Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain, Narrated by Anthony Bourdain. (Read via Audible.com)
In the same tone as Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica, this book is about working in the restaurant industry but on the kitchen side of the equation. I love that Bourdain was completely fired up as he wrote this book. You can just feel the grit in his voice of all the events he has lived through. The stories he has are just unbelievable.
What really made the book is his frankness of telling it how it is. He is right the restaurant business is a dirty business, and cooking is not a glamorous job. In fact it’s 6-7 days a week, 15 hour days. I also loved his complete bashing of the food network. Most of all I loved his stories about the NYC places he worked. I found the Rainbow Room stuff just classic. The Big Foot stories were even better. I get the impression the Big Foot is one of the most influential people in NYC on how restaurants are run because he’s so exacting. I give people like that credit especially that they are so on top of their business, to the point that they know what’s going on down to the cent.
More than anything else… This book is very humbling. Bourdain for all the partying that he did, is a straight shooter. He fully admits he did not make the best choices in the world in life, however he is glad that he has been very lucky. His google talk is a killer to watch as well.
9/10
Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster by Paul Ingrassia, Narrated by Patrick Lawlor (Read via Audible.com)
What a sobering view of the giant industry. This book give a good account of making automobiles throughout history in the USA. It mainly focuses on the big three. What I found that was total flabbergasted me, was the amount of time that all three management teams had to change their fate before their collapse in 07-08. They found cash cows with SUV’s, but did spend any decent abomut time to innovate the rest of their product line. I think of the EV program in the early 90’s that GM did. All the development that went nowhere.
On top of that was the whole UAW thing. Just how Enron took business too far, the UAW took unions way to far. To the point where they were paying people to do nothing everyday. Admittedly I have a severely limited perspective on the entire operations of that group, but from a casual outsider, both management and the union were at fault. They both worked themselves into such absurd long winded terms, I would not be surprised if there was a clause for smoking on the assembly line. Oh wait, there was. For a very long time.
A great piece about the auto industry.
8/10
Behind the Cloud… By Marc Benioff & Carlye Adler, Narraged by Ax Norman (Read via Audible.com)
This is the book about the people behind Salesforce, mainly Marc Benioff’s journey combined with his over a hundred specific points he makes. What I liked was you got to peak inside how this company came up from nothing. The balance of New Concept, Technology, and great marketing is what made the company.
The two tidbits I remember the most was the brilliant little move of spinning the protestors that were outside of a Salesforce conference. He managed to convince a bunch of attendees that those people were paid by him. Also I loved the part about when the site first started having massive uptime issues. Benioff talked about how saying nothing is actually many times worse then being out in the open about major things. (I guess BP still has to learn that lesson)
I am not saying you can’t have secrets. Only that once a major problem directly affects a large number of people dramatically, its better to be honest and open then try to pull a fast one.
The book reads well, however it did feel a tad like propaganda to believe everything too blindly. But since Benioff has such great character, I can’t fault the book too much.
For that
8/10
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, Narrated by Malcolm Gladwell (Read via Audible.com)
It was an impulse buy, and ironically saw it on the bookshelf of a friends house months after I read it.
The basic synopsis of the book is that Gladwell gives another perspective on very successfully people. He raises a few points that in addition to mental capacity that, there are valid external factors that dramatically influenced many famous people. He gives good examples of Bill Gates having surreal access to a computer terminal in high school before most colleges had them. Canadian ice hockey players age cutoff in youth hockey leagues and how that has influenced what time of the year talent comes from.
He also gives good thought to the ‘10,000 Hour Rule.’ The Beatles were a case example. I didn’t know the band’s history at all. Especially how they were able to play gigs more than a thousand times in just a mere few years. And that more than anything, made the group.
This read definitely is one to have on the shelf. Gladwell actually does a good job reading his own book. I can see why he is one of the most popular speakers on the speaking circuit.
8/10
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine By Michael Lewis, Narrated by Jesse Boggs (Read via Audible.com)
I have to say this book was great read. I picked up the book after caching a piece on 60 minutes about the book.
