The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis Didn't Do It For Me

I've been a longtime fan of Michael Lewis, having read a half dozen of his books over the years. I recently started reading The Undoing Project and for some reason wasn't getting into it. I then decided to re-read Moneyball, the bestseller that later became a motion picture starring Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman. As with the first time, I again thoroughly enjoyed it.

This prompted me to go back and continue with The Undoing Project. It's not the first time I started a book, failed to connect and had better luck the next time. It was until my third effort with Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano that I not only engaged with but devoured it. Unfortunately, my second effort here yielded little fruit. If words were food, The Undoing Project was sawdust. Why was this?

I decided to go to Amazon and see what other readers were saying. Many liked the book very much, but there were others who expressed my sentiments as well.

--> This is my 10th or 11th Michael Lewis book and this is the only one I couldn't finish and did not enjoy. 

--> When this book was chosen for my book group, I looked forward to reading it. I have read other Michael Lewis books and totally enjoyed them, even when the topics were not a subject I was particularly interested it. Baseball! Derivatives! Why not psychology? Lewis' books always had energy and told an interesting tale. Not so with The Undoing Project. Nearly halfway through I stopped to read some reviews of the book because I had no idea what it was about or where it was going.

The book opens with Lewis talking about the challenges basketball teams have in determining who will succeed and who will not in pro basketball. Just as Moneyball focused on the Oakland A's, this book details challenges the Houston Rockets faced. 

Somewhere along the way it seemed I missed what this had with Undoing, but I hung in there, wondering where this would all be going. I'd read enough Lewis books to know that he is a storyteller, enjoys gathering details and sharing them in story form. Unfortunately, as these stories unfolded I was unable to see where they were all going.

There is a certain amount of trust that readers put in writers. If they trust the writer they continue reading, believing there will be a payoff for their efforts. The Fables of Aesop always had a payoff, but they did not require endless pages of story to get there.

The central story here is that of the friendship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists and economists who did research on heuristics (among other things) in Eugene Oregon. Their work ultimately garnered them a Nobel Prize.

After the lengthy lead-in we arrive at the main event, which is presented in a meandering story that winds over the river and through the woods, but never arrives anywhere. Or at least, after passing the midway point, did not give me confidence that there was a destination. It felt like the story was supposed to be the destination. And I was not alone in this sentiment. Here's another Amazon reviewer:

--> I'm a huge Michael Lewis fan but this book was awful. It was tedious and trying to understand where he was going with the book was hopeless.

I can't say the book was awful. It just wasn't engaging, and I would suggest part of the reason had to do with the writing. Tedious is probably an accurate word. As a result, I lost faith that the story was taking me somewhere.

Be sure to read the positive Amazon reviews before you make up your mind on this one. This review is just my two cents from the peanut gallery.

Related Links

My review of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano

Moneyball Worth More Than the Price of Admission (A Review)

Noteworthy Steinbeck Notes and Quotes

This past week I've been reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck. It's possibly the last of Steinbeck's major works that I'm finally getting around to reading after having gone through a "Steinbeck phase" earlier in my life.

From his opening descriptions of the Salinas Valley one is dazzled by Steinbeck's linguistic dream-weaving. His patient character development and vivid psychological profiles reflect the unfathomable landscapes of the soul that make us human.

The 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to him "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception." Upon reading Steinbeck again, it's easy to see why the Nobel Committee was sufficiently impressed with his writing and impelled to award him this prize.

Here are some excerpts from his work that reflect his prose and perspectives on the world we live in. Much has changed since the Dust Bowl days of The Grapes of Wrath, yet our essential human and the struggles we face to maintain our dignity remain unchanged. In this sense, the great writers are timeless.

* * * *

John Stenbeck. Public domain.

"We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome."
--In Awe of Words

"In every bit of honest writing in the world … there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other."
--Journal Note, 1938

"In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable."

