivate people to work towards it. Once people are motivated and feel a sense of purpose in their jobs, they will ensure that the company performs well in the game. The author discusses the social responsibility of the company and disagrees with the approach of Milton Friedman that states that the social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits.

Pandemics

The COVID-19 crisis led me to read the following two books in 2020:

La Peste (The Plague, 1947) by Albert Camus

This novel is a fictional story that sounds very real. Camus did a tremendous job to describe what it means to be a doctor, a civil servant, a journalist, a criminal, a regular human during a severe health crisis.

The Great Influenza (2004) by John Barry

The H1N1 influenza A virus was called the Spanish flu. This is mainly because the Spanish press was reporting about it freely, in contrast to the censored press in the countries involved in world war I. This flu is arguably the deadliest pandemic in history. It happened between 1917 and 1920 with a peak in 1918. The war helped the virus spread by both displacing men between countries, and by censorship that minimized the death reports to maintain morale. The book describes this period in great detail.

When I was reading this book, I heard a president of a European country comforting his people by claiming that the COVID-19 crisis and its context (economic crisis, terrorism) is the worst in modern history. Political dogma aside, we are far better, with our modern technology, than the generation that endured the flu pandemic and WWI. We should expect the worst.

The book was written over 15 years ago. The author, John Barry, warns against the risk of flu pandemic outbreaks that may occur any time. He points out the fragility of the just-in-time supply chain, and the over-optimization of the industries, including the health industry, which makes us poorly prepared in case of a pandemic. 

Nassim Nicolas Taleb - INCERTO

In 2007, in his book “The Black Swan”, Nassim Taleb wrote: “As we travel more on this planet, epidemics will be more acute […]. Once again, I am not saying that we need to stop globalization and prevent travel. We just need to be aware of the side effects, the trade-offs —and few people are. I see the risks of a very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet.” He didn’t mean the COVID-19, he meant a much more dangerous virus.

Two years ago, I read “The Black Swan”. A book about how unexpected extreme events (called black swans) happen and can be disastrous, even if their probability is very low. After they happen, in hindsight, we rationalize them and claim they were predictable. Because we, humans, think that we can understand everything, and find a causality everywhere, even where there is none. The book is a masterpiece and is on my list of books to read again. In 2020 I read the rest of the volumes in Taleb’s INCERTO, and I don’t think that The Black Swan is THE Masterpiece of Taleb. Here is a summary.

Fooled by Randomness

This is the first volume of Nassim Taleb’s INCERTO. It helps you understand the underestimated role of chance in our lives. It tackles the myths of (causal) success receipts. If you follow the morning routing of Jeff Bezos, you may become more disciplined, but it does not guarantee that you will become rich. Life and social interactions are extremely complicated, and one needs to accept randomness as a crucial part of life. This book sets the ground for the impact of extreme random events discussed in the second volume, “The Black Swan”.

Anti-Fragile

I believe that this book, the third volume of the INCERTO, is THE Masterpiece of Nassim Taleb. It gives insights into how to avoid being the victim of Black Swans. I will not add any more comments about it to encourage you to read it.

Skin in the Game

This is the fifth volume of the INCERTO, it discusses a very important topic in society and business: you can’t offer a bonus without a malus. A system that compensates people for their performance without sanctioning them for their malpractice is a corrupted system. “Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice”, says the author. He also says

Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk

when emphasizing the importance of skin-in-the-game in decision-making.

Memoirs

The Ride of a Lifetime, by Robert Iger

Robert Iger was the CEO of the Walt Disney Company from 2005 to 2020. In his book, he tells his story from humble beginnings to global fame. The story gives a lot of insights on what it is like to become and to be a CEO of a big company, and it is pleasant to read. Iger extracts some lessons in leadership from his experience, based on what worked for him and what didn’t work. Some of these lessons are common sense: hire great talent, keep innovating, and take responsibility for your failure. Others are less intuitive. Anyway, what worked for the author might or might not work for others, one must embrace the role of chance in such a context (c.f. the book “Fooled by randomness” by Nassim Taleb for a better understanding). The main takeaway, in my opinion, is that leadership is all about being trustworthy, emotionally aware, able to take bold risks, and not stupid.

Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight

In this memoir, Phil Knight tells his story and that of Nike. In contrast with “The Ride of a Lifetime” which is about the CEO, “Shoe Dog” is about the founder who has more skin-in-the-game. The story is completely different and is very beautiful. Knight tells the story so vividly that it makes you feel the uncertainty, the frustrations, the joy of success, the stress, the regret of stupid mistakes, and the blessing of luck when starting a new company. The book gives insights into innovation, Laissez-faire leadership, and collaboration across cultures.

Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou

This book is not a memoir. It could have been a memoir if the principal character of the story, Elizabeth Holmes, accepted to answer the author’s requests. “Bad Blood” describes a true crime committed by two entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. A crime that involved prominent figures in the US and that hurt tens of talented people. The book describes the traits of poor leadership and the signs of a toxic work environment. It shows the catastrophes that may result from the “halo effect” bias when people trust others solely based on their appearance and tone of voice, for example.

L’Intelligence Artificielle n’existe pas, Luc Julia (in French)

Luc Julia started his career in academic research, then became an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, and ended up in big companies. At the time of writing his book, he was the CTO of Samsung. He is a co-founder of Siri and is actively involved in the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). His book is a sort of Memoir, but also a case for AI. The book title is provocative, “The Artificial Intelligence does not exist”. The author tries to explain what is (what we call) AI today, what are its limitations, and why we should not be afraid of it.

Economics Books

In 2020, I was interested in economics for 2 reasons. 1) we witnessed the early economic consequences of the pandemic. 2) My home country, Lebanon, was hit with the most severe economic crisis since the civil war. I wanted to understand more; I thought economists might have some answers. I discovered that they are a part of the problem.

Economics is too important to be left to economists.

The Big Three in Economics, by Mark Skousen

This book is an introduction to the most influential economic schools and their leaders: Adam Smith with the free market regulated by the invisible hand, Karl Marx with his centralized top-down communist model, and John M. Keynes who believes in the free market with government intervention. The author made a pedagogy effort that renders the book accessible to a wide audience. He is clearly biased toward Adam Smith's ideas. What struck me the most was the childlike naivety of some economic theories and how they are disconnected from the (real) world.

Good Economics for Hard Times, by Banerjee and Duflo

The authors try to answer today's questions based on data and comparative studies. The world is becoming more polarized between (at least) two dogmas, progressives and conservatives. Each camp has a set of beliefs and answers to climate change, immigration, taxes, etc. It is amazing how one can sometimes predict the entire system of beliefs of a person based on his/her opinion on one topic. This book tries to destruct this binary view of the world's problems and to give new insights into them. A better understanding of the problem helps in designing the right policies to tackle it. I enjoyed reading this book, and I would like to share some of my favorite extracts.

The first chapter of the book starts with:

A woman hears from her doctor that she has only half a year to live. The doctor advises her to marry an economist and move to South Dakota.

WOMAN: “Will this cure my illness?”

DOCTOR: “No, but the half-year will seem pretty long.”

In the third chapter, the authors tell the following story:

Stanislas Ulam was a Polish mathematician and physicist […]. He had a low opinion of economics […]. Ulam challenged Paul Samuelson, […] one of the great names in twentieth-century economics, to “name me one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial.” Samuelson came back with the idea of comparative advantage, the central idea in trade theory.

In the sequel, the authors argued that this idea is not trivial but not always true neither!

The book ends with:

 “Economics is too important to be left to economists.”

Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows

This book is not about economics, but I preferred to include it in this list because it answers questions that are very relevant in economics. The author of this book was a scientist at MIT who specialized in system dynamics (which happens to be my field of specialty), and she applied the principles of this science to real-life problems by modeling them as systems. The approach remains at a basic level, with simple yet practical models and solutions. More sophisticated approaches can be found in the work of Nassim Taleb. This “feedback loop” approach should be appreciated by economists to avoid na?ve solutions.

Reflections

In 2020, the world experienced a large-scale stress test. It revealed the fragilities in societies, economies, health systems, values, etc. It also revealed the anti-fragility of digital technology, sustainable businesses, and agile/flexible mindset. The pandemic increased our awareness of the pivotal importance of human interactions (empathy, trust, etc.).

This year, we could appreciate the forward-thinking and clear-mindedness of some leaders and visionaries. Also, we could discover new dimensions of human stupidity. It is unfortunate that, since WWI and great influenza, governments have invested crazy amounts of money on defense/war against other humans (a loose-loose game) that dwarfs the investments in the defense against pandemics.

It is indeed human stupidity, not artificial intelligence, that is the real danger to our future.