Lewis gives another perspective of the financial industry during its large meltdown caused by the moronic mortgage crisis (Among other things). It was about the people who saw what was coming and bet against the market. They literally cashed in on the ticking bomb of what the market was. Both Greg Lippmann and Michael Burry’s stories were great. How both of them go into the market and figured out a way to buy insurance on these packaged securities. The epic fail at AIG was even better. I couldn’t believe that Joe Cassano managed to burn through 99 billion dollars at AIG over the stuff he was insuring.
I do have to say that Lewis exactly writes the kind of story based non-fiction books that I like. I found it very easy to understand why this big crash happened, and was even more riveted when some of these characters were figuring out what really was going on before everyone else.
This book reminded me that the market is not some machine, but just bunch of people that some are leaders, others are followers both trying to dominate any way they can.
9/10
The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, Narrated by John Farrell (Read via Audible.com)
After reflecting on this book for a few weeks, I am unsure of how I view this book.
Farrell presents the idea of Myelin, and how it antidotally relates to mini mecca’s of talent all over the world at different times throughout history. This book feel like Ken Robinson’s book ‘The Element’ in many ways. Just replace the term element with myelin, and things line up very closely in many ways (but far from exact). That is however why I am on the fence on this book. This book did not present a solid scientific background to the claims that he made in relation to these nerve walls. At least Robinson didn’t try to explain his finding scientifically, but as a interesting point that cannot be ruled out when studying the connections to science from the complex social roll of the dice that happens.
With that, this book does have something to say about skills, and how people learn. That I did find really fascinating and a great read. Especially as he explains the patterns that he has observed and how we can take that information and apply it to real life.
Unfortunately due to the amount sudo-science in this book is the reason why I cannot give this book more that a 6/10 because half of the dam time, he is blabbing on without solid footing for his argument. However I would still recommend the person interested in this subject to read purely due to the case studies of the people he has investigated and his findings (minus the science). He could be right, but I need proof before I will rubber stamp this book.
The Kid Stays in the Picture By Robert Evans, Narrated by Robert Evans (Read via Audible.com)
I picked up this book after an off hand remark by Alex Lindsay on MBW and boy I was not disappointed. This book is definatly one you have to listen to, because boy its good. Robert Evans does a great job narrating his own book. You can just absorb the stories, and his passion for his work. Throughout the book, I could just picture myself being at the meetings, reworking the godfather so it doesn’t suck.
Now this is the kind of hollywood book you just can’t make up. I know we fret about this industry way to much. But unlike most pieces of crap auto-biographies, this one really reads well. You really get a picture of what was going on at paramount studios at the time he ran it.
10/10
Rework by Jason Fried & David Hansson (Read via Physical Book)
I picked up this book as it just came out and I just loved the layout of the book. All of the chapters a series of 2-3 pages at most with pictures illustrating the point that they were trying to make. I loved that there was no business jargon BS in it, where an author spends 600 pages just trying to make one point. These guys, make a number of points based on their own experience. Don’t get me wrong it did have that Tim Ferriss 4 hour workweek feel to it, but I did not find that detracting.
I was more just relieved that this book did not blab on about something useless or worse, some VC’s point of view.
A great quick read, and keep with the physical/pdf version of the book. Believe me I love audible, but the illustrations are just great.
10/10
Marco.org: More ideas than time: Last week's news -
Most news outlets, including TV news shows and networks, newspapers, news websites, and blogs are targeted at news junkies: they never want to miss a story, and they want to be the first to report it to you.
If you look back on these stories even one week later, the majority of them seem…
This is exactly why I watch Frontline on PBS - its the best!.
Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzini (Read via Physical Book)
This book is an extended publication of the early mac developer mailing lists around the mac os 5-6 timeframe. It is just great to read all of the testing and discovering what worked and what didn’t with the creation of the modern user interface.
A few pages just opened my eyes to the way people think. They wanted to ask a user if the screen they were looking at was a color display. You think that would be a straight forward question but it wasn’t. They actually had to go through 5 different iterations of that question to get it right. Just wording a sentence makes all the difference.
Overall what made this book over the top for me was the point of view TOG takes for designing interfaces. Even though this book is 15 years old, most all of the same design principals procedures, to rephrase, how you work to end up with a what we call a intuitive/simple design still matters.
What a fascinating gem, especially so early on in the development of computers. I just love when you just read the excitement and drive these people had over these little periods of time where tons of innovation happened.
9/10