--NYTimes

For man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
--Grapes of Wrath

There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
--East of Eden

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
--Sweet Thursday

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
--The Winter of Our Discontent

To be alive at all is to have scars.
--The Winter of Our Discontent

No one wants advice, only corroboration.
--The Winter of Our Discontent

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
--Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech


Related Links
Conversations with John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck - Writers Take Sides 1938

Galbraith's How to Control the Military, Still Relevant Today In Many Ways

At the end of his second term President Dwight D. Eisenhower shared, in his parting address to the nation, a word of warning about "the military industrial complex."

Just under a decade later, the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University and past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a short volume titled How to Control the Military, a succinct 65 page book aimed at underscoring the same theme.

Galbraith was the author of thirty-one books over a period of three decades, including The Affluent Society, The Good Society, and The Great Crash. According to his Wikipedia bio, "He has been awarded honorary degrees from Harvard, Oxford, the University of Paris, and Moscow University, and in 1997 he was inducted into the Order of Canada and received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2000, at a White House ceremony, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

* * * *
The author's purpose in writing this book was to warn us that when the Vietnam War ends, the cost of peace will be even greater than this war because the Pentagon bureaucracy has a vested interest in growth. On page 16 he writes that the actions of the bureaucracy seldom are done in the best interest of the public, but "to serve the goals of the bureaucracy itself." This is why so many actions that the government takes seem to make no sense to the public at large.

This, of course, was spectacularly played out in Vietnam. He notes that when we try to understand how we got into that quagmire, "It was the result of a long series of steps taken in response to a bureaucratic view of the world--a view to which a President willingly or unwillingly yielded and which, until much too late, was unchecked by any legislative or public opposition."

A little further on he states, "What was essentially a civil war between the Vietnamese was converted into an international conflict with rich ideological portent for all mankind."

Alas, we told ourselves we were trying to. save the world. And who wouldn't want to be the good guys in that objective? "Most of the men responsibly involved accepted the myth in which they lived a part."

A couple pages later he writes, "But Vietnam was not the first time men were so captured--and the country suffered. Within the same decade there was the Bay of Pigs, now a textbook case of bureaucratic self-deception." (i.e. idiocy)

On page 57 Galbraith shared this insight as to why LBJ back down from going after a second term in office. "Suspicion of the military power in 1968 was the most important factor uniting the followers of Senators Kennedy, McCarthy and McGovern. Along with the specific and more important opposition to the Vietnam conflict, it helped to generate the opposition that persuaded Lyndon Johnson not to run.

He went on to state that it wasn't just Leftists and barefoot kids wearing flowers who were concerned about these things. Even right wingers like George Wallace were ringing alarm bells.

* * * *

Galbraith as a young man in 1944.

At another point in the book the author states that our democratic nation has deviated significantly from its Founders' vision of being a government "of the people." This notion, Galbraith says, is a myth. Now that the country is even larger, the bureaucratic systems are even more bloated. All efforts to trim the fat are met with such screams that you'd think we were torturing babies.

The current debacle in regards to the U.S. response to COVID-19 is not simply a matter of lack of preparedness. These massive inefficiency is simply the way bloated bureaucratic systems operate. IN THIS CASE, it's exacerbated by the fractured and somewhat hysterical political discourse generated by partisan politics and power games, misinformation, media manipulation and the unrestrained megaphone of social media.

* * * *
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."--Letter to John F. Kennedy

Well, if anything, our new war on coronavirus seems to be bearing this out. Everyone seems to say the same thing. "Don't blame me, blame them."

* * * *
Much more could be said about our current "empire" that includes colonies and military bases in 800 locations around the world. And why--if our presidents keep running on the platform promise to get us out of Afghanistan--are we still in Afghanistan. Who is really in control here?

That's enough for today. I have work to do.

