Latest Posts

• Book of the Week: Scaling Up Excellence

  I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Huggy Rao about scaling. Scaling Up Excellence is a book Stanford professors, Huggy Rao and Robert Sutton, wrote about the problems that occur when companies try to scale up. Things start breaking, what worked before doesn’t work anymore. How do you grow without getting into a clusterfug? The book goes over a lot of examples since it is complied from 7 years of talking to people, but it is not as crisp and clear as I wanted it to be since a lot of things are nuanced. Reoccurring Cast It seems I can’t read a book with Silicon Valley start ups without Bill Campbell’s name appearing. Seems like he’s more “the Don” than “the Coach”. Also, when anybody talks about the d.school, they bring up the pediatric MRI example. If d.school and design thinking is truly effective, wouldn’t there be more than one example that really hugs the heart strings? I like design thinking, but only have a singular example makes me lose faith. It is like talking about Michael Jordan when trying to get people to play basketball. You may like basketball, but you aren’t going to fly like Mike. Scaling Mantras

• Book of the Week: Design Patterns

  This week, I take a look at Design Patterns: Elements of Reuseable Object-Oriented Software, which is often recommended to new programmers. When you start out as a programmer, your main concern is writing code that accomplishes a task. As you write more and more code, you notice that you need to do the same things over and over again. You notice patterns. Then you begin to isolate and identify things by giving them names. When you starting talking to other programmers, you need some common vocabulary. Design Patterns provides that common vocabulary. 24 Design Patterns Purpose	Design Pattern	Aspects That Can Vary
  Operation	Abstract Factory	families of product objects
  	Builder	how a composite object gets created
  	Factory Method	subclass of object that is instantiated
  	Prototype	class of object that is instantiated
  	Singleton	the sole instance of a class
  Structural	Adapter	interface of an object
  	Bridge	implementation of an object
  	Composite	structure and composite of an object
  	Decorator	responsibilities of an object without subclassing
  	Façade	interface to a subsystem
  	Flyweight	storage costs of objects
  	Proxy	how an object is accessed; its location
  Behavioral	Chain of Responsibility	object that can fulfill a request
  	Command	when and how a request is fulfilled
  	Interpreter	grammar and interpretation of a language
  	Iterator	how an aggregate’s elements are accessed, traversed
  	Mediator	how and which objects interact with each other
  	Memento	what private information is stored outside an object, and when
  	Observer	number of objects that depend on another object; how the dependent objects stay up to date
  	State	states of an object
  	Strategy	an algorithm
  	Template Method	steps of an algorithm
  	Visitor	operations that can be applied to object(s) without changing their class(es)

• Book of the Week: The Monk and the Riddle

  This week I read The Monk and the Riddle, by Randy Komisar, who works for a VC firm currently being sued by Ellen Pao for gender discrimination. The book is a little unusual, but I liked it. It’s fiction interspersed with Randy’s life and experiences as a VC. There is an overarching story of a caricatured guy trying to raise money for funerals.com and he takes side tangents to go into his background and experiences. Deferred Life Plan

• Book of the Week: The Progress Principle

  This week I read The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, a husband and wife psychologist team. This book is written for managers. The Progress Principle

• Book of the Week: The Pursuit of Wow!

  I did not like this book at all. I’m used to books conveying a coherent idea. The Pursuit of Wow! is the equivalent of an explosive diarrhea brain dump. There is just shit everywhere and somebody should clean it up. This might be okay as a coffee table book in the lobby of the doctor’s office. This book is written for people with ADD. I don’t need to be told 200 things. I just need to be told one valuable thing. I gave up reading the book, because I couldn’t remember what I had just read.

• Book of the Week: Growth Hacker Marketing

  This week I find out what it means to be a growth hacker with Growth Hacker Marketing. There’s not much to the book. It doesn’t tell you how to be a growth hacker in detail. Traction is better for specific things to do. This is written for old school marketing people who want to find out about this new thing called the Internet. This book is an interesting read after The 4-Hour Workweek, because Ryan worked on marketing Tim’s other book, The 4-Hour Chef. Everyone is linked together someway. Growth Hacker

• Book of the Week: The 4-Hour Workweek

  The 4-Hour Workweek is one of those well known bestseller type of books. I thought I read it before, but after reading it again, maybe I didn’t read it before. Tim offers a 4-step program (DEAL) to work toward a 4-hour workweek and become one of the new rich (NR) instead of living a deferred (D) life. From previous books on wealth, it looks like I have to save to become wealthy. I know I’ll eventually become wealthy if I save, but then what? Does the knowledge of being financially independent help me sleep better at night? Or would I rather live like a millionaire now?

• Book of the Week: The Millionaire Next Door

  I forgot why I wanted to read The Millionaire Next Door. It was probably mentioned in another book. After reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad and I Will Teach You To Be Rich, I was getting tired of reading books about the wealthy. This book was written by two PhDs that study wealthy people. Some areas of the book are heavily focused on material from their research like how the wealthy buy cars. They had the data, so they shoved it into the book. This is a book about the wealthy, not a book on how to become wealthy. 7 Common Denominators of Wealthy People

• Book of the Week: Flour

  After working on cooke recipe substitutions, I needed to learn more about baking. This week I read Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery + Cafe by Joanne Chang. These recipes were modified to work in your home kitchen from her bakery. Overachiever Joanne graduated with degrees applied mathematics and economics from Harvard and worked at a management consulting firm before going into the food industry. What’s with Asians food people and degrees from prestiges schools? Ming Tsai majored in mechanical engineering at Yale. She got job after job in the food industry after gliding through brief interviews, so she learned from experience and not culinary school. Eventually she opened up her ownsuccessful bakery called Flour. She also mentions that Chinese meals have no dessert, which is relevant, because she’s Chinese and makes desserts. The last chapter of the Language of Food explains why. Techniques There are a dozen techniques that a home baker should know. She goes over each technique with insightful tips.

• Book of the Week: The Boglehead's Guide to Investing

  I skimmed through The Boglehead’s Guide to Investing. It is a good source if you don’t want to scour the internet and lurk in forums for information about investing. It covers more than you want to know in plain english. I found it more useful than The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning.

• Book of the Week: I Will Teach You To Be Rich

  This book was recommended to me. I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi is a 6-week program that puts you on better financial footing. As I was reading the book, it was like preaching to the choir. The book is written by a young adult for other young adults. It is a quick read, but it covers what that every adult should know about money. Being Rich

• Book of the Week: The Blind Side

  I liked Flash Boys, also by Michael Lewis, so I decided to give The Blind Side a try. The book is a mix of Michael Oher’s story of a poor black kid being picked up by a rich white family because of his physical gifts and the changing way football is played. The Blind Side Bill Walsh developed the west coast offense where the quarterback throws quick short timed passes and the receiver gains yards after the catch instead of long 20 yard bombs. This shifted teams from calling running plays to passing plays, because they became more effective. This made the quarterback more important. For the predominantly right-handed quarterbacks to release the ball in time to complete the pass, they needed protection on their blind side (left side) or they would be drilled into the ground by the defense end. Michael Oher played the left tackle position, which protects the blind side.