Reading with my daughter, Salma.

This year has been a special year for me. My daughter, Salma, was born on 12/27/18 so my wife and I had a lot to learn as we entered into 2019. Salma is our first child and we are still learning how to take care of her and be the best parents we can be. When I did some research on parenting, I learned that reading to your child is a great way to develop their cognitive abilities. I love to read so this was great news. We've read 13 books in 13 weeks. Each week I took a picture of Salma with the book we read that week. I intend to continue reading with her as she grows. This way, I'll always get to look back at our growth through these pictures.

What follows is the list of books we've read so far and some of my takeaways from them. I hope you find these interesting. Enjoy!

1. Good Strategy Bad Strategy, The Difference And Why It Matters, by Richard Rumlet. 

A good Strategy consists of three elements: A proper diagnosis of the challenge or problem, a guiding policy, and coherent, coordinated actions. 

It is not enough to declare an ambitious goal. That’s not a strategy. I’ve made this mistake as a leader multiple times and have learned from it. One must first truly understand the problem and ask "Why" multiple times to get to the root of the challenge. Once we have a proper diagnosis, one can set a guiding policy or a high level plan for how to address the challenge, and finally come up with coordinated and coherent actions that work well together to execute against the high level plan. These actions must build on top of each other to form a synchronized organization that is aligned and focused on accomplishing your organizational goals.

2. A More Beautiful Question, The Power Of Inquiry To Spark Breakthrough Ideas, by Warren Berger. 

Quote I loved from the book: “Don’t be put off by learning how much you don’t know. That darkness was always out there, surrounding you; you just had no idea how vast it was until you began probing with your question flashlight”.

3. This is Marketing, You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn To See, by Seth Godin. 

From the book, in answering “Is Marketing evil?”:

“I think it’s evil to persuade kids to start smoking, to cynically manipulate the electoral or political process, to lie to people in ways that cause disastrous side effects. I think it’s evil to sell an ineffective potion when an effective medicine is available. I think it’s evil to come up with new ways to make smoking acceptable so you can make a few more bucks.

Marketing is beautiful when it persuades people to get a polio vaccine or to wash their hands before performing surgery. Marketing is powerful when it sells a product to someone who discovers more joy or more productivity because he bought it. Marketing is magic when it elects someone who changes the community for the better...

Just like every powerful tool, the impact comes from the craftsman, not the tool...

For me, Marketing works for society when the marketer and the consumer are both aware of what’s happening and are both satisfied with the ultimate outcome.”

4. Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick J. Deneen. 

By Liberalism, Deneen is not referring to the opposite of conservatism in popular American discourse. Instead, he means the set of principles upon which liberal democracies are built. 

The author writes at length about the weakening of local communities as one of the reasons Liberalism has failed to accomplish what it promised. The following passage describes one way in which this weakening of communities took place:

“More than any other people, Americans have pursued a living arrangement That promotes the conception of ourselves as independent and a part, primarily through the creation of the postwar suburb, made possible by the technology of the automobile. The suburb, however, was not simply the “creation” of the automobile; rather, the automobile and its accessories – highways, gas stations, shopping malls, fast-food chains- permitted a lifestyle that Americans, because of their deeper philosophical commitments, were predisposed to prefer. We find other evidence of such pre-commitments beyond the automobile’s influence, such as the transformation of building styles documented in the architectural historian Richard Thomas’s remarkable 1975 article “From Porch to Patio.” Thomas describes a striking post war transition in house styles in which the front porch, formerly the most prominent feature in the elevation of the house, disappeared in favor of a patio tucked behind the house. He describes the social and even civic role played by the porch – not only offering cooler temperatures and a breeze in the air out before air-conditioning, but providing intermediate spaces, a kind of civil space, between the private world of the house and the public spaces of the sidewalk and street. The front porch, often cited within easy chatting distance of the sidewalk, was an architectural reflection of an era with a high expectation of sociability among your neighbors. The back patio gained in popularity around the same time as the increased use of the automobile and the rise of the suburb – all of which created a build environment conducive to privacy, apartness, insularity, and a declining commitment to social and civic spaces and practices.”

