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10 key lessons I learned from reading 40 books last year
Marketing: While we all yearn for virality with our products or ideas, it most likely won't happen. What we can all do is take a more structured approach to spreading our ideas. This is what Jonah Berger offers in 'Contagious.'
He offers an approach to virality by triggering emotions of anger or goodwill. I used this to great effect in a few of my blog posts this year (including 'How Elon Musk might be screwing this up' which generated 10's of thousands of views and vitriolic responses from Musketeers).
You can also trigger emotions by finding a bogeyman that rallies your audience, team or customers. A bogeyman stirs up emotions that provoke action.
For Phil Knight it was Grelle (a classmate runner who always bested Knight) and Adidas when he ran Nike. For Elon Musk it is the incumbent utilities. For Edward Tufte it was bad design. The bogeyman triggers emotions and drives you.
Also read '22 Immutable Laws of Marketing' by Al Ries & Jack Trout and 'Traction' by Weinberg and Mares to add some additional marketing knowledge to your arsenal.
Marketing: I read fiction books almost as much as I read non-fiction. The best fiction books do a great job of character mining; it's how they get us to feel what the character feels and live the journey of the protagonists.
My character mining fixes this year came from reading 'Say You're One of Them' by Uwem Akpan and 'Swing Time' by Zadie Smith. When you truly understand people (your customers) you empathize at a level that allows you to tell their stories (and truly meet their needs).
To learn how to tell stories I also read 'Writing Fiction for Dummies' by Ingermanson and Economy.
I found the next layer of understanding, communicating with people, in the most unlikely of places by reading '30 Million Words' by Dana Suskind, which is all about building a child's brain through conversation. It provides a structure for how we ensure, even as adults, that we listen more than we speak through asking the right questions. We all need that.
I also reread 'And Then There Were None' by Agatha Christie, one of the most well-written novels ever. And millions of people agree. Without giving away the plot, for fear of the ire of the few who haven't read this, the business lesson here is that the combination of a well laid-out plan based on a strategy that understands the very nature of people is plain murderous.
I also threw in 'Tribes' by Seth Godin. What's a year of reading about marketing without a Seth Godin book? I chose to go with an oldie but a goodie.
Design: Edward Tufte is a legend in the world of visual information display, and the folk at Duarte, who created Slidedocs, are his esteemed students. 'Resonate' by Nancy Duarte is, unsurprisingly, a well laid out book that presents a new way to think about slides and presentations.
I'm not a designer (far from it) but between this book and Edward Tufte's 'Visual Display of Quantitative Information', I created Utility Digest, a breathe of fresh air in a staid industry. Looking at things differently and conveying the information in a different and simpler way makes it more accessible to a wider audience. Something that my industry, the utility industry, sorely needs.
I also read a few books on design including 'Design Is How It Works' by Jay Greene, 'Design: The Definitive Visual History' (which you actually browse), 'Change by Design' by Tim Brown and the 'Little Black Book of Design' by Adam Judge — as there is a convergence between design thinking and the utility industry that I need to get familiar with.
Trends: What Rohit Bhargava does in 'Non-Obvious 2016' I like to call futurecasting; it’s like weather forecasting but for future business trends. In the 2016 edition of his recurring series of books, Bhargava correctly predicts a few trends that came to define 2016.
My favorites were Small Data and Engineered Addiction. These books speak to always having an eye for where your industry is going so that you can discover the business opportunities inherent. But the trends start on the fringes.
Diving into fringe analysis meant reading 'Small Data' by Martin Lindstrom. In a world beset with big data Lindstrom suggests that we can draw great business insights from truly understanding what makes the individual tick. Using examples from his travels across the world, he describes the simple but meticulous work of consumer research that yields the valuable insights.
I dug deeper into futurecasting by reading 'Superforecasting' by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner and honed in on the art of seeing more and seeing better in 'Visual Intelligence' by Amy Herman.
Innovation: The utility industry is changing (here, here and here). In 'The Grid,' Gretchen Bakke, an anthropologist, lays out the history, the current shaky state and the possibilities for both sustainable and highly profitable businesses to change the landscape of the utility industry.
I re-read 'Understanding Today’s Electricity Market' by Shiverley & Ferrare (several times) because, as they say, to disrupt you have to understand deeply. Also read 'The Colors of Energy' by Kramer, a compilation of essays by industry experts, to learn more. I also read 'How Google Works' by Eric Schmidt, a primer on a culture of innovation.
