Books

Loonshots

Safi Bahcall

Fantastic story filled book designed to help you understand the environment and management style needed for sustained innovation.

Some great thinking here that isn’t a repetition of somewhere else.

I’m a big fan of Simon’s work. This book takes a previous theory on Finite or Infinite situations and explains it in easy to understand ways and with some great stories. The basic idea is that some things can be finite, a football match for instance. You all play by the same set of rules, you know who the opponent is and when it finishes it’s easy to declare a winner. It’s easy to understand and easy to work out a strategy to win. But what if there was no end? What if you didn’t know who your opponents were and what if everyone played by their own rules? The idea is not to win, you can’t win in a situation like that. The goal must therefore be to play for as long as possible… Politics, business, war, careers, life, basically everything other than sport and games can be viewed as infinite rather than finite, and if that’s the case it changes everything about how you should treat them.

Leaders Eat Last is another excellent book on leadership and how to think about what good leadership is. He’s a very clear speaker and writer, I recommend his many YouTube appearences too.