Book Reviews - 2019
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries
I will admit, this was a difficult book to stay focused on. The subject is interesting but the presentation is a little dry. Agile being the word of the decade, all of us in the tech world are familiar with the basic concepts of the book - minimum viable product, constant iteration, and capturing the right metrics are critical for any successful product. In the first few chapters of the book , Eric Ries walks us through many examples of failed startups, and the principal reason for the failures were not understanding the customer's needs, attempting to solve a problem that does not exist or releasing a final product without iterative development to incorporate the customer's feedback. All the anecdotes emphasize on the Build-Measure-Feedback loop to deliver a sustainable product. To persevere in the same direction or pivot to a new path based on this iterative loop is most critical.
Of the numerous product development stories in the book, the one I most liked was the design of the Toyota Sienna minivan in 2004. The principal behind designing this minivan was the Toyota way of 'genchi gembutsu' - go and see for yourself. To really understand what an American consumer is looking for in a minivan, the principal design engineer went on a roadtrip across all of continental United States, and large parts of Canada and Mexico. He rented the current minivan model, drove it and interacted with and observed real customers to understand what the average owner of a minivan is really looking for! The results were so dramatic that the 2004 minivan designed by him generated sales that were 60% higher than the 2003 model!
Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age
As a lot of us are stepping into middle age and learning to navigate the challenges and some unexpected upsides of it, this book can be a good resource for what to expect while #midlifing.
The author interviews a number of women who are struggling to cope with the dread of the emptiness left by retirement, their own bodies becoming frail and in a way betraying them, the serious illness of a spouse or being a caregiver of aging parents. All the examples are relatable and very honest, and Mary Pipher, a clinical psychologist, does not attempt to offer solutions to every difficult situation. Her characters are real and do fail at becoming models of overcoming adversity. Some of them are actually quite stubborn, such as the woman who is unable to accept retirement as a choice even at 65 although it is impacting her relationship with her well meaning husband because she is afraid of losing the only identity she has ever known. The author herself has to cope with losing dexterity in one of her hands and describes how she has to learn new ways of doing things- she now has to get down to the ground to play with her baby grandchild. There is another woman, who after losing her husband, to a very quickly growing and aggressive cancer, is thrown into this vacuum which she describes as 'If you are walking through hell, keep walking'. But in describing all of this, the author shines in lines like this which beautifully explain why suffering is necessary - "Those who do not suffer, become insufferable".
I will end by quoting this paragraph from the author on how we are befuddled by the changes that midlife throws at us, and our trepidation in facing it :
".. we explore the largest of questions. Did I make a good use of my time and my talents? Am I now? Was I loving? Was I loved? What is my place in the universe? "
This book is not on the bestselling list and is almost obscure. I was browsing through the books on display in my local library when the librarian highly recommended it. It is a very intriguing collection of essays by Lynn Freed – “The Romance of Elsewhere” based on the author’s life in the US and South Africa.
In one of the essays, Freed accurately observes the struggles of balancing her life as an aspiring writer and managing her home. This is something a lot of us can relate to but perhaps cannot write so intelligently!
"the deafening cacophony of the house: Wash me! Fold me! Answer me! Tidy me! Fix me! Prepare me! Cook me! Answer me Now! As often as not, of course, I was to blame for listening. But, wed to order, I'd find myself thinking. "I'll just fix this, do that, and that, and maybe the other thing, and then it'll be done and I'll be free to work."
Lives can pass this way; certainly unwritten books do.”
Anyone who has longed for and got a few days to spend just with themselves will completely understand the unbridled joy of that. In Freed’s words:
“But even with help – a servant, a devoted husband – Virginia Wolf exulted in their absence. “I have three entire days alone,” she wrote, “three pure and rounded pearls.”
Another essay ('Useful Zulu phrases, 1986') that really spoke to me was the one where she describes the relationship between Zulu house helps and their white masters in South Africa. To overcome the language barrier, the Zulu servants are taught certain phrases in English which scream of racial and socioeconomic divide. Examples of phrases taught by a master to his Zulu servant:
"Be silent while I am speaking", "You will have to do any work that I tell you".
