AN INTERESTING STORY FROM ETHIOPIA
When business, culture, politics, and psychology collide, the consequences are often disastrous. . Ethiopia builds a new railroad across the entire country. . To save money, they do NOT build a fence to protect the tracks from animals. . People are worried that their camels can be killed by the train. . The government says…
Parents don’t have/should not try to make their kids happy
Parents don’t have/should not try to make their kids happy. If you as a parent focus on keeping your kid always happy, the kid will not have a happy life.
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
The best business failure book since The Bad Blood. I love books about business failures – I think we can learn more from them than from books about success. I reviewed earlier “The Bad Blood” (the failure of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes), “Losing the Signal” (the failure of BlackBerry/Research In Motion”), “Faster, Higher, Farther” (the…
ANALYZING THE ROI OF THE PURSUIT OF WOMEN
Perhaps the strangest, but an oddly insightful book on economics. ANALYZING THE ROI OF THE PURSUIT OF WOMEN. The author, an economist, literally tries to calculate the return on investment in having a (one) woman in your life. Basically, the economic analysis of the utility of being married. He first calculates the value of having…
THE GREATEST FAILURES
I collect failure stories. Some other time, I’ll share some of my own failure stories. Here are my top 3 failures from the business world. I like books that detail failures much more than books that detail success. “Losing the Signal” is way more educational than “7 Habits of Successful People”. KODAK was the king…
Super-founders
А very informative, instructional, and motivating book about entrepreneurship. The author compared 195 startups that reached the unicorn status against a control group. Lots of myths busted. Lots of useful insight. So, to improve your chances of launching a billion-dollar company, > Should you start your company from a dorm of an elite university?No. The…
SIGNS OF A BAD LEADERSHIP/BUSINESS BOOK
In my experience, the following are signs of bad, shallow, uninformative books on leadership/business/ self-development: 1. THE TITLE CONTAINS A NUMBER: “7 habits”, “10 superpowers”, “5 steps”, “… in 30 days”, etc. “7 Habits of Successful People” is the best example of an international bestseller that, upon a closer inspection, is nothing but white noise,…
THE BEST BOOK ABOUT MONEY
Maybe you should write one for your country? I don’t even know why I got this book. It seemed like yet another cheesy, cheap “get rich fast” book. Oh no! It turned out to be the absolutely best book about money, one I’d always wanted to write. It is as simple as it is useful….
Business Jokes
The one about clever pricing An old man is selling watermelons. His pricelist reads: 1 for $3, 3 for $10 A young man stops by and asks to buy one watermelon. “That’d be 3 dollars”, says the old man. The young man then buys another one, and another one, paying $3 for each. As the…