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• Book of the Week: The Black Swan

  This week, I read The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. As I started reading the book, I got the feeling that the author is a guy that likes to hear himself talk. Not to say it is a bad thing, but I was trying to read the book as fast as I could to extract the gold nuggets. If I had more time and education, I would probably enjoy reading more about history and philosophy. What is a Black Swan?

• Book of the Week: Predictably Irrational

  Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational explores the behavioral psychology behind why humans make irrational decisions. Each chapter is a self contained nugget of information, so here are some summaries/thoughts I had about each chapter. Chapter 1 The Truth about Relativity(Why everything is relative, even when it shouldn’t be) People’s perceptions and decision are made by comparisons. Your new iPhone is awesome when it comes out, but when a newer iPhone comes out, it no longer is as awesome even though it is the same phone. A person can be making a lot of money, but if they are making less money than their peers, then they are not as happy. Taking a step back and appreciating what we have will make us happier. Chapter 2 The Fallacy of Supply and Demand(Why the price of pearls and everything else is up in the air) Once people have an anchor, the decisions they make will be compared to the anchor. Subsequent decisions are made with the anchor in mind. To avoid failing victim to this, you need to revaluate old decisions to see if they are still valid. One thing would be reevaluating your current job. Chapter 3 The Cost of Zero Cost(Why we often pay too much when we pay nothing) People would do things for free stuff that they wouldn’t do for things that cost 1 cent. Free is in a category of its own for pricing. We don’t take into account other opportunity costs when factoring for free things. Chapter 4 The Cost of Social Norms (Why we are happy to do things, but not when we are paid to do them) People are more willing to volunteer their time for free than at a reduced rate. Need to appeal to values to truly motivate people.

• Book of the Week: The Innovator's Dilemma

  The Innovator’s Dilemma was the perfect book to read after Crossing the Chasm. While Crossing the Chasm was about users, The Innovator’s Dilemma is about product. The book was first published in 1997, so we know what happened in the future with solid state drives replacing hard drives and the electric car. Knowing the future only reinforces the central thesis in the book. I liked this book. This book is about how being a good company sets up for failure. My point of view is that of the disrupter rather than the manager at a big company. This book like so many of the others I have read is split into two parts. If I had a dollar for every book that was split into two parts, I’d be wealthy. The first part of the book is about “Why Great Companies Can Fail”. This consists of examples to support the central thesis. The second part of the book is about “Managing Disruptive Technological Change”. Examples are given of companies that have successfully managed and those that have not. There are two types of technologies: sustaining and disrupting. Sustaining technologies make the existing product better for the mainstream customer. Disrupting technologies start up worse for the mainstream customer, but eventually get good enough to supersede the previous technology thereby screwing the companies that only invested in sustaining technologies. Being a leader in sustaining technology doesn’t make much a difference in the long run, but being a leader in disruptive technologies can pay huge dividends. When I was almost done reading the book, I realized this is a bit analogous to investing. Warren Buffett can’t invest in small companies now since they don’t make a dent in comparison to Berkshire Hathaway’s market cap. The opportunities may be greater with the small companies, but he has to play in a different league because of his size. The same can be said with companies. Established companies have an established customer base with certain needs and demands. Great companies provide things that the customer needs. Sustaining technologies are suited to taking care of those needs. Disruptive technologies start out unable to compete on the mainstream needs, but offer a different value set. The problem with big companies is that the value set of the disruptive technology does not match up with the value set of their existing customers. New entrants need to find new customers and create new markets for their disruptive technology. The company goals are aligned with the customer needs in this case. As the technology matures, it starts to gain mainstream customers, because old product and new product can fulfill their needs, but new product offers added value. Each disruptive technology is like a startup looking for a market and customer. Big established companies aren’t good at being startups, so a possible course of action is to spin out a separate entity that has separate goals from the parent company. If you decide the rules of the game you’re playing, you can win. A company with a disruptive technology should not play in established markets. They need to create new markets where they can win. A point where great companies failed is that they tried to play in their established market with their new disruptive technology. It seems to mean to succeed at this, you need a two-headed beast. One head to keep existing customers happy and another head to search for new opportunities. This is why there will always be startups that succeed where big companies fail. Purchase The Innovator’s Dilemma at Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Recovering From MacBook Pro Hard Drive Failure

