Category: 3. SHELF it

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Relationships

BR 137: Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage by Mark Gungor

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Category: 3 – SHELF it (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: I read this book for 2 reasons – because I’m getting married and because I loved Gungor’s famous YouTube video on men’s and women’s brains. The book was okay – very good in parts and pretty okay for the most part.

Gungor is occasionally scientific and structured but for the most part it centers around his observations as a pastor. I also think it didn’t help that he wrote this for Christians. There were way too many bible, Jesus references for a non Christian.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. Boxed in (watch Mark Gungor’s famous nothing box video on YouTube for this section). Men’s brains are like boxes – they are dealt with one at a time and DO NOT TOUCH. And a man’s favorite box is the nothing box… Given a choice, we love the nothing box and hence, love staring into the ceiling.

This is contrast to a woman’s brain which is like a bunch of wires and is typically thinking of many things at once.

2. Communication. When men communicate, they say what they mean and mean what they say. Women, on the other hand, are masters of nuance. Words are just one part of communication. So, in a women case, what is said matters less than how it is said.
The way to get past this is to implement the Covey principle of understanding – seek to understand before seeking to be understood.

3. What men want: Respect – unconditional respect. Men don’t want to earn respect on performance. They want it because of who they are. They don’t want criticism or women to change them – they want to be loved as they are. But just because men aren’t resistant to improvement doesn’t mean they can’t be improved, a women’s effect on a man’s maturity, cleanliness, etc is always massive. Strong women make a huge difference to a man’s life. A touch of fear of the wife has also found to be good in strong marriages. :-)

What women want – women want to be picked. They want to know that you would choose them above all else – your tv show, your outing with the lads, etc. the more you

Book notes

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Money

BR 135: The Millionaire Teacher by Andrew Hallam

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Category: 3 – SHELF it (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: Really good book. This book was recommended to me by one of my favorite authors William J Bernstein when I asked him for Singapore specific investment advice.

A must-read for folks living outside the US looking for solid money and investment advice.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. Live like a millionaire. Millionaires wear cheap watches, buy second hand cars, and live in the suburbs. Real millionaires live frugally and invest wisely.
2. Compound interest is the most important mathematical concept you need to know. The earlier you start investing, the better it is for you as compound interest will take over. Invest in simple plain vanilla index funds (same as Bernstein’s advice.. the value add here is clear steps for folks living in Canada, UK, Australia, and Singapore) and remember that financial service firms are out to eat into your money. Actively managed mutual funds are a no-no.
3. Every generation is gripped by irrational financial madness at some points (the tech bubble being an example). When you see a market behaving irrationally, be fearful. The relationship between the value of a stock and it’s earning is similar to a dog on a leash with it’s master. One can be far ahead of the other for only a short while.

Click here for book notes from the book

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Career

BR 129: The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

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Comments: Good career book and potentially useful for those reading career books for the first time.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. Follow your passion is bad advice. The biggest reason for following your passion being irrelevant advice in this day and age is that your passion could be for an industry that might not exist in 10 years. The rate at which industries are being disrupted means that, even if it does manage to survive the next ten years, it’s unlikely it’s going to be anywhere as lucrative or attractive as it is now.

2. Who you know is what you know. Reid and Ben argue that the network is truest fastest source of information.When you look at it that way, having a deep network in the field you’d like to be in is critical because news will likely reach you much faster than via conventional sources.
The use for this is with all sorts of career moves of course. You get to hear of job openings before they exist, and so on.

3. Beware keeping optoins open. We’re often told to keep options open but Reid cautions against it. Making a decision may reduce your options in the short run but increases your options in the long run.

There’s never a right time. Even if you make a wrong decision, you can make another decision to correct it.

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Novel Concepts and Interesting Research · Technology

BR 128: Free by Chris Anderson

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Comments: Interesting book, especially for those who are interested in the impact of “free” on business and industry.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. The world is moving from scarcity to abundance in most aspects of life. As a result, the structure of the world and business has undergone a fundamental change. A 100 years ago, all the top 100 companies in the world were involved in manufacturing. Now, the percentage is down to 30%.