5. Powerful, Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, by Patty McCord. 

Loved this read. The author is the renowned former Chief Talent Officer of Netflix. Some quotes from the book:

Orchestrate the debates you want

“At one point a big disagreement arose between Netflix’s head of marketing and head of content concerning how we thought about our customers. It was developing into a real tussle, because both executives were very strong-minded, and both had good reasons for their views. Reed did a beautiful thing. He arranged a debate between the two, on stage, and chairs facing each other, in front of the rest of the executive team. And the really brilliant twist was that each one had to argue the other’s decide. To prep for that, they really had to get into the other person skin.”

Have an opinion, and be right most of the time 

“There is no problem with people having strong opinions. On the contrary, it’s important that they do and that they argue for them vigorously. However, people’s opinions should always be fact based. Insisting that decision making be fact driven doesn’t detract from the importance of opinions. It just means people are expected to try really hard to make sure theirs are well founded. I often say to executives, ‘Have an opinion; take a stand; be right most of the time.’ Opinions aren’t helpful unless the people who hold them are willing to take a stand in their defense by making a fact-based case.”

On paying talent top dollar, account for the value of working for you

“One day I heard that google had offered one of our folks almost twice his current pay, and I hit the roof. His management panicked because he was a really important guy, and they wanted to counter. I was adamant that there was no way we were going to pay him that much. I got into a heated email exchange with his manager and a couple of VPs where I argued that “Google shouldn’t decide the salaries for everybody just because they have more money than God!” We bickered about it for days, even through that whole weekend. They kept telling me, you don’t understand how good he is! I was having none of it. But then I woke up on Sunday morning and said to myself oh! Of course! No wonder Google wants him. They’re right! He had been working on some incredibly valuable personalization technology, and very few people in the world had his expertise in that area. I realized that his work with us had given him a whole new market value. I quickly fired off another email. “I was wrong, and by the way I went through the P&L and we can double the salaries of everybody in this team, and it’s really fine.” This experience changed our thinking about compensation. We realized that for some jobs we were creating our own expertise and scarcity, and rigidly adhering to internal salary ranges could actually be harming our best contributors financially because they could make more elsewhere. We decided that we didn’t want to use a system where people had to leave to get paid what they are worth. We also encourage our people to interview regularly. That was the most reliable and efficient way to find out how competitive our pay was.”

6. Poor Economics, A Radical Rethinking Of The Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. 

This was an incredible book about poverty and how to combat it. Something I found interesting was how much humans, rich and poor, have in common. Misinformation affects the way those living in poverty think about health which in turn affects their ability to get out of poverty, but based on our current political climate, misinformation affects us living in rich countries too. The recent measles outbreak in Washington is a prime example of this. 

This passage illustrates how beliefs that are held by those who are misinformed, at no fault of their own, live in worse conditions than those who are armed with education or accurate information. 

“Faith, or to use the more secular equivalents, a combination of beliefs and theories, is clearly a very important part of how we all navigate the health system. How else do we know that the medicine that we were prescribed will make the rash better and that we shouldn’t apply leeches instead? In all likelihood, none of us has observed a randomized trial where some people with, say, pneumonia were given antibiotics and others were offered leeches. Indeed, we do not even have any direct evidence that such a trial ever took place. What assures us is a believe in the way drugs get certified by the food and drug administration FDA or it’s equivalent. We feel – sometimes wrongly, given the financial incentives to manipulate medical trials – that an antibiotic would not be on the market if it had not gone through some kind of reliable trial; we trust the FDA to make sure the antibiotic is safe and effective.

The point is not at all to imply that our decision to trust doctors’ prescriptions is wrong, but rather to underscore the fact that a lot of beliefs and theories for which we have little or no direct evidence contribute to that trust. Whenever this trust erodes for some reason in rich countries, we witness backlashes against conventionally accepted best practices. Despite the continuous reassurance by high-powered medical panels that vaccines are safe, there are a number of people in the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, who refuse to immunize their children against measles because of a supposed link with autism. The number of measles cases is growing in the United States, even as it is declining everywhere else. Consider the circumstances of average citizens of a poor country. If people in the west, with all the insights of the best scientists in the world at their disposal, find it hard to base their choices on hard evidence, how hard must it be for the poor, who have much less access to information? People make their choices based on What makes sense to them, but given that most of them have not had rudimentary high school biology and have no reason, as we saw, to trust the competence and professionalism of their doctors, their decision is essentially a shot in the dark.”

