What I read in 2019

Continuing with my new habit of summarizing the books I read during the year, here's the one for 2019. Looking forward to expanding this list to new topics and more books in 2020!

If you have any suggestions on interesting books, please share!

The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It by Marty Makary MD

After getting charged 5+ times more for the medication I usually buy, I got curious and dug into how healthcare insurance worked. A friend suggested I read this to get a better idea on the US healthcare system. This was an eye-opening book for me. We all hear about the rising cost of healthcare, but few of us really know the components of the cost structure. Dr. Makary, Johns Hopkins Medical Center surgeon, highlights predatory practices such as the overmedication and unnecessary procedures, price gauging, notoriously inflated hospital charges (some are marked up 23 times higher than Medicate prices for the same exact service), lack of transparency in bills, and sad collection methods driving patients to bankruptcy. Dr. Makary gives many examples across the US thanks to his on the ground research. The section on how less known but loads of middlemen drive costs to insane levels was the most interesting to me.

“How did medicine transform from a charitable profession to one that has put one in five Americans into collections for medical debt?”

There’s so much room for innovation but heavily guarded by incumbents who extract unfair and massive value from patients. Despite that, there’re companies that brought a decent amount of transparency to medicine such as GoodRx. Dr. Makary also shares some of his suggestions on how to implement processes to alleviate the negative impacts of bad practices. This should be required reading in the US.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis 

I like reading books on the science of decision making with hopes to limit my irrationality ;-) Michael Lewis does a fantastic job of telling the story of years of friendship between two remarkable geniuses, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), and their ideas and work on the decision-making theory. As expected, Lewis’ journalism and storytelling is enjoyable. There are engaging stories of their deep collaboration and detailed descriptions of their research (in plain language) on many cognitive biases such as framing, representativeness, anchoring, loss aversion, endowment effects, availability, and conditionality heuristics. It’s not one of those prescriptive books on “mental models” or list of biases. I like the focus on how and why decision making is not perfect. This is well captured by Tversky:

"We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.”

Other lines I really liked:

“No one ever made a decision because of a number – They needed a story”.

“People predict very little and explain everything.”

“Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.”

Digital Resilience: Is Your Company Ready for the Next Cyber Threat? by Ray Rothrock

I got this book at an event where Ray presented growing cybersecurity threats to our investor. This has been a growing problem in the world i. DDoS, viruses, malware, ransomware, phishing, etc. Some claim that the third world war is already going on but in cyber – “At present, NATO doesn’t define cyber attacks as a clear military action.” Check here current DDoS attacks among countries. Some of us already fell victim to well-known attacks (Target, Equifax, etc.) in the past few years. Ray starts with the Target breach affecting 70m customers in 2013 and explains how Target failed to manage the breach. Ukraine-based Intruders entered their system on Nov 12, 2013. Internal team alerted on Nov 20, 2013. Second alert sent on Dec 2, 2013. Internal investigation began on Dec 12, 2013. Finally removed malware on Dec 15, 2013. It took 2 months for Target to fix the problem while intruders figured out how to access the customer data! Scarier part was that it all started because of a phishing email to one of Target’s vendors, a small refrigeration contractor. Cybersecurity is a fairly complicated area. Almost all companies focus on stopping network penetration, but don’t have any plan what happens if they got breached - “Resilient networks are those that quickly identify and limit the activities of unauthorized actors.” No company is impenetrable. This is not a technical book but has recovery & continuity strategy suggestions to non-technical folks to build resilient companies.

Quench: Beat Fatigue, Drop Weight, and Heal Your Body Through the New Science of Optimum Hydration by Dana Cohen MD, Gina Bria

I’m sure most of us heard of the conventional wisdom of 8 glasses of water per day to get hydrated. This book explains the logic behind that and why you need to do more than just chugging down water i.e. absorption. Considering 65% of our bodies are water (we can survive 2 months without food, but die in 3-4 days without water), we need to pay attention to get properly hydrated or else i.e “Chronic headaches, brain fog, fatigue, weight gain, insomnia, gut pain, autoimmune conditions”. Book highlights the chronic dehydration problem in our society (more than half is dehydrated) and reasons for it such as diets with processed food, indoor environments, stress, immobility. It then dives into the concept of “gel water” and “fascia”, our irrigation system of connective web of tissue that surrounds organs and cells in our bodies and pumps water to our tissues. Then, it concludes with a bunch of recipes. In summary, eat more plants as they contain gel water and help with water absorption, include daily micromovements to trigger fascia to distribute water in the body, and drink enough water. It’s light on science but has some interesting concepts. Could have been way shorter.