Trends: I saw Kevin Kelly's keynote at SXSW in 2016 and pre-ordered his book right after the talk. A few months later it was a pleasant surprise when 'The Inevitable' came in the mail. The Inevitable provides a frame with which to assess the advancement of technology, positive and negative.
Kevin Kelly suggests that one of the tasks that our technology platforms will capture value from doing will be to filter on our behalf. What happens when the technology, as we saw over the last few months with politics, filters news because it thinks it isn’t valuable to you, even though it is?
To take the thinking around technology, and the changing landscape of business, a few steps further read Steve Case’s 'The Third Wave,' 'The Master Algorithm' by Pedro Domingos, 'The Shift' by Lynda Gratton, and 'Big Bang Disruption' by Larry Downes and Paul Nunes.
Self-Improvement: About halfway into 'Mastery' by Robert Greene I decided what I would get better at this year, the thing I had already put my 10000 hours into, was writing. Suffice to say, my blog posts have gone from a few hundred views to a few hundred thousand views and shares in just one year.
I’m far from mastery (my sentences still run on) but I’m learning and improving and taking as much I can from the journey. But I also learned that the 10,000 hours concept is now misleading folk. It’s not a destination. It’s just a point along the journey.
I paired this book with great career advice piece from Scott Adams of Dilbert Fame.
I put 'The Excellence Habit' by Vlad Zachary on this list less because of the quality of the book but more because of the message and how the attainment of mastery is tied to habit. It’s not based on any scientific evidence but Zachary suggests that excellence can be developed like a habit and consequently success comes from that. I can buy that — I just wished it had been more, for lack of a better word, thorough. I also read 'Faster, Higher, Stronger' by Mark McClusky.
Operations: 'Sprint' by Jake Knapp, 'Bend The Curve' by Andrew Razeghi, 'Venture Deals' by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelsohn were all helpful in the practical work of helping a lot of founders get through the hard times of building their businesses this year.
The true value from these books was how it brought life to the words on the pages — it allows you to experience the joy of turning around a business or feeling the pain of a founder as she shuts down her venture. It all still boils down to doing the work.
Disruption: Messy. Sometimes disorder wins. And it sucks. Because of its random nature and the inability to predict the next move, we stay fascinated.
This is the premise of 'Messy' by Tim Harford. The line that captures this (and the year for me) was: "the careful commander is disoriented by a more impetuous opponent." It should be every startup’s mantra as it faces the incumbents in its industry.
Personally, I’m pretty intellectually messy, engaging in at least 4 different things at any period. This project switching nature is something this book made me feel comfortable about, especially in reaffirming something I've learned, which is that nothing focuses my attention like stepping into unfamiliar ground. If you’re like me, you should get comfortable with that.
Design and Life: I first came upon this concept reading 'Universal Principles of Design' and then in the 'Million Dollar Parrot.' As with a good number of design principles, the Figure-Ground relationship applies to life, career and business.
In our lives, careers and businesses sometimes become the figure issues (daily grind, bank balance, next project to be delivered to the boss, etc.) that we focus on, and we neglect the often more important ground aspects of our lives (lifelong learning, growth, wellness).
This relates to the concept of beauty in 'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi, which might be one of the most impactful books I've read this year. If you haven’t read it, go get it. It’s the beautifully written true story of a young surgeon who finds out about and dies from his cancer in a staggeringly short amount of time.
What he left behind was a family, friends that loved him, and a great book on how we should find our calling and do the work at our hands to our best capacity (and some of that work is in loving our loved ones). Paul Kalanithi came to a quick realization of the Figure/Ground relationships in his life as he faced death.
This book came in handy as I went through periods of self-assessment and, despite not having professional writing experience, paired it with ‘My Memoirs,’ the life story of my grandfather (dictated to my brother) who was an Archdeacon in the Anglican church in Nigeria.
When we live our lives with the figure (e.g. "will I overdraw my account this month?") and ground (e.g. "I haven’t read a book/been to the gym in months!") compositions not properly defined, we get stuck in the life we’ve always had even as we desire to change the state of our finances, careers, and personal relationships. We can’t get more until we personally define what should be figure and what should be ground.
(Also read 'Originals' by Adam Grant if you’re realizing you might be a bit of a non-conformist.)
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