7. The Culture Code, The Secrets Of Highly Successful Groups, by Daniel Coyle. 

This was one of the best books I’ve read on company and team culture. The Culture Code outlines how teams and organizations can build culture that leads to exceptional success. The author interviews senior leaders and founders from the world’s most successful organizations including the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six, IDEO, Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, Zappos, Shake Shack, and even the Pink Panthers who are a group of jewel thieves(interesting one- I know). Daniel shares that the secrets to the cultures of these organizations are 1. Building Safety, 2. Sharing Vulnerability, and 3. Establishing Purpose. 

On Sharing Vulnerability, Daniel writes the following: 

“Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains. And as with building muscle, the first key is to approach the process with a plan. With that in mind, here are a few workout ideas, for both individuals and groups:

1. Make sure the leader is vulnerable first and often. 

As we’ve seen, group cooperation is created by small, frequently repeated moments of vulnerability. Of these, none carries more power than the moment when a leader signals vulnerability. As Dave Cooper says, [I screwed that up] are the most important words any leader can say. 

I saw a vivid example when I watched restaurateur Danny Meyer run one of his morning meetings with his staff(about twenty people). Meyer, whom we’ll meet up close in Chapter 15, is the founder of Union Square Cafe, Shake Shack, Gramercy Tavern, and a number of other restaurants that together are worth more than a billion dollars. The night before my visit, he had delivered his first-ever TED Talk. The staff meeting began with the group watching a video of Meyer’s speech. Then the lights went up, and Meyer spoke. [Can you see my leg shaking?] he asked the group. [I was so nervous, I was shaking like a leaf. I’ve given a lot of speeches, but the TED people wanted something more, something deeper and thoughtful. So I slept about three hours the night before, which is why I have those bags under my eyes. We had a terrible rehearsal, and I kept screwing up the PowerPoint. So it was almost a complete shit show. Except that I’m lucky enough to have some absolutely brilliant help.] He paused and pointed. [Thanks, Chip and Haley. They made the whole thing work. They wrote great stuff, gave me great advice, and kept me together.] Everyone looked at Chip and Haley and gave a short round of applause while Meyer looked on approvingly. 

Meyer delivered the message - I was scared - with steadiness, confidence, and comfort that underlined the deeper message: It’s safe to tell the truth here. His vulnerability isn’t weakness; it’s his strength.”

Other ways to build group vulnerability in the book include:

• Over-communicate expectations
• Deliver the negative stuff in person
• When forming new groups, focus on two critical moments: 1. The first moment of vulnerability in the group and 2. The first moment of disagreement. 

These small moments are doorways to two possible group paths: Are we about appearing strong or about exploring the landscape together? Are we about winning interactions, or about learning together? At those moments, people either dig in and become defensive and start justifying, and a lot of tension gets created or they say something like [Hey, that’s interesting. Why don’t you agree? I might be wrong, and I’m curios and want to talk about it some more.] What happens in that moment helps set the pattern for everything that follows. 

• Listen like a trampoline
• In conversation, resist the temptation to reflexively add value- Let people share. 
• Use candor-generating practices like retrospectives and red teaming where the team openly asks questions like what were our intended results? what were our actual results? what caused our results? What will we do the same next time? What will we do differently?
• Aim for candor; avoid brutal honesty. Giving honest feedback is tricky, because it can easily result in people feeling hurt or demoralized. One useful distinction, made most clearly at Pixar, is to aim for candor and avoid brutal honesty. By aiming for candor - feedback that is smaller, more targeting, less personal, less judgmental, and equally impactful - it’s easier to maintain a sense of safety and belonging in the group. 
• Embrace the discomfort
• Build a wall between performance review and professional development 
• Use flash or rapid mentoring 
• Make the leader occasionally disappear

8. Leadership and Self-deception, Getting out of the box, by The Arbinger Institute. 

What a powerful and engaging book this was. I highly recommend it. It’s told as a story about a senior leader’s on-boarding to his new role. One of the concepts that comes up frequently in the book is “being in the box”. Being in the box is bad. Someone is in the box when they are in a negative place towards another person. They see others less as people and more as objects. They don’t care about others, and only see their faults. When someone is in the box, they blame others instead of helping them. We all get in the box from time to time. It’s easy to get in the box when someone else is in the box as well. Once in the box, we look for justification to stay in the box. The book is about how to get out and stay out of the box. 