* * * *
Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
--The Age of Uncertainty

Midnight In Chernobyl: Adam Higginbotham's Explosive Story About What Really Happened

There's nothing quite like the exhilaration of a good read. The last time I couldn't put a book down was in the late 60s when I stayed up all night reading Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Friday night I was sorely tempted to stay up all night once more because of a book I almost couldn't put down, Adam Higginbotham's Midnight In Chernobyl.

It's a remarkable account of the Chernobyl disaster. It's quite apparent that a lot of work went into researching this story. The author, drawing from new sources, gives what is surely the most complete account of what really happened. What's compelling is the writing itself. These are real people who were in the middle of a real situation.

The incident took place in the spring of 1986, April 26 to be precise, just days before the May 1 celebrations designed to show off the Soviet Union's mighty power.

The book opens by setting the story within a context, that context being the Soviet Union after decades of communist party leadership.

"Behind all the catastrophic failures of the USSR during the Era of Stagnation —beneath the kleptocratic bungling, the nepotism, the surly inefficiencies, and the ruinous waste of the planned economy – lay the monolithic power of the communist party."  (page 13)

"Advancement in many political, economic, and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict, and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them. By the mid-70s this blind conformism had smothered individual decision making at all levels of the state and party machine, infecting not just the bureaucracy but technical and economic disciplines, too. Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along with chain of management: those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quarters heroically exceeded. To protect its own position at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them." (page 15)

In other words it was a system that rewarded Yes-men, a system that rewarded those who played the game, not those who told the truth.

Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, a younger more astute politicians that "the long succession of the zombie apparatchiks whose declining health, drunkenness, and senility had been concealed from the public by squadrons of increasingly desperate minders."

The man responsible for building the Chernobyl complex--four nuclear reactors in operation and two more in the works-- was Victor Brukhanov. The entire city of Pripyat where the workers and their families lived, was similarly a showcase achievement.  But Brukhanov was a product of his culture, as Higginbotham details here:

"In the 16 years that he’d spent building four nuclear reactors and an entire city on an isolated stretch of marshland, Victor Brukhanov had received a long education in the realities of the system. Hammered on the anvil of the party, made pliant by the privileges of rank, the well-informed and opinionated young specialist had been transformed into an obedient tool of the nomenklatura. Like all successful Soviet managers, to do so Brukhanov had learned how to be expedient and bend limited resources to meet the endless list of unrealistic goals. He had to cut corners, cook the books, and fudge regulations."  (Italics mine)

For all his achievements Brukhanov would be rewarded. And in the spring of 1986 because of the success of Chernobyl would be honored at the May One holiday with a decree of the presidium of the supreme Soviet.

* * * *

Photo by Javier García on Unsplash

One of the features of the story is the great pains the author has made to understand and explain the science behind nuclear power. This is from a a section about the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

"At 8:16 AM on August 6, 1945 a fission weapon containing 64 kg of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein‘s equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just 1 kg of the uranium underwent fission, only 700 mg of mass—the weight of a butterfly – was converted into energy but it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second. Some 78,000 people died instantly, or immediately afterward – vaporized, crushed, or incinerated in the fire storm followed the blast wave. By the end of the year, another 25,000 men, women and children were also sick and died from their exposure to the radiation liberated by the world’s first Atom bomb attack."

The explosion that destroyed this Japanese city came from unleashing the power within a remarkable small amount of material, about the weight of a butterfly. By way of contrast, this is how energy is created in a nuclear power plant.

"Unlike a nuclear weapon, in which a vast number of uranium atoms fission in a fraction of a second, releasing all their energy in and annihilating flash of heat and light, and a reactor the process must be regulated and delicately sustained for weeks, months or even years. This requires three components: a moderator, control rods and a coolant."

"To generate power steadily inside a nuclear reactor, the behavior of the neutrons must be artificially controlled, to ensure that the chain reaction stays constant and the heat of fission can be harnessed to create electricity. Ideally every single fission reaction should trigger just one more fission in the neighboring atom, so that each successive generation of neutrons contains exactly the same number as the one before, and the reactor remains in the same critical state."