  My computer kept freezing when I was using the Chrome browser. Just recently Chrome was updated to a new version, so I thought the new version was buggy. Turns out the new version of Chrome wasn’t buggy, my hard drive was dying. Recently it made an unhappy noise after I moved it while in bed. I should have known then, but I wasn’t paying enough attention. If I was more vigilant in my backups I would not have to recover the hard drive. I’ve been pretty busy with the Insight Data Science Fellowship that I neglected my backups. It seems like OSX wants to finish writing the journal entry to the hard drive, but when it does that it encounters an error. I know windows is F8 during boot, but I had to look up the startup key combinations for the mac. Command-v | Verbose Mode
  —|—
  C | Start up from a bootable CD, DVD, or USB thumb drive
  I popped in my Ubuntu CD and copied my user directory to a Windows network share. Create Mount Point ` $ sudo mkdir /mnt/MOUNT_POINT Mount Share Drive $ sudo mount -t cifs -o guest //LOCALHOST/SHARE_NAME /mnt/MOUNT_POINT Tar user directory $ sudo bash $ cd /media/Machintosh HD/Users $ tar cvf /mnt/MOUNT_POINT/username.tar username` Directories to backup ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook ~/Library/Application Support/Adium ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0 ~/Library/Calendars ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist ~/Library/Mail ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/

• Book of the Week: Crossing the Chasm

  Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore is one of those books that gets recommended to young entrepreneurs. This is another book with two parts. The first part describes what the Chasm is and the second part is how to cross it. The book was first published in 1991 and subsequently revised after that. My version was revised in 1999, because the examples were dated. The book should be overdue for another revision, but the internet has changed things quite a bit. It would be a waste of time to revise this book again. I found myself skipping over sections of examples. Not worth my time to read examples if I already agree with the statement. The main premise is that there are different types of customers which adopt your products are different stages. In the beginning there are early adopters, which are different from the mainstream. The way to get the mainstream is to have social proof from others in the mainstream. This is a chicken and the egg problem, which can be solved by segmenting the mainstream market and targeting a niche to takeover. Then adoption will spread from the niche. Early adopters don’t help with the mainstream since their requirements are different. I can see the influence from this book on customer development in the Start Up Owner’s Manual. If I had a product that I sold in return for money, I’d probably hit the chasm. With an internet company, I’m no so sure the same rules apply. The end of the book said growth was more like a stairs than a hockey stick. That is probably closer to the truth. Each new market segment is stair step. Lesson Learned: Don’t go after the whole pie in beginning. Cut yourself a slice first. Eat it, then go back for some more. Purchase Crossing the Chasm on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: The Art of Blizzard Entertainment

  This week I read, The Art of Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard is to computer games as Pixar is to computer animated movies, they make nothing but hits by having high quality standards driven by creativity. I was anxious to receive my copy of this art book. This is one case where digital copies can not compete with print. I enjoy reading on my kindle, but art books are inherently visual and large to encompass your vision. Art books are nice to have around to admire time to time. Something you can pick up to escape to another world for a short while. The book covers Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft as well as a few bonuses. The thing I liked the most is that you get familiar with concept artist’s style. Concept artist are people too. Purchase The Art of Blizzard Entertainment on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: On Writing

  This is the first Stephen King book I’ve read. It’s a nonfiction book that is about writing. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

• Book of the Week: Best of Quora

  Quora distributed a hardbound copy of the Best of Quora 2010-2012 to their top writers. For the rest of us, we can grab a pdf of the book. The book is a collection of questions and answers ranging from topics such as prison life to literature. You gain personal insight from people that would be difficult to find elsewhere. This is what makes quora so special. The awesome thing about reading for pleasure is that you can read only the questions you want to read and skip the rest.

