10 Books that Made Me Smarter
Embracing a beginner’s mindset:
In 2019, I recommitted to lifelong learning—through books, experiences, and expert advice. It opened up more growth than relying on my own experience alone ever could.
Well, technically, these are 10 books that made me smarter in 2019. That’s the year I took the leap from a lengthy career in experience-based retail to be a subject matter expert turned product director for a retail technology start-up. That year, I met many smart people as I traveled from Seattle to San Francisco, to Brisbane, to Beijing, to London and back. They shared with me their favorite picks to bring me up to speed, with new skills, perspectives, and industry know-how. 6 years and marketing leadership roles at 3 retail technology start-ups later, I found this Medium article I posted and wanted to repost it here.
From 2019:
Heading into the new year I’m reminded of an entrepreneur I caught up with over the Holidays who claimed he was done reading books, relying instead on his own career experience for insight and perspective. Say what? I was utterly confounded by the notion. To stop reading is to stop learning, and that seems like a pretty ridiculous idea.
Indeed, 2019 provided me with the exact opposite reality. Completely transformed in my way of thinking by Chris Gathard’s deeply funny take on trying new things with reckless abandon in Lose Well, I decided I needed to become a better student. I started throwing myself into an array of new (and often extreme) learning environments. I found myself in chokeholds training Brazilian Jiujitsu with law enforcement officers, to enrolling at MIT Sloan focusing on Fintech with zero formative background in the field. I wore a white belt, both literally and figuratively, everywhere I went.
As a new, self-proclaimed beginner in all things, I began to attract a lot of smart advice in my life. It turns out when you finally cut the bullshit and accept education as a lifelong pursuit, you discover just how many people around you have something of value to teach. This past year my colleagues from all over the world gave me a ton of good reads and all on a myriad of subjects ostensibly specific to my own career interests. Nonetheless, I’ll share my favorites here with you, in hopes that I somehow pay these pearls of wisdom forward:
THE WORKPLACE
The Lean Start Up: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses | Eric Ries
Perhaps the most indispensable yet accessible introduction to Agile product development, The Lean Start Up collected dust on my own bookshelf for years. What lies within, however, is a prescription for A/B tests, 2-week sprints and iterative releases to overcome an affliction of long-winded and costly projects based on scatter-shot assumptions. It’s a critical read for any leader in any organization large or small, old or new, seeking formative performance gains by treating their business more as an ongoing experiment — and less like a fixed model.
Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate | Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney
Launching new technologies ahead of their time comes with its own set of challenges, as consumer adoption can take a while. Play Bigger not only offers some novel approaches for product innovation, but more so how to create a better narrative around innovation so that consumers can see how it meets the needs they didn’t even know they had. Anyone responsible for the strategy and timing of deploying new ideas should read this.
Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success | Adam Grant
Professor and organizational psychologist at Wharton, @AdamMGrant is easily one of my favorite sources of insight related to the workplace. The basic message of this book, that giving more and helping others results in both greater team and individual success, on its face seems like a truism. But with so many detailed studies, it’s heartening that the evidence is there for those who do favors and see the potential in others. They gain better networks, reputations, and success in the end. For anyone jaded by the notion that ‘nice guys finish last,’ there are some great tips in here on how better to focus time toward smartly helping others.
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win | Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
‘No bad teams, only bad leaders’ is a helpful maxim from this book. As SEAL trainers, the authors offer an account from Basic Underwater Demolition’s hell week, where the most physically and mentally strong soldiers are pushed to their very limits. In this punishing environment, crews paddling and carrying 200lbs rafts in a seemingly endless cycle of races compete against each other for the first-place position. Interestingly, when leaders of consistently winning crews were reorganized to head crews who were lagging or outright loosing, those teams underwent a transformation — even miraculously taking the leading position from behind. Point being, be wary of assuming that success is just the luck of having the ‘right team.’
Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal | Oren Klaff
It doesn’t matter what you say, it’s how you say it — and who says it. This is a really fun book from a Wall Street/Silicon Valley venture capitalist who espouses the very same behavior I’ve seen myself in the most effective sales pitches. Though, here he deconstructs otherwise complex decision making into basic categories, or ‘frames’ (e.g., power, authority, strength, information or status). This is a quick and helpful read for anyone like me naive enough to think we’re persuaded by overly complex ideas; people still make snap decisions based on basic needs.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams |
Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, Nate Walkingshaw
This is not the easiest read, but like the Handbook for the Recently Deceased from Beetlejuice, it’s quintessential to navigating the life of a product manager. Draw three intersecting circles like a Venn Diagram — User experience, tech development, and business objectives — and put ‘Product Manager’ smack dab in the center. This is a textbook really, something to return to: How should a Kanban Board be organized? What’s a good release schedule? Am I pushing the envelope or just pushing pixels?
CHINA
The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower | Michael Pillsbury
A direct result of critical research done for the CIA, this book has (for better or worse) provided much of the guiding principles behind the current US approach toward China relations. At the heart of the most comprehensive summary of statecraft, only the most engaged policy wonks may fully appreciate that cultural distinction that few Americans understand — deception versus cleverness. It’s a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of current Sino-American affairs.
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order | Kai-Fu Lee
Take it from tech-rockstar Kai Fu Lee, whose career spans leadership positions at Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Silicon Valley may have the jump on autonomous vehicles, but with a pro-tech government and culture more inclined to give up personal data in exchange for convenience, China is poised to lead the new AI economy. Indeed, the value of this book as ‘AI for beginners’ is to think bigger than self-driving cars and consider all the areas in which the online and offline worlds are merging.
Technology for the Wine Industry
At Everledger, I needed to upskill around wine to go to market with an authentication solution.
WINE
The Juice: Vinous Veritas | Jay McInerney
Unless you’re an exceptional sommelier or an independently wealthy enophile with way too much time on your hands, it’s unlikely that you know anywhere near as much about wine as Jay McInerney. His stint as the wine writer for The Wall Street Journal seems likely a passion project as he’s already a celebrated American novelist, but as such the journey this book takes through each appellation, varietal and vintage is as informative as it is beautiful. McInerney spends a good deal of time on new world wines and if you’d like to glean both an education and bragging rights about American wine culture, it’s all in here.
Wine Wars: The Curse of the Blue Nun, the Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists | Mike Veseth
How can it be that a bottle of California red blend costs $50 from the acclaimed Stag’s Leap Estate, $20 from Robert Mondavi and $2 from Charles Shaw? From the illusion of choice on the wine wall to the changing landscape winegrowers face with global warming and a growing export market into China, Professor of Economics Mike Veseth unveils the true nature of the industry with a few startling predictions for its future. This is a great book to either understand the modern supply chain from grapes to the table, or just serve as a guide to getting a great wine at a reasonable price.