"Should each fission fail to create as many neutrons as the one before the reactor becomes subcritical, the chain reaction slows and eventually ceases, and the reactor shuts down. But if each generation produces more than one fission, the chain reaction could begin to grow too quickly toward potentially uncontrollable supercriticality in a sudden massive release of energy similar to that in a nuclear weapon. To maintain a steady state between these two extremes is a delicate task. The first nuclear engineers had to develop tools to master forces perilously close to the limits of man’s ability to control."

* * * *

Midnight In Chernobyl is divided into two parts. Part One is called The Birth of a City. It describes the life of those who lived in this advanced and growing community of 50,000 people. It was envisioned that Pripyat would grow to be a city of 200,000 once the full nuclear energy complex was rolled out. The disaster interfered with this vision. How the Soviet leadership responded is the rest of the story, Part Two, is titled The Death of an Empire.

The book is important on many levels. Was the Chernobyl disaster a warning about nuclear power? Or was this more a lesson about what happens when you create a culture built on a lack of transparency? This became the first real test of Gorbachev's idealistic aim to create a new, open society. Ideals, however, are easier to proclaim than to put into practice.

Adam Higginbotham has produced an important book. More to come.

Related Links
Three Mile Island and Two Personal Anecdotes
Throwback: Anniversary of the Three Mile Island Incident

The Prose and Cons of a Kerouac Classic -- On the Road

I finally got around to reading On the Road, the Kerouac classic considered by some to be the most significant book about the Beat generation. Twenty or forty years ago I started Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s follow-up, but couldn’t get into it.

Since I myself have now been a publishing writer more than four decades, I can confess that I’ve always had a beef with this book. Why? Because I’d heard how he wrote the manuscript on a continuous reel of paper and a publisher actually accepted it. Kudos to Kerouac, I suppose. He did it his way and he slid by the gatekeepers of convention.

I know many talented writers who can’t get a publisher to look at their work without an agent and even then, if you sent in a manuscript rolled up like a toilet paper roll, I honestly doubt you’d be taken seriously.

Keep in mind, though, that this was the era of Jackson Pollock, so bad behavior was overlooked if you’d been tapped as a genius.

* * * *
My expectations were low for On the Road, despite Time magazine's declaration that this was one of the most important books of the 20th century. Others raved about it and endorsed it, including Dylan, so when I saw it at the library two weeks ago I checked it out.

Photo by Donald Giannatti via Unsplash

Reading On the Road brought two other road trip books to mind--Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip. Both of these were written in the 1960s, with On the Road preceding them. On the Road (1957) is about the travels of Sal Paradise (the narrator) and friends, chiefly Dean Moriarty, from 1947-50. Steinbeck's story was a true account of a road trip in 1960 around the country with his poodle. Tom Wolfe's book is an example of what was labeled the New Journalism, a novel-like account of an LSD-infused magic bus trip with Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. All three go cross-country and back, with Sal and Dean ultimately zagging South into Mexico.

Sidewalk nameplate outside City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco.

The three stories have this in common. They're well-written. On the other hand, I would not go as far as the New York Times went when they described Kerouac's novella, "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."

The central character--almost a fixation for Kerouac--is Dean Moriarty. Wikipedia describes him as "much admired for his carefree attitude and sense of adventure, a free-spirited maverick eager to explore all kicks and an inspiration and catalyst for Sal's travels."

As I read the book--and what makes all this praise feel appalling to me--this hero is essentially a juvenile delinquent who never grew up, who lies, is perpetually looking to get laid, abusive to every female character he has a relationship with, wrecks vehicles, vandalizes, steals, betrays his friends and does whatever he pleases without consideration for the others in his life. Great hero he is not.

The big surprise for me was that Kerouac did produce some good sentences. I enjoyed the skill with which he produced some of the descriptive passages, and everywhere there is a vividness in the writing that makes the action come alive in the reader's mind. Throughout the story I was struck here and there by a turn of phrase, by some of the interesting ways he stated things.

When all is said and done, Kerouac's writing was prose. Dean Moriarty is a con. 

Pros and Cons of the Storytelling Epidemic

If you're in marketing and advertising, you can't help but to have noticed how big the word  "storytelling" has become. It's almost as if it were the word of the year.

There's no question stories have power. Stories connect with people. And you've got to admit that reading the story of Jacob and Esau in Genesis is far more interesting than reading all those lists in the Book of Leviticus.

In the marketing world you might even find people who say that without a good story you can't succeed.

This is one of the reasons so many marketers love the new opportunities generated by social media. You get verbal stories, video stories, visual stories (Infographics) and personal stories. It's in your face everywhere you look these. In fact, "Stories" is the latest technique Facebook is using to keep people engaged. It's not enough to tell stories on your Wall. Now you can almost effortlessly keep "adding" to "your story" in that Stories box.

This past week I brought home a book from the library called The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose. I picked it up because the cover design looked interesting and the title intriguing. When I got home I noticed the subtitle: How the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories.

The prologue begins by noting how anthropologists have observed that storytelling is a fundamental part of being human. He writes, "Just as the brain perceives patterns in the visual forms of nature--a face, a figure, a flower--and in sound, so it detects patterns in sound."

Then he goes on to share the results of a 1944 study in which 34 college students were shown a short film and asked what was happening. Essentially it was two triangles and a circle moving on a two dimensional surface. There was also a stationary rectangle partially open on one side.

What was striking is how nearly every student began creating a narrative about what they imagined was going on. Two men fighting for a woman? All kinds of storylines emerged, including the emotions of these "characters."

How strange.

So it is that our brain is constantly connecting dots to create narratives.

Another book that I brought home from the library this week is also about stories. It's titled Republic of Lies by Anna Merlan. The subtitle is American Conspiracy Theories and Their Surprising Rise To Power.

The Amazon blurb calls it "riveting tour through the landscape and meaning of modern conspiracy theories, exploring the causes and tenacity of this American malady, from Birthers to Pizzagate and beyond."

I've only just started this one, but the Prologue certainly sets you up to want to read more. Author Anna Merlan begins by telling readers about a Caribbean cruise she went on. The ship's passengers were all members of various conspiracy groups. Because she was not a member of a conspiracy group, some passengers thought she was possibly FBI. Once an idea like that gets planted, it can be hard to dislodge.

Three quarters of the reviews are 5 star, but the one star reviewers are out there, one calling it nothing more than a a rant.

I only mention the book because of the previous illustration above which shows how our minds create stories. How many conspiracy theories are based on connections between events and how many are simply a mental construct in which disparate pieces seem to fit the story?

I think of the constellations in our night sky. Here's a cluster of stars, three of them serving to be the belt, and very lightly a knife sheath. At some point in human history he was given a name, The Hunter, or Orion. There are several stories about Orion in Greek Mythology. How this batch of stars came to be a basket of stories is itself quite intriguing. (You can read more about Orion here.)

The trigger for this blog post, though, was a blog post by Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman. Hoffman acknowledges the power of stories, noting that a good story is memorable. What concerns him, however, is when marketing decisions are made on anecdotal evidence instead of actual data. 

That's a point directed toward the marketers in my audience. Check out Bob Hoffman's The Danger In Storytelling.

* * * *
And with that, I bid adieu.

Five Powerful Books For Business Leaders

Leaders are readers. While reading The Campaigns of Napoleon I learned that the influential general and emperor drew his major ideas from reading books. He once said, "I have fought sixty battles and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning." (i.e.: from his reading.)  And his advice to others: "Read and meditate upon the wars of the great captains. This is the only means of learning the art of war."

This same advice applies to the realm of business and enterprise. As the wise man once said, "There's nothing new under the sun." Hence we profit much by reading what other people like us have experienced, encountered, learned from a lifetime of development as leaders. Here are five books I would recommend for your 2018 reading list. At the end of this blog post is a link to another list of books for consideration, books that Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and other leaders read in 2017.

Creativity Inc.

This is the story of Pixar, behind the scenes, from one of the co-founders, Ed Catmull.

The book's subtitle tells the real story of what made Pixar such a superstar: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in The Way of True Inspiration. Unseen forces means forces can refer to forces that are invisible, like the ice below the surface that sunk the Titanic, or it can mean forces that are in plain sight, like Poe's Purloined Letter, but we do not see them. Catmull states that the management team had to be perpetually vigilant. What they were vigilant about was very different from most organizations.

Amazon Link: Creativity Inc.
My Brief Review: How to Create and Manage a Creative Culture: Lessons from the Pixar Experience 

* * * *
It Worked for Me

Colin Powell shares the principles that shaped his life and career in this inspiring and engrossing memoir.

This is a book incredibly rich with insights on leadership. Also available as an audiobook, Colin Powell lays out the principles that guided his life. If you don't have time to read the book, or your "want to read soon" stack is too high right now, you can get a flavor of Powell's insights by viewing this 20-slide powerpoint, A Leadership Primer.

Amazon Link: It Worked For Me
A Brief Insight: The Bus To Abilene

* * * *
Leading with the Heart

Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski shares the insights he has put into practice over the course of a lifetime.

In some respects, a top-level college coach is a lot like a manager in any business. He has to turn a group of talented individuals into a smoothly running team, and he has to produce results that please the fans of his team--the shareholders of the athletic program. Thus, in Leading with the Heart, Krzyzewski reviews the lessons he's learned as basketball coach at Duke University, and tries to universalize them so they translate to any leadership position. For example, he writes, "Adjustments are not unusual, they are usual. So a leader's ability to think on his feet ... to do things without instruction ... is of paramount importance." Makes sense, as does this admonition: "When teaching, always remember this simple phrase: 'You hear, you forget. You see, you remember. You do, you understand.'"

Amazon Link: Leading with the Heart: Coach K's Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life
Brief overview from Leadership Now

* * * *
Education of a Coach
How do great leaders develop? Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam offers an insightful look at how one of the winningest coaches in NFL history got his chops.

Amazon.com reviewer Noah Pallotta-Walsh wrote: David Halberstam’s, The Education of a Coach, was informative, but also very fascinating. The book tells us Bill Belichick’s background and where he gained extreme love for the game. We see throughout the book who surrounded and taught him so much about the game. The book shows both Belichick’s failures and successes. We see how hard Bill works and the multiple failures he had to experience to achieve greatness. I believe the book goes beyond football and can be inspiring to many. I think that “The Education of a Coach” is a great book and would recommend it to anyone, whether they are a football fan or not.

Amazon Link: The Education of a Coach
Read the Reviews on Goodreads Here

* * * *
Becoming Steve Jobs

Business writer Jim Collins (Good To Great) called Steve Jobs one of the two greatest leaders of the past century. Winston Churchill was the other.

Author Brent Schlender is an award-winning career journalist who made his mark writing profiles of high-profile entrepreneurs and business leaders in the digital revolution, including two decades as bureau chief and editor-in-chief at Fortune magazine. One can tell early on that he has had close up access to Jobs for a very long time.

Amazon Link: Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
My Brief Review from this past Spring: Lessons for Leaders from Brent Schlender's Becoming Steve Jobs

* * * *
Here's the article that triggered this blog post, 19 Books the world's top CEOs read in 2017.

What are you reading?

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Live from Zenith Bookstore

https://www.zenithbookstore.com/

All images on this page come from Zenith Bookstore, Central Avenue in Duluth.

Maybe one day this will become the next City Lights. 

If you have not yet been, you should check it out.

Across the parking lot from Beaners Central.

For what it's worth, at least two of my books can be found here.

No shipping costs when you buy in the store. Nice!

Meantime, what book did you say you were reading today? Or writing?