My top 5 books of 2020
1. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John Barry
The year that went by was a perfect opportunity to read about the other big global pandemic of the past century. This book is a masterful account of the 1918 pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu” that was anything but. It is widely believed that a cook in a military camp in Kansas was the first case of the pandemic that would ravage the world for a year and take an estimated 100-150 million lives.
The reason the pandemic spread across the world was the Great War, which America had finally committed itself to in the face of internal pressure from the war machine and the tipping point caused by an intercepted communication from Germany to Mexico seeking to join hands in taking the war to America. President Woodrow Wilson would send large numbers of the country’s youth into the army, pack them in tight quarters in training camps, and eventually put them on cramped ships to Europe, contributing to the needlessly high death toll. Ironically, Wilson himself would fall victim to the flu while in Paris to negotiate the treaty of Versailles. He would survive but with the severe mental and cognitive issues that would also affect many others hit by the virus.
Perhaps the most astounding aspect of the government’s response in 1918 that resonates today is the complete lack of understanding of the pandemic by the national political leadership at the time and the unwillingness to act decisively to contain the spread with the tools available.
The world did not beat the 1918 pandemic. After claiming lives in every part of the globe - with some rare exceptions such as American Samoa- the virus mutated, turned on itself, and died out. However, as with every crisis, the work of pandemic-era scientists would lead to significant scientific advances, to institutional and policy changes allowing us to prepare better for the next pandemic, and more.
2. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
The story of Netflix’s rise, near death in the late aughts, and spectacular transformation to become a global entertainment powerhouse is the stuff of MBA program case studies. Reed Hastings, credited for having created Netflix with his Co-founder Marc Randolph (whose book That Will Never Work about the early days of Netflix leading up the IPO is a required companion text to this one), talks about the guiding principles by which he leads Netflix today.
The book is creatively structured, with anecdotes from the company’s employees illustrating the many corporate philosophies that makes Netflix the unique company it is today.
As the Founder/CEO of my own technology consulting business, I was able to calibrate our own company culture and practices with the Netflix way of doing things. Even before I had finished reading the book, I had made some changes in my company that were the direct outcome of what I was reading in the book.
Of course, Netflix is a very American, and more specifically, a very Silicon Valley company. Many aspects of the culture may seem counterintuitive to those who work in traditional firms in other countries. The loose rules and high levels of empowerment, the brutally candid feedback culture, the high tolerance for risk-taking balanced by a low tolerance for average performance may all sound unsettling to those who prefer order to creative chaos.
As with other Silicon Valley firms, notably Google (read Lazslo Bock’s Work Rules or Eric Schmidt’s How Google Works), Netflix operates by its own rules of Netflix-ness. The No Vacation Policy, the Keeper Test, Leading With Context, and many other management practices described are radically different from what most individuals experience in traditional corporations. The authors note that the Netflix culture isn’t appropriate for all industries - pointing out healthcare and airlines as examples where compliance with rules and procedures is paramount for ensuring safety.
The book also reflects on Netflix’s many failures, including the near-death experience of a botched transition from DVD rentals to streaming media, and points to how fragile a company’s success really is and how easily it can all crumble due to a single mistake. Just as likely, a company’s success often hinges on unexpected changes in the environment, as we have seen with their windfall gains from skyrocketing subscriptions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As I write this, Netflix is in the early days of a leadership experiment that has been tried and abandoned many times over; the two-CEO model. For a company that has defied conventional management theory and practice and written an entirely new set of rules by which a knowledge economy company must operate, that is an odd decision.
3. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple
As an Indian American, born and raised in Calcutta with an acute sense of the legacy of the British Raj, this book was an astonishing and gripping revelation of the anarchy of the 1700’s, something that more recent history has somehow managed to overshadow. The foundations of Britain’s eventual colonization of India, starting with the East India Company, a simple trading operation that metastatized to become a cancer on India that rapaciously consumed its wealth while laying waste to its people and cultures, is magnificently narrated by Dalrymple, a British historian gifted with a deep scholarship of Indian history and a highly engaging writing ability.
The book answers a simple question: How the hell did a for-profit company end up replacing the wealthy and mighty Mughals to seize control of an entire nation? And what lessons do we take from it for our present and future?
The actions of EIC officials, starting with the brutal and violent Robert Clive (who took his own life later after returning to England), the earnest attempts of Indophile Warren Hastings to restrain the worst instincts of company officials, and the final push by the imperious and megalomaniacal Richard Wellesley are wonderfully researched, and provide us an up-close look at the events through the diaries and papers of contemporary European and Persian historians. We learn of the fight to the finish by Marathas, the southern hold-out by the father-son duo of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, the betrayal and complete humiliation of Mughal emperor Shah Alam (whose grandson Bahadur Shah Zafar’s sad story is beautifully narrated by Dalrymple in The Last Mughal), the backstabbing among Indian provincial rulers and London parliamentarians alike. No one comes off looking good.
The author notes the irony of tables reversed in the current century as western wealth is transferred steadily - and legally - back to India in the ongoing economic power shift. He avoids mentioning the nationalistic backlash that many European nations face against the rampant globalization that has left many jobless and without a future. He does caution against the unchecked power of a new form of the global elite, powerful corporations that wield enormous power through surveillance capitalism and legalized forms of patronage such as lobbying and systemic corruption. The parallels are unmistakable. The wolf is forever at the door, ready to plunder, whether it’s to sacrifice your job to automation and outsourcing or to profit from your digital exhaust. The battle continues.
4. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
This is the fascinating story of Northern Ireland’s struggle with British rule, referred to as the Troubles, covering an arc of 50 years dominated by the violent resistance movement of the IRA. The author has painstakingly researched the events, the characters, and the roots of the sectarian conflict.
During my college years in India in the eighties, IRA bombings in London echoed against India’s own troubles with a separatist movement in Punjab in the north, with the dangerous spillover of the Sri Lankan Tamil separatist movement into the southern states. New Delhi was a city fortified by bunkers and sandbags on the streets. The Punjab separatists had entrenched themselves in the Golden Temple at Amritsar and would eventually be overcome and shot to death by the Indian army. The Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, who ordered the attack, would pay with her life, shot in her own residence by armed Sikh guards. A few years later, her son Rajiv Gandhi would be blown to pieces by a suicide bomber recruited by the Tamil separatists.
The parallels with the IRA’s armed struggle reverberated through my mind as I read the book, unable to put it down as one shocking revelation after another spilled out of its pages. The book brought back my vivid recollections of Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to give in to the hunger strikes by IRA prisoners. The death of Bobby Sands would make him a worldwide name overnight.
The author meticulously dissects the ideologies and motivations of key personalities in the history of the IRA’s violent struggle against the British. Gerry Adams, IRA commander turned politician and Leader of the Sinn Fein party, who would deny any involvement with the IRA in later years despite overwhelming evidence of his personal approvals for a series of hits on suspected informers; the broken McConville family, continuing to seek justice for their mother’s disappearance, decades later; Brendan Hughes, Adams’ trusted lieutenant and frequent executioner of Adams’ orders, who lived in penury and died a broken man in his fifties, betrayed and discarded by his former colleagues; the mercurial Dolours Price and her sister Marian. The sisters, who after being arrested for planting car bombs in London and being handed down long sentences, turned to hunger strikes as a successful protest against British authoritarianism in their homeland, and became unlikely revolutionary icons.
The story is full of twists and tales, too dramatic to be true. And yet, they are. All the characters pay a heavy price, with broken psyches, broken marriages, broken bodies from years of imprisonment, and abuse. Gerry Adams appears to emerge unscathed from it all, retiring from active politics as an elder statesman, reviled and despised by his former IRA colleagues, and dodging the law that repeatedly tries to nail him for the crimes of his youth.
Truth is stranger than fiction, they say. Say Nothing is nothing if not the truth, strange as it may be. The reader is left shaking and shaken at the end. Yet, we know the story doesn’t end there. The IRA paramilitaries from the 70s and 80s haven’t all gone away. Even after the very last one dies, long-suppressed secrets will keep tumbling out into the public. In that sense, the book is merely a chapter in the history of the IRA.
5. A Promised Land by Barack Obama
In 2004, I accidentally bumped into Obama at the top of an escalator at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. He had just been elected to the Senate. I didn’t know much about him, but the way people swarmed towards him at the bottom of the escalator suggested he was extremely popular. Years later, I still recall that brief encounter vividly.
A Promised Land is a special book that tells the story of the initial Obama years. It’s a narrative of important recent events in our living memory. What makes it special is that it is told from the perspective of the man who was at the center of it all.
Obama has a flair for writing and has a unique and original voice. His idealism permeates the book. He continues to see hope in the constant and hopeless partisanship of national politics, in the aspirations of the youth, the work ethic of working-class Americans, and the sacrifices of the men and women of the armed forces.
The 44th President recounts his implausible political career, starting with his odd name and unlikely background through his rise from junior senator to Democratic candidate for President and his landslide victory in 2008. He provides context and perspective on some of his administration’s most important early achievements. He doesn’t shy away from the failures either (such as the Dream Act), choosing to present them in terms of progress towards an eventual success. He comes across as a man committed to getting legislation passed, even if it means having to hold his nose repeatedly and making compromises – whether with his own party members or those of the Republicans. Despite holding the most powerful office in the world for two consecutive terms, he adopts a self-deprecating tone throughout the book and comes across as a man devoted to his family.
The book lays bare the core functioning principle of our political system – the horse-trading that is required to pass any kind of legislation, even if your party controls the White House, the Congress, and the Senate. The detailed descriptions of his foreign policy negotiations, along with the historical context of the specific region or country and the profile sketches of other world leaders, bring life to an otherwise tedious read (at 700 pages, it took me nearly a month to finish.) My favorite chapters are about how Obamacare was passed, the decision-making process to extend crucial support to pro-democracy activists during the Arab Spring, and the final chapter on the Navy Seal mission that took out Bin Laden.
With the benefit of hindsight, Obama acknowledges the gathering forces of nationalism across the world and in our own country. He observes the inability of a large part of the nation to come to terms with its first black President, the disruptive rise of the Tea Party movement, and yes, how a real estate developer and reality TV showman starts gathering national attention on an unlikely platform - birtherism.
For all its shortcomings, we may look back on the Obama years as the last time there was a genuine attempt at a bi-partisan approach to policymaking. Much has changed since he left office. In our current hyper-partisan environment, many will choose not to read this book. They would be missing out on a valuable history lesson from a charismatic and well-read President with a remarkable legacy.
(visit my Good Reads page for detailed reviews of all my books from 2020)