Recommends Only the Paranoid Survive.

Transcript context

…First question, what are two or three books you've recommended most to other people? I feel like this is going to be a challenging question, but what comes to mind? It sort of is. The books that I'm... Clayton Christensen's stuff about The Innovator's Dilemma is always solid. Books on strategy that I recommend to other people on... There aren't that many. So, I like Playing to Win by Roger Martin. I really recommend other kinds of books, strategy books. It's easy to get a list of strategy books, but I think you should read biographies and histories. I think the book about Steve Jobs is brilliant. I like books about business leaders. I'd recommend Andy Grove's book Only the Paranoid Survive, and a few others, but I recommend that people read more broadly about people, Rockefeller's histories, it's fantastic. The stuff about Rockefeller and how he put together... Rockefeller was a robber baron and he built an empire and all that, you learn that in school, but what you don't learn in school is he dropped the cost of a gallon of kerosene from $1 to 10 cents. That's the robber baron, and he made kerosene so inexpensive that he drove all the little mom and pop proprietors out of business, which is why they hated him. So, he was a vicious competitor, but he dropped the price of something by an order of magnitude, fascinating. So, it's important to understand stories, not just theories, but stories. I love how this always comes back to just being steeped in history and this specific point about biographies is really interesting, and we'll link to all these books that you're mentioning in the show notes. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.