Here is a short story from the book about how being in the box causes us to be blinded to others’ positive actions and continue to blame them- indicating that it’s all on us, and it’s all about our mindset. 

“Let me answer those questions by telling you something that happened about a year ago in this situation with Bryan(my irresponsible son). On a particular Friday night, Bryan asked if he could use the car. I didn’t want him to use it, so I gave him an unreasonably early curfew time as a condition- a time I didn’t think he could accept. ‘Okay, you can use’, I said smugly, ‘but only if you’re back by 10:30.’ ‘Okay, mom’ he said, as he whisked the keys off the rack. ‘Sure.’ The door banged behind him. I propped myself down on the couch, feeling very burdened and vowing that I’d never let him use the car again. The whole evening went that way. The more I thought about it, the madder I got at my irresponsible kid. I remember watching the 10 o’clock news, string over Bryan the whole time. My husband, Steve, was home, too. We were both complaining about Bryan when we heard the squeal of tires in the driveway. I looked at my watch. It was 10:29. And you know what? In that moment, when I saw the time, I felt a keen pang of disappointment. Now think about that for a minute. That night, I would have told you that the thing I wanted most was for Bryan to be responsible, to keep his word, to be trustworthy. But when he actually was responsible, when he did what he said he’d do, when he proved himself trustworthy, was I happy? No. I was still irritated and may have even gotten after him for squealing the tires. After he came in the door- having made it in time, mind you- rather than thanking him, or congratulating him, or acknowledging him, I welcomed him with a curt, ‘you sure cut it close, didn’t you?’. Notice- even when he was responsible, I couldn’t let him be responsible. I still needed him to be wrong. I would have told you at the time that I wanted a responsible son, but is that really what I wanted most? No. When I’m in the box, there is something I need more than what I think I want most. And what do you think that is? What do I need most when I’m in the box? What I need most when I’m in the box is to feel justified. Justification is what my box eats, as it were, in order to survive. And if I’d spent my whole night,-‘d really a lot longer even than that, blaming my son, what did I need from my son in order to feel justified to feel right? I needed him to be wrong. In order to be justified in blaming him, I needed him to be blameworthy."

The message from the story is powerful. When we are in the box(in a negative mindset) towards someone, even though we tell ourselves we want solutions to our problems, what we really want is justification to be in the box. Though we think we want people to improve, we really want them to give us a reason to feel justified in being upset or unhappy with them. Getting out of the box takes recognition that we are in the box in the first place and requires us to reflect deeply on whether we are really trying to get out of the box or are simply colluding in giving each other reason to stay in the box.

9. Sprint, How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, by Jake Knapp. 

This book was very prescriptive and had plenty of examples on how the Google Venture’s team tested ideas and solved challenges very quickly. The key was to place an artificial hard time limit on yourself and your team and clear your calendar for 5 days in which you fully focus on one single daunting challenge. Once solved, you move on to the next challenge. In sprint, it’s recommended that you start by defining a big problem(the harder the better), form a cross-functional team, clear the team’s calendar for the entire work week (M-F), work from a single conference room together for the whole week by starting with the goal(Monday), Sketching or creating multiple solutions(Tuesday), deciding which approach to go after(Wednesday), prototyping your solution(Thursday), and testing your solution in real life(Friday). It’s amazing what teams can do in just 5 days!

10. Hacking Growth, How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success, Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown. 

This book was intense! So much good content. It is a playbook on Growth Hacking. The author shares how growth teams at today’s start-ups and fast growing companies(Facebook, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Lyft, etc) identify their growth levers, run experiments frequently, apply successful experiments across the board to grow acquisition and activation, improve customer retention, and optimize for monetization. Think of the growth hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean Startup did for product development and scrum did for productivity. Highly recommend for any leader focused on growth!