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

I came across this when Annie Duke visited Google for a talk. She has an impressive background. She quit PhD on cognitive psychology UPenn, and became a professional poker player and a World Series of Poker champion. It’s an easy and interesting read decision making from the lens of a poker player. Book emphasizes the importance of probabilities in decisions, similar to poker – “every decision is a bet”. Rather than simply categorizing bad or good decisions based on outcomes, she suggests considering a probabilistic approach to evaluate outcomes – thinking in bets. I found similarities to Mauboussin’s focus on process over outcome. Book contains useful frameworks (decision trees, premortems, etc.) to decision making backed up by many interesting examples.

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

I read this while I was at Google. Majority of the book resonated directly with my day to day life there so I really liked it. I heard some didn’t like it as much. This is a book on Google’s culture, management practices, and processes, not how Google technically works or SEO/SEM ;-) There are many useful takeaways for anyone managing innovative technology companies on leading engineering-led organization with deep focus on product and “technical insights”, hiring and review process of “smart creative”, OKRs, communication, and many others. There’s a lot companies can learn from Google on these.

“Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”

“If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.”

“The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.”

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

This book was sitting on my desk for some time. There’s something uninteresting about a book on originals when it’s written by a professor. Prof Grant proved me wrong. This is an engaging and thought-provoking book on creative & original thinking. He uses many interesting examples and detailed stories to show how originality can by nurtured vs nature and how we all could think originally. His tips on strategic procrastination and on dramatically increasing the number of swings resonated well with me: “Quantity is the most predictable path to quality” “But in reality, the biggest barriers to originality is not in idea generation—it’s idea selection”. Overall it’s an entertaining quick read with some interesting examples and stories.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield 

A good friend recommended this. Pressfield is a well-known screenwriter and author. He wrote many novels one of which is the Legend of Bagger Vance. In this book, he shares his experiences and suggestions on confronting “Resistance” with creators in bite-sized essays. Resistance shows itself as procrastination, fear of rejection, etc. It’s a kind of self-sabotage – “It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.” His way of tackling this is daily routine of hard work and dedication which is what you would expect from a professional artist. Final section of the book on Jungian self/ego and other spiritual topics doesn’t seem to be a great fit for the book though. While Pressfield wrote this book for the artists, it has a broad appeal to anyone willing to do something new. It’s a short and simple read.

“If you were the last person on earth, would you still do what you do? There’s no one to impress… The sustenance you get comes from the act itself, not from the impression it makes on others.”

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

I attended an event at Andy Rubin’s Playground where Rosenberg and Eagle were sharing their thoughts on this book and the legendary coach Bill Campbell. Stories were fascinating. After all, Bill was the coach for many Google executives, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and many other prominent technology leaders. You will read many engaging stories & insights from such people in the book. There are also useful management/leadership advices such as how to hold better 1:1s, creating an envelope of trust, focus on team before problems, etc. Book is full of great quotes from Bill and others – “Your title makes you a manager, your people make you a leader.” However, it’s a light on specifics and feels a bit random collection of stories of a great human being. It’d be awesome if Walter Isaacson writes a biography of the Coach.

And Yet...: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

I love Hitchens brilliant and sarcastic way of going contrarian on everything. This is a good collection of his essays on various topics. You will enjoy his witty and eloquent style of writing. His views on Orhan Pamuk, or Gertrude Bell who made Iraq or Hillary Clinton or Che Guevara were all delightful reads. It would have been amusing to have him around today to comment on the current pollical landscape. 

The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

I bought this right before a long flight at the airport. It’s just list of biases with no deep explanations. There are way better books. Avoid this one!