Book Summaries - You Exec

Do you long for the day when you can work less and travel more? Do you fear

that you’ll never have enough money to be able to retire? By following

Warren Buffett’s approach to value investing, you can learn how to build an

investment portfolio that will give you the financial freedom you need. The

key to Buffett’s approach is to look for companies that you can understand,

that have an intrinsic and durable competitive advantage, and that have

talented management. Then, calculate a good price at which to buy that

company’s shares. Value investing does involve diving into the

sometimes-complex world of financial statements, but with practice, you can

figure out which are the most important numbers on any company’s Income

Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement, and use them to decide

whether a company meets your investment criteria. Once you have calculated

the right price for your target companies, wait until the share price falls

to that level and then buy, confident in the knowledge that you have an

anti-fragile portfolio that will not just give you a great rate of return

but will also be able to survive the next – inevitable – market downturn.

You get home from a long day, but somehow home does not make you feel

relaxed. Just looking at the messy living room or crammed closets makes you

feel even more tired, and the need to tidy up feels like an exhausting and

endless chore. Or, perhaps it’s your office that makes you anxious, piles

of papers and clutter that make it hard to focus or to find what you need

to get things done. A tidy and organized home will make you more productive

and energized at work. Marie Kondo’s approach, the KonMari Method, shows

you how to literally put your life in order. Forget doing a little every

day or one room at a time; forget buying the latest fancy storage system or

pushing everything into boxes that just keep piling up. This summary will

show you how to tackle everything in one go, systematically working through

your possessions and deciding for each item whether to throw it away or

keep it, based on whether it brings you joy. Once you have purged yourself

of the excess, then decide where to put the things you keep. At the end of

this process, you will have discovered how to free yourself from being

overly attached to the past and how to face the future without fear.

Do you feel that your ideas lose momentum quickly? You can use the tactics

in this book to make your ideas “sticky.” Sticky ideas are those that “are

understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact – they change your

audience’s opinion or behavior.” Sticky ideas have six traits. They are

simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and told as stories, and

this summary covers the counterintuitive and well-researched tactics for

transforming your ideas so that they stick. Learn why simple does not mean

“dumbed down.” Understand how unexpected is more than a gimmicky surprise

and the ways to not just capture but hold your audience’s interest. Hear

about how making ideas concrete can help others collaborate on them rather

than disengage. Find out how to load your messages with credibility without

expert endorsement. Get others to care about your ideas by making them

emotional, even for an audience that is far from sappy. And finally, get

insight into the best way to tell a story so that others will be inspired

to act.

Have you seen great ideas or apparently-solid organizations fail because of

some random event or unexpected shock? Does your organization spend

significant resources on trying to avoid volatility or uncertainty? What if

shocks, volatility, and uncertainty were actually what your ideas or

organization need in order to really take off? This summary shows how the

key to thriving is not avoiding stress but embracing the concept of

“antifragility.” The antifragile is the opposite of fragile; it is

something that loves randomness and uncertainty and is strengthened by a

shock. Antifragility is inherent in all the natural and complex systems

that survived over time. Our modern civilization is intent on damping down

volatility and randomness and avoiding stressors; but once we grasp the

importance of antifragility, we realize that our modern approach actually

causes harm. Suppressing volatility and randomness in our economy, our

health, our education, or our political life makes those systems more

fragile. Without stressors, complex systems become weak and even die

The iconic Nike sporting goods company started over 50 years ago as a

‘crazy idea’ in the mind of a young runner in Oregon. Shoe Dog is Phil

Knight’s personal memoir of the company that started with him selling

running shoes he called Tigers out of the back of his car. Along the way,

he learned the importance of assembling a team of brilliant, dedicated,

like-minded individuals; of focusing on people before profit; and of not

being afraid to stand up to challenges and face them on your own terms. In

the early days, the Nike management team, the Buttface team, identified

strongly with each other and trusted each other. That spirit and ethos came

to embody the entire company, where the focus has always been on the

athletes and on building trust. The company’s “us against the world”

approach helped them to overcome some formidable challenges: losing their

main Japanese supplier, solving the problem of uneven supply and excess

inventory, and even taking on the government over import taxes. Sponsoring

the runner Steve Prefontaine when he was at a low point in his life gave

the young company a formidable spokesman and ambassador for the brand.

Deciding to maintain his memorial after his tragic death was emblematic of

the people-oriented company Nike was becoming. That connection with its

athletes continues to this day. The inventions of two of Nike’s iconic

products—the waffle-sole running shoe and Nike Air—came from unexpected

sources and went on to revolutionize the world of athletic shoes. There

were disasters, too, like the much-hyped Tailwind shoe that literally tore

itself to shreds. And there was controversy, particularly the allegations

over the use of sweatshops in Asia. Phil Knight and Nike turned each

stumbling block into a challenge to do better, to achieve more, to keep

winning the race.

