Books, apps, and tools people actually name.

recommends / book

“I know a lot of people on this podcast recommend high-output management, but it should be swap the Bible out for it at all the hotels in the world, in the little drawer. Put it everywhere. You can't go wrong, though. It is an incredible clarity of how to spend your time as a leader, a manager of other people, a very high bar for how evaluating your work as the sum everyone around you. That was very clarifying to me that it's not an individual effort, it is the sum of everything I'm involved in is how to measure it. So that's definitely up there. A nice pair to that book, as a amuse-bouche afterwards, is Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace, I think, is the full exact title by Gordon MacKenzie, which is the story of a illustrator at Hallmark, the greeting card company, and it turns out to be a, again, bureaucratic, slow-moving organization that, over time, added rules and policies and rules and policies and quelled creativity and innovation, which is surprising at a greeting card company, but it existed. So this is his incredibly well-drawn book, as you'd imagine, with beautiful illustrations about how he orbited the hairball of the organization to inspire others, keep himself engaged, and to bring creativity and excitement and trying to pull people off the hairball as he orbited it. So I think it's a fun afternoon read with beautiful illustrations about how to stay sane at big companies and where to be a little goofy and take the advantage and gravity of the hairball, but not be succumbed by it and to be able to orbit it. Those two are really fun. I will say one other one I like... Because we haven't talked about strategy here, there's been more getting stuff done and some other tactical things, but 7 Powers, and I know you had the author recently on, which was awesome. I won't explain the book, you just watch the podcast of it, but it walks through many of the business powers and moats a company can have. I ran into the author...”

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recommends / book

“Gustav Söderström Okay. This is why I try to squeeze in seven into two and three. So if we start on product, I think it's well known, but one that I would recommend product people to read is 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer, and Netflix has used a lot. We use a lot. It's just if you're starting out, it's great to have a strategy framework. No strategy framework is right, but having one is better than none. Gustav Söderström Another in the space of mental models and frameworks, I think, is The Complete Investor by Charlie Munger. So, yes, it's about investment, but really it's a bunch of mental models that he uses. And I think the key takeaway is you have a problem, you should always apply three different models to it because what models do is they simplify and reduce dimensionality. The world has probably infinite dimensions and they reduces to maybe three or four. And the risk with that is you happen to get rid of a really important dimension, maybe pandemic diseases or something. But if you use three models that have different dimensions and was reduced in different ways, statistically, and it comes to the same conclusion, even the second model you apply vastly increases your chances that you're right. So that was a good book to read. Gustav Söderström Then I think if we go outside of product, I'm very interested in just science and mathematics. So a few quick ones. The Mystery of the Aleph, an amazing book. Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli on the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality by David Deutch. The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman on the evolution versus truth and that evolution doesn't optimize for seeing the truth, just for fitness. Gödel's Proof, I think, is an amazing book on his incompleteness theorem, that in any axiomatic systems, there will be true statements that can never be proven, which is a weird thing to think about. And then maybe one of my favorites is The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies that, I think, is lesser known on how information is really just entropy and this concept of information engines, that you can power something by just information and exhaust is also information. That was not a quick list.”

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