Thread

1. jppope · 1790713542 · focus · HN ↗

   "Collapse" - A friend gave me the book in a bag he was going to donate. its been great. Theres obviously a huge undertone of preachy "humans struggle with sustainable resource utilization" but the views into failed societies are just fascinating. Really enjoying it, though I've slowed down and might not finish.

   "7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy" - Recommended by @pc in an interview. I'm ~50 pages in and not really blown away. Its a nice accumulation of Alpha creating strategy... but I think its really missing some nuance. I do LOVE that they take an economist approach and actually provide the math/algorithms behind the concepts. Theres some good stuff in here but so far it feels like 30 pages stretched out to make a book.

   "Monetizing Innovation" - dropped this book, do not recommend. I was expecting a really nice accumulation of how pricing should work with companies who are innovating... and it came no where near that hopeful concept. The case studies were weak, the hypothesis were weak, the writing was weak.

   1. cinntaile · 1790748382 · focus · HN ↗

      Business and self-help books are always 90% fluff and 10% content, not much to do about that.

      1. andrew_lettuce · 1790782029 · focus · HN ↗

         Full agree - and I've adopted a similar reading strategy. Full read of first and last chapters, skim the rest and should be done in no more than an hour. If there's a systems diagram or algorithm you want to dig into, make a note and maybe do that later. Most of these books should be blog posts; ironically (?) the ones that were blog posts extended into full books tend to be the better ones!

         1. jppope · 1790788953 · focus · HN ↗

            Good observation. Off the top of my head all the 37 signals stuff (which started as blogs) were great when they became books. Morgan Housel too.

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