11. The Anatomy Of Peace, resolving the heart of conflict, by The Arbinger Institute. 

Even during times of war, one can wage war with a heart of peace or a heart of war. The authors use the example of Saladin to emphasize how he treated even his enemies in war with compassion and care. The point is when we are trying to resolve a conflict, whether personal, professional, or political, it all depends on our state of mind and whether or not we can adjust that state of mind. We cannot fully resolve a conflict until we see the people we are in conflict with as people with their own feelings and aspirations. This applies even when we are having the toughest conversations too. Everything we do can be done either with a heart at peace or a heart at war.

12. The Outward mindset, seeing beyond ourselves- how to change lives and transform organizations, by The Arbinger Institute. 

The lessons in this book are very simple to understand, but are difficult to apply. 

When attempting to change a relationship or an organization’s collective mindset: 

Nothing improves “until one person is willing to make the first move and turn outward without any assurance of what others would do. 

While the goal in shifting mindsets is to get everyone turned toward each other, accomplishing this goal is possible only if people are prepared to turn their mindsets toward others with no expectation that others will change their mindsets in return. “ 

That is so powerful! The authors continue “.. This capability - to change the way I see and work with others regardless of whether they change - overcomes the biggest impediment to mindset change: the natural, inward-mindset inclination to wait for others to change before doing anything different oneself. 

This is the natural trap in organizations. Executives want employees to change, and employees wait on their leaders. Parents want change in their children, and children wait for the same in their parents. Spouses wait on change in each other. Everyone waits. So nothing happens. 

Ironically, the most important move in mindset work is to make the move one is waiting for the other to make. The most important move consists of my putting down my resistance and beginning to act in the way I want the other person to act. The main goal of any effort to change mindset should be to equip people to change their own mindsets even when others are not yet ready or willing to change for theirs. 

This kind of unilateral change is the essence of true leadership. Unfortunately, those who make this move are too rare. People tend not to make this move precisely because the inwardness of those with whom they are engaged gives them all the justification they need to stay inward themselves.” 

“Remember, the principle to apply is: As far as I am concerned, the problem is me. I am the place to start. Others’ responses will depend mostly on what they see in me. The most important move is for ME to make the most important move.” 

Let’s change ourselves regardless of how others decide to act, and eventually, others will change. This is how we can change mindsets at scale. It always starts with us.

13. Factfulness, Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world- and why things are better than you think, by Hans Rosling. 

Factfulness is the stress-reducing habit of carrying only the opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. 

“When asked simple questions about global trends- what percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school- we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, investment bankers, and Nobel laureates.”

“It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.” 

The author shares with us ten reasons we have a systematically incorrect understanding about the world we live in. 

The ten reasons presented are: 

The gap instinct, the negativity instinct, the straight line instinct, the fear instinct, the size instinct, the generalization instinct, the destiny instinct, the single perspective instinct, the blame instinct, and the urgency instinct.

They are all extremely interesting. The Gap instinct, for instance, covers how most of us believe there is a gap between the “developing world” and the “developed world” to the point where we believe that most of the world’s population lives in poverty. We see the world as the West and The rest. Of course there are extremes at each end of the spectrum when it comes to economic growth of countries- there are countries that are in poverty on one end and wealthy nations on the other end, but what we often forget is that there are many countries in the middle of the spectrum. In fact the vast majority of the world’s population today lives in middle-income countries. That doesn’t mean we need not worry about those living in poverty, but it does mean we have to be realistic and celebrate the fact that everything we are doing IS working. Progress is being made. We can and should be optimistic about the world as there is so much that is in our control and we have the data that demonstrates that things have been getting better. 

Some fun facts: 

• In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost been cut in half. 
• In the last 100 years, the number of deaths per year from natural disasters has decreased to less than half. 
• 80% of the world’s 1-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease.
• 80% of the world’s population has access to some electricity. 

The world is getting better on almost all metrics. Keep up the good work, everyone!

This concludes the list for the first quarter of 2019. I hope you find this list useful and a bit entertaining. Which of these books have you read? What books do you recommend we read in the future?