Lab Rats
By Don Lyons
This thoroughly researched book is a very interesting read for all who are associated to the tech world. Dan Lyons goes into a lot of depth discussing some of the concepts that are ruling the tech world today such as scaled Agile, minimum viable product, open offices, a futuristic workforce ruled by AI and Robotics.
It is a somewhat disturbing look into the inner workings of the startup culture and some of the big tech oligarchs. There are several anecdotes about the bizarre character traits of most prominent personalities in tech,but the one that sticks with me is an incident where Elon Musk fired his assistant of a decade just because she had the nerve to ask for a raise. There is a lot of sickening detail on Jeff Bezos and his way of running the Amazon warehouses as sweatshops. In Philadelphia, there were reports of ambulances stationed outside Amazon warehouses operating in temperatures over one hundred degrees, in case employees working over ten hour days 'keel over'.
The push for management consulting solutions for all problems creates an identity crisis for even traditional manufacturing based companies such as Ford Motors, and they are forced to jump on to the bandwagon out of the fear of being left out, even if it is a misfit for them.
The book touches a raw nerve for every employee in tech who has been asked to 'adapt' relentlessly to things like noisy 'collaborative' work zones, integrate continuously with the new order of doing things such as daily 'stand up scrums,' getting used to the dictum 'We are a team, not a family' and the lack of a sense of humanity.The author cites the example of IBM's Agile campaign which embraced the 'workforce of the future' and set up Agile hubs, which not only meant previously remote workers needed to report to the office but they had to relocate to these hubs in many cases. Job insecurity, specially for older tech workers not fitting into the culture, is at an all time high despite the talent, experience and domain knowledge they may bring to the table.
The reason this book ended on a high note for me is that in the last few chapters, the author talks about a solution. He chooses two companies to showcase how even in this age where big tech culture seems all encompassing, it is possible to go against the flow and create companies where employees are nurtured and given an environment to grow, and also be treated with dignity and respect, not as a number. One of the companies is an office-cleaning and maintenance startup 'Managed By Q' by a late twenties young man Dan Teran. In his company, he makes sure all employees hired (including himself), regardless of position, has to go out for one shift as a cleaner, so that they know first hand what the workers in the field go through. His company not only provides employees benefits such as health insurance and 401K unlike the gig economy companies like Uber, who categorize workers as 1099 contractors for maximizing their profit. Not just that, they train their shift workers so that they can get promoted to new roles such as mentors or supervisors. Even after providing all of this, Q turns a profit and and growing revenue.
This is a hopeful sign, and the author believes that a social enterprise movement is building, which promotes a midway between 'hardcore capitalism and pure nonprofit organization'. Universities have been offering programs in social entrepreneurship, and even large companies such as Patagonia with a billion dollar revenue are following the same model of treating its workers and being socially conscious well while generating profit.
Educated: A Memoir
By Tara Westover
"On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I am only 7, but I understand that it is this fact more than any other that makes my family different. We don't go to school. Dad worries that the government will force us to go, but it can't because it doesn't know about us. Four of my parents' seven children don't have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we've never set foot in a classroom."
This book has been on the bestselling list for months, and being talked about in book clubs, and even highly recommended by Bill Gates. I picked it up after a friend spoke highly about it and am so glad I did. As the book opens, it throws the reader in the middle of a Mormon survivalist family in the hills of Idaho, always preparing for doomsday and a 'head for the hills' bag packed with herbal medicines, ready to eat meals, guns and knives. It is a world most of us know nothing about, a world of religious fundamentalism with deep rooted distrust and suspicion against the system - the federal government ('Feds'), the medical system, public education.
Their only allies were the mountain and the bunkers Tara's father had build there for his family to hide in, her mother's healing oils and tinctures, the junkyard where all the children were made to slave all day without minimum safety precautions while constantly suffering major and minor burns, gashes and falls. Her father and brother's tyranny and physical abuse are very hard to read & even harder to believe she survived those incidents with no permanent physical damage.
How Tara Westover reached the heights that she did ( a PhD from Cambridge) is a story of unbelievable grit and courage, and to a certain extent, a nonchalance about her terrible upbringing. A woman who first sits in a classroom when she is 17, first hears of holocaust when she is a freshman in college, first sees a doctor for strep infection when she is 21 - but makes it to Cambridge and Harvard seems incredulous at times.
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