The moment an industry moves from transmitting atoms (boxes) to bits – free becomes inevitable. So, if the industry is competitive (and we can argue that the Internet has resulted in more competition than ever before), then prices will keep going down till it just covers cost.

2. The important thing for companies is to adapt their business model to incorporate free as an integral part of their model. Free is here to stay.

Examples –

– The popular freemium model wherein businesses give a basic product for free and charge for premium usage

– Microsoft went through the DABDA curve in its reaction to Linux operating systems. While it initially began with the lens of competition, the end result was an acceptance that there is a place for open source in the market. Small companies would rather go open source as its free while big companies would pay money to minimize risk.

– Google’s strategy for information markets – 1) take whatever you are doing, do it for free 2) hook users in and generate scale 3) charge for valuable information Search and Gmail are easy examples. Another such example is Goog-411 – free voice help which is part of Google’s investment into a voice search engine.

– Music – 90% of money is made by bands is in concerts! So digital piracy (or free) helps the band find willing fans

3. The importance of corn – rice, wheat and corn have always been considered the key crops. Rice is high on protein but difficult to grow, wheat is low on protein but easy to grow, and corn is both. Since corn is the most efficient converter of water and sun light into starch, we use corn for more than we can imagine.

More than 25% of the products in a super market are derived from corn. In fact, soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, the boxes they are packed in, and even the compounds that the super markets are built with are  based on corn. A great example of corn power is in a chicken nugget. From the feed of the chicken, to corn oil, to the golden color and smell – nearly every aspect of it is derived from corn.

The big reason corn and food have gotten expensive over the past few years is that corn began being used for the production of ethanol for fuel. This has truly tested the limits of corn.

That was a really cool insight.

(Book notes here)

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Business

BR 127: The Price Advantage by Walter L Baker, Michael V Marn, Craig C Zawada

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Category: 3 – SHELF it (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: I read this book thanks to preparation for a project at work. Really good book on pricing written by pricing experts from McKinsey & Co. and makes for a good read.

Pricing moonlights as a seemingly boring topic but is at the heart of understanding profit levers in a business.

Top 3 learnings:

1. Pricing is the single most powerful pricing lever in business. A 1% increase in price for an average fortune 500 company results in an 8.4% increase in profit (!) versus a 1% increase in volume (around 3%). If you care about being profitable, you need to care about pricing..

2. There are 4 components to understanding pricing and I’ve tried to describe these in terms of questions you need to ask yourself-

  • Market dynamics: Am I market leader? What sort of pricing conduct does our market have? How can we instituionalize good pricing conduct. (Aggressive price wars result in irreversible negative consequences)
  • Company strategy: What is our pricing strategy? Do we invest in a best-in-class pricing organization and invest in having  great market and industry analytics? Do we understand our position in the industry via value maps?
  • Transactions: Do we monitor how pricing is carried out in practice? Are our sales people watching for profit vs revenue? How does our pocket price distribution look? (Pocket price is the eventual price for a project following all discounts, rebates, etc.)
  • Pricing infrastructure: Do we have IT and enabling systems that support our pricing organization

3. There’s tremendous areas of opportunity in the organization. A few points critical to good pricing are –

  • Solid market information so you understand your cost and benefit in relation to the market
  • Sales data to understand “pocket price” i.e. what is the net price you receive on your products.
  • Pricing infrastructure for your sales team to understand what are good practices and what aren’t
3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Psychology

BR 122: Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert

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Comments: This is a very good book and almost makes it to the “Buy it!” list. The trouble I had with it is that there is no structure and this makes it rather difficult to absorb in the audio version. Some really really good insights, though.

Top 3 learnings:

1. The best way to sustain happiness is to do something in intervals. So, if you have access to something amazing, do it in intervals e.g. a fancy meal every few weeks vs every day.

2. We greatly underestimate 2 big factors in our judging of our experience – the strength of our personal immune system and our ability to project our current feelings into the future.

As a result, we underestimate how well we will cope with most kinds of adversity/loss. And, we make very poor predictions of how we will feel after an experience

3.  Surrogation (i.e. making a judgment based on someone else’s experience) is a very interesting technique to gauge happiness. We like  thinking we are unique but in reality, we are not. So, the best way to judge if you will be happy after a decision to ask others who’ve been through the experience. There is a certain wisdom in the crowd.

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Philosophy · Psychology

BR 120: Authentic Happiness by Martin E.P. Seligman

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Comments: Martin E.P. Seligman is the father of positive psychology and his book lived up to expectations. I didn’t find it “ground breaking” and that’s thanks to having read many a happiness book that builds on Seligman’s ground break findings.

The only miss is the lack of a “framework” in the book. I remember it as a collection of great anecdotes, many of which I’m sure to write about. I’ve always maintained that great books give you a framework in which to remember the key learnings – e.g. the 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey.

Top 3 Learnings

1. Two groups of school kids were studied for their happiness level. Group I involved the geeky kids who studied hard, attended various classes after school and played hard. Group II involved the “cool” kids who hung out in the mall. It was found that the geeky kids tested happier on every aspect except one – they thought the kids in the mall were happier.

What an awesome story.

2. Optimism is an acquired trait based on the 3 P’s – Permanence, Pervasiveness and Personalization. Optimists don’t believe a bad event is permanent, pervasive and that the world is “out to get them.”

3. Expressing anger and negative emotions does NOT help – contrary to popular belief.

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · History

BR 118: The Art of War by Sun Tzu

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Comments: I am guessing the original (Chinese) version is one with stories behind the principles. My audio book was a short 1 hour 2o minute listen with a summary of principles. Thanks to the absence of stories, they didn’t really stick. Age old war wisdom though.

Top 3 learnings:

1. You only move as a general when your odds are favorable. Bravado is foolish. At every point, it’s about staying rational and improving your odds.  A general is not the same as warrior..

2. Everything in life is about a few basic things. 3 basic colors give rise to a whole spectrum of colors – similarly, war (and, as an extension, everything else) has a few very basic principles. Ensure you know them well.

3. Control of communication and discipline is incredibly important if managing large groups. “Never attack an army whose banners are upright.”

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Self Improvement

BR 114: 9 Things Successful People Do Differently by Heidi Grant Halvorson

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Category: 3 – SHELF it (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: This is an HBR article expanded into a book. A very short, breezy read.

Top 3 learnings:

1. There are 2 kinds of optimism – unrealistic and realistic.

Realistic optimists have a belief that good things will happen but caveat it with the understanding that hard work would need to go in, and that bumps along the way are inevitable.

2. There are 2 ways of interpreting the world i.e. entity theory and incremental theory.

This is essentially the “fixed” and “fluid” mentality concept. Entity theorists believe that intelligence and ability are constant while incremental theorists believe that everything is malleable.

The easy test is what you do when things go wrong. Entity theorists respond with “maybe I’m not any good at this” while incremental theorists focus on improving their preparation, their strategy etc.

3. There are 2 types of goals – “be good” goals and “get better” goals “Be good” goals are those that focus on showcasing excellence. If it is achieved, that’s great. But if not, they kill our confidence.

Get better goals are those that focus on constant improvement and that allow us to fail.

Conclusion: Be a realistic optimist, an entity theorist and set “get better” goals. :-)

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Entrepreneurship

BR 113: The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

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Category: 3 – SHELF it (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: Interesting book with a take on “lifestyle” entrepreneurs i.e. entrepreneurs who do things they like and fund a very good lifestyle for themselves.

If you are in touch with tech/entrepreneurship on the internet at large, it’s unlikely most of the ideas in the book are new. It still makes for a good read. (The other side of the story is – if you are interested in or are contemplating entrepreneurship, it’s a nice  book to read)

Top 3 learnings:

1. Launch fast and iterate. This has become common wisdom in a way but this books shows many examples of those who launched, iterated and got much better.

2. Keep working on side projects. Most of the lifestyle entrepreneurs’ ventures began as side projects.

3. Resourcefulness and initiatives go a long way. Lots of great examples again of people who generated significant value out of practically nothing (hence, the $100 start up)