Every well-known speaker has had to overcome fear and develop the

self-confidence to speak in public. Being able to deliver a well-crafted

and interesting speech is not the result of some innate talent that only a

few possess; rather, it is a skill that anyone can learn. The keys to

becoming a good public speaker are thorough preparation, careful planning,

and frequent practice. Start by speaking to small groups of friends on a

topic you know well and care deeply about; the more you practice this, the

easier it will become. Work on improving your memory so that you can speak

naturally and in a conversational tone without having to refer to notes.

Realize, too, that persistence is essential. Allow your personality to

shine through when you speak, and make sure the setting is one where your

audience can focus on you and not be distracted. Start your speech by

arousing your audience's curiosity, tell a story, or ask a question. Keep

their interest by appealing to their interests, using human interest

stories to get your points across, and giving colorful descriptions. Close

your speech with a summary of your key points, an appeal for action, or a

joke that leaves them laughing. Finally, pay attention to your vocabulary.

Boost your command of language by making use of the dictionary and

Thesaurus, and getting acquainted with the great writers of literature.

Following these tips and techniques will allow anyone to become a confident

public speaker.

How did Ray Dalio, the child of an ordinary medium-class family create the

world’s largest, and most successful hedge fund, currently managing over

$150 billion USD? In a word: principles. Ray Dalio created a set of

principles for personal and professional life that serves as an operating

system for living based on radical honesty and radical transparency

thriving within an idea meritocracy. An idea meritocracy is "a system that

brings together smart, independent thinkers and has them productively

disagree to come up with the best possible collective thinking and resolve

their disagreements in a believability-weighted way." To

"believability-weight" something means to determine an idea's legitimacy

based on the track record and the ability of the idea's originator to

clearly explain their concept. Dalio believes an idea meritocracy is the

best decision-making system because it requires honesty and leads to

continual improvement. Dalio divided his principles into Life Principles

and Work Principles. The life principles apply to individual success, and

the work principles guide group success. Dalio decided to share his

principles to help others succeed. His goal is to inspire people to

discover and write their principles and to refine them through experience

and reflection. Dalio believes good, experience-tested principles can lead

people to better decisions, more mutual understanding, and superior

outcomes

To thrive in the coming century, every organization needs the ability to

experiment rapidly with new products and new business models; to empower

their most creative people, and to engage repeatedly in a process of

innovation in order to unlock new sources of growth and productivity. A

modern company must give every employee the opportunity to be an

entrepreneur, recognizing entrepreneurship as a core discipline. The

lessons of the lean startup movement of Silicon Valley are the basis of

The Startup Way, a series of tools and techniques that will unleash this

entrepreneurial approach in any organization. The core of the approach is

the small, internal startup team, a cross-functional group that is focused

on testing leap-of-faith assumptions about potential new products with the

use of minimum viable products. A repeated cycle of testing leads to an

iterative process where failure becomes a key component in validated

learning. Making use of growth boards and metered funding, the teams learn

how to pivot or persevere on each project. Embedding the entrepreneurial

function in the organizational structure, creating career paths and

assessment processes that value innovation, and making use of innovation

accounting, ultimately leads to an organization that embodies the concept

of continuous transformation.

Any company can move out of a “red ocean” of intense competition and into a

new value-cost market space – a wide-open “blue ocean.” Doing so requires

completing five steps, each of which yields valuable insights into the

structure of the industry and the company’s particular vulnerabilities. The

shift of a company’s culture, product portfolio, and strategy from a red

ocean to a blue ocean is the transformation process introduced in “Blue

Ocean Shift.”

A shift starts with a Pioneer-Migrator-Settler map, to get a good view of

your current offerings, followed by creating a picture of the state-of-play

in the industry with a Strategy Map. Next, delve into the actual experience

of your customers and what they really want with a Buyer Utility Map, and

identify how the total demand landscape for your offering could be

expanded. With this information, the team can dive into systematic field

research, using six paths that will enable them to decide what to

eliminate, reduce, raise or create and so reconstruct the boundaries of the

industry. Finally, after holding a Blue Ocean Fair and drawing up a new

business model, the company will be ready to roll out its Blue Ocean Shift.

Established bureaucratic companies, companies in regulated industries, or

even government agencies surrounded in red-tape, can open up and create new

blue oceans. Blue Ocean Shift not only provides a recipe to identify and

transition companies into blue oceans but also focuses on the human-side

(or “humanness”) of a transition. It does this by introducing many

strategies and tactics that help shift the culture of an organization from

its current state to one will allow any organization to welcome a shift.

Author Steven Levitt, working with journalist Stephen Dubner, shows how

economic theories can be used to analyze social issues. Each of the six

essays explores a different theory or social issue, from cheating by sumo

wrestlers to the economic organization of drug gangs. Along the way it

addresses a series of questions such as “Why do some teachers cheat on test

results?” and “Do parents really make a difference to a child’s success in

life?” Using a series of stories and case studies the author shows that, at

its root, economics is the study of how people behave and how they get what

they want.