Reading Time: 4 minutes Do you know a company that defies comparison and exists in a category all by itself …. a “Category of One” as author Joe Calloway puts it? Are there common, repeatable features of “category of one” firms? The answer to this question from Joe Calloway’s book is emphatically yes – here are the top nine … More Becoming a Category of One
Reading Time: 8 minutes The pursuit of happiness is built into the very definition of human desire. We treat our future selves as if they were our children, spending most of our waking hours seeking out ways to make them happy. So understanding what does seems pretty important for making decisions today … But do we really know what … More Stumbling on Happiness
Reading Time: 6 minutes What I read this summer Stumbling on Happiness The pursuit of happiness is built into the very definition of human desire. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days… volatilityviewpoint.w… The Inevitable From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, … More What I’m reading summer 2017
Reading Time: < 1 minute A mixture of task & communication checks help manage the problem of proliferating complexity in the modern word – that’s the relatively simple premise of Atul Gawande‘s short, but excellent book on checklists – The Checklist Manifesto. The book is driven mainly from a medical context, that being the author’s background, and centred around the … More Books – The Checklist Manifesto
Reading Time: 5 minutes My beachside reading on the recent winter trip to Australia was the excellent “The Undoing Project” by Michael Lewis. Obviously when it comes to Michael Lewis expectations are high, both for the quality of the writing and depth of the research behind it. This is no exception. Some of the specific elements are familiar but … More Books – The Undoing Project
Reading Time: 3 minutes Hack your own productivity, figure out what works for you As “knowledge workers” we all carry out a wide variety of different cognitive tasks each day: some are repetitive, some are simple but require a high degree of accuracy, some are creative while others involve problem solving or co-ordination of others. Some involve significant willpower … More Four Things I Learnt at Work in 2016
Reading Time: 3 minutes The best book I read over the summer was Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking. The central theme of the book is really fear of, and reaction to, failure. We have an allergic aversion to failure. We try to avoid it, cover it up and airbrush. The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance is the name for the … More Black Box Thinking
Reading Time: 3 minutes After really enjoying Charles Duhigg‘s excellent first book The Power of Habit, it was an easy choice for me to grab a copy of his second book on the way to my holiday, having been given a recommendation from Mitesh. I wasn’t disappointed! Essentially the book looks to explore ways in which we as individuals … More Book review – Smarter, Faster, Better
Reading Time: 3 minutes Feel like I’ve managed to read a decent amount in 2015, as always would like to have read more though! With a bias to non-fiction, here are the 3 the books that really stood out for me in 2015. 1. The Success Equation (Michael Mauboissin) I wrote about this one in more detail here, but … More My 3 Favourite Books of 2015