• Book of the Week: Plan B 4.0

  [caption id=”attachment_476” align=”alignnone” width=”584”] Plan B 4.0[/caption] Lester Brown was on Science Friday to promote his new book, “Full Planet, Empty Plates”. I decided to read his older book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available free online at earthpolicy.org. Since the book was published in 2009, it mentioned a lot about things that were scheduled to happen in the future. So it is interesting to compare people thought was going to occur compared to what did occur. This is probably why this is Plan B 4.0 and not just plan B. The book didn’t really excite me, because I pay attention to the topics mentioned in the book. I care about the future and how the shit is going to go down. Even though I was aware of many things, I did learn a few new things. If you’re totally unacquainted with the problems facing humanity, this book is a good starting point, because is a lot of information referenced. For people acquainted, more action is required upon your part than reading. The first part of the book talks about the problems facing the human race. I think we are already screwed. It is not about saving the earth, but saving civilization from collapse. The main problems are food, water, energy and climate. They are all interconnected. Pretty much all of the same problem. I need energy and water to eat, but getting energy screws the climate, which makes it harder to grow food and get water to grow food. The meat of the book is Plan B. How are we as a civilization going to solve this problem. Since I am in the business of solving problems, I pay a lot of attention to this. Every problem is a opportunity. If you want to learn about Plan B, then read the book. There are also updates to Plan B on the earthpolicy.org website. Other Thoughts Here are some other thoughts that came into my head as I was reading the book. China imports chopsticks from Georgia. Georgia, the state, not the country. The quest for resources have led richer nations speculating on land in other countries. Is it really cost effective to go solar? Loyd Case wrote about his experiences going solar. I wouldn’t call his experience in 2008 cost effective, but today might be different. It’s getting there. The air quality in Beijing is deadly. These are the consequences we are living with now since we screwed things up already. Fracking uses precious water to get oil. I’d rather use the water for other purposes, like pooping in it. The byproducts from making ethanol can be used to feed livestock. That is mentioned by a caller on the science friday podcast. When I went beer tasting, the brewery uses the byproducts to feed hogs, resulting in awesome bacon. There’s like a three-way for water use in California: fisheries, farmers and cities. Totally. Reminded of cattle rancher dealing with drought on Marketplace. The earth has self correcting mechanisms: global warming -> fight for food -> nuclear winter -> global cooling and reduced populations. If we want to think about making the most use of resources for food, we can look to NASA and how they will build a Mars Colony. Food production on Mars has to be the most extreme case. What can we learn from that? We can make more efficient use of our land. Growing Power uses greenhouses combined with aquaculture to make food and fish in a small area. In the future, the cheapest way of making protein will be fish (tilapia and perch) and insects. I remember stories of using gray water from the bath to garden since water was rationed in the past. It is only when we don’t have something, do we realize how precious it is. If we all grew our own victory gardens, I wonder how would the world change. Or maybe if there were aquaculture greenhouses dispersed throughout the city. Deforestation happens, but how did the forests get there in the first place? Golden Gate Park in San Francisco used to be all sand dunes. The problems mentioned in Plan B are becoming current problems. Purchase Plan B 4.0 on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Build Your Own Telescope

  Build Your Own Telescope: Complete Plans for Five High-quality Telescopes that Anyone Can Build by Richard Berry, Editor of Astronomy magazine. The 5 telescope designs are

• Book of the Week: The Charisma Myth

  Olivia Fox Cabane gave a lecture about charisma at Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture Series. I read her book, The Charisma Myth. Definition of Charisma from Merriam-Webster

• Book of the Week: Change By Design

  This week’s book is Change by Design by Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, a well known design firm in silicon valley. This book is also divided into two parts, just like Dead Aid, Tao Te Ching and Flatland. I’m beginning to sense a pattern. The first part of the book fleshes out design thinking with some historical examples and the second part talks about how design thinking can impact the world, the big picture. Before Tim can convince you of design thinking’s impact the world, he describes the techniques used by designers for designing products and how that evolved into designing experiences. A designer is ultimately concerned with how people interact with whatever they are designing, be it a physical product or a service. First ideas are needed. “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.” -Linus Pauling By having lots of ideas, it opens up the playing field and covers the problem space before one can narrow down on what is truly important. Ideas start as observations. These observations plant seeds that turn into ideas. The idea is just the inspiration, next comes perspiration. To advance the design process, it is helpful to have quick prototypes, which allow a conversation to take place. These conversations lead to a better product and a compelling story. By using these design techniques, IDEO was able to make innovative products bringing bags of money to the companies they helped. Eventually this grew from designing products into designing interactions and experiences. For the design process to be successful, the company must have design in it’s culture. Tim points out how various companies innovate. Then from companies, the text moves into doing social good in the second part. These are feel good stories. The last chapter is about designing life, things that people and companies can do to embrace design thinking. Design is not some magical thing that only creative people can do. It is a process that results in innovation, which is vital for solving the world’s problems. If you are interested in design, I recommend checking out the Stanford d.school. Purchase